BLOC PARTY at Kool Haus (132 Queens Quay East), Friday and Saturday (March 13-14), 8 pm. $35. 416-870-8000.
It’s been four years since Bloc Party’s twitchy, post-punk debut, Silent Alarm, converted a legion of hipsters seemingly overnight and had even the crankiest music critics offering the band accolades infused with synonyms for “angular.”
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Despite the near-universal love for the British quartet’s blockbuster introduction, their upward trajectory stalled with A Weekend In The City, a less catchy, over-emotional 2007 offering that forced some of their biggest supporters to shrug “Six out of 10. Better luck next time.”
They experimented with electro sounds on Intimacy, released last August, which also failed to garner Silent Alarm-level buzz. The band still retains a sizable following, despite their inability to match or exceed their oh-so-promising debut.
“I think in the future we’ll have more time for other things,” says drummer Matt Tong on the phone from his London home. “We’re taking some time off [after the tour], and in that interim I expect ideas for the fourth album will come.”
Tong, who’s said he feels like “the least ambitious member of the band,” spends his rare days off reading and relaxing. “I just finished Why Do People Get Ill? by British psychoanalysts Darian Leader and David Corfield. It focuses on how Western medicine is practised and what we can learn from other cultures.”
It’s a fitting choice, considering Tong’s yeoman-like work in Bloc Party resulted in an onstage medical emergency in November 2006.
“It was the third date on a tour with Panic at the Disco, and we were goofing around playing sports when I started to feel this pain in my chest. I wasn’t aware of the full extent of my injuries so I played the show. Afterward I felt very sick, and they called an ambulance.”
The diagnosis was a collapsed lung, forcing the band to drop off the tour.
Looking forward, Tong has no plans to dabble in post-tour side projects, though guitarist Russell Lissack does. A collaboration with vocalist Milena Mepris (ex-Black Moustache) under the name Pin Me Down has led to promising tracks on MySpace – songs that prove some members of Bloc Party still have the knack.
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