Good Weather For Airstrikes

NOTE: Sorry there are no pictures, Bank of America Pavillion was all “No Cameras” and we didn’t want to get our shit jacked so we obliged.

Anyone whose been reading this website for any time at all can pretty much immediately discern that my favorite band is far and away Bloc Party, and for this reason I already knew Bloc’s show in Boston two nights ago would be one of my all-time favorites before it even happened. However, it was a longer journey than usual to get to the venue, as we had to take the ferry over to the mainland from Martha’s Vineyard before driving about an hour to Boston to get to the Bank of America Pavillion, which proved to be my favorite large-scale venue I’ve ever attended and a pretty great environment for Bloc Party’s anthemic, fist-pumping angular guitar-rock. With me were my favorite trio of indie girls, the always-lovely Merry, India, and Lizzy, and despite a glaring lack of testosterone outside of that which was supplied by me (which is to say, not much), we had a fucking splendid time.

As anticipated, the band did not dissappoint, ripping through every track I’d wanted to hear from Silent Alarm as well as two amazing tracks from their upcoming and as-yet-untitled sophomore album, “Waiting For The 7.18″ and the incredible “Uniform”. While I’m extremely upset I didn’t get to hear “Hunting For Witches” (another new track that’s seen some exposure in live settings) as the audiences the next two nights in New Jersey and Brooklyn did, I’ll settle for what was, with the exception of the inclusion of “Tulips” over “Little Thoughts”, essentially the perfect Bloc Party setlist. Kele and co. even hooked us up with “Two More Years”, the exclusion of which from the band’s Intonation setlist last month nearly reduced Lizzy and I to inconsolable messes at the time, as well as set-closer “The Pioneers”, another phenomenal track we missed out on last time around.

More and more, Kele is proving himself to be one of the most intelligent and charismatic frontmen in indie rock, and at no point was this more apparent than when a surely-inebriated prototypically-surly Bostonian in a Red Sox jersey jumped up on the corner of a stage and started clapping and drunkenly-dancing in front of the audience during “Price of Gasoline” in the encore. Rather than letting the security guards take care of the man, Kele walked over and put his arm around him while still singing, and brought him over to the mic to share lead vocals on the chorus with him, before leaving the man to take over vocals on his own. When the guy had difficulty keeping up with the words, Kele gently led him over to Gordy’s mic to take over on the much more simplistic backing vocals (just grunting “ugh” every other second or so). Afterwards Kele took the man aside and they shared a laugh about something before the certainly overwhelmed fan returned to the audience. It was certainly interesting to see Okereke, who wrote such a scathingly-anti-American song as “Helicopter” (with it’s “stop being so American” lyrics), embrace a fan so obnoxious and stereotypically-American as this dude was in his drunken grandeur, but this sequence of events was a true testament to his charisma and ability to work a crowd as a rock and roll frontman.

Bloc Party is in a very exciting place right now as a band, and their next album should elevate them to an entire new level of popularity and critical acclaim. With Silent Alarm the band garnered nearly unanimous critical praise but also gained the band a lot of haters who called the group Gang of Four knock-offs and accused them of being just another run-of-the-mill guitar rock band trying to cash in on the dance rock fad. However, with their new album Bloc are trying to shake such accusations (”dance punk will not be a noose around our neck”, Kele said in a recent interview) and have traded in their danceable, angular guitar riffs for much a much more languorous, morose sound like that first hinted at on “Two More Years”. In fact, with the exception of possibly “Hunting For Witches”, there’s nary a single track that’s 100% danceable the entire way through, as the lion’s share of the songs are either much slower-paced, moody affairs all the way through or follow the formula established by “So Here We Are”, in which the song starts out slow and builds to furious climax before it’s completion, as can be seen in both “Waiting For The 7.18″ and “Uniform”. Peep the setlist from the show below, and download the best-available live versions of the new songs as well as two rare acoustic tracks taken from the Pioneers CD-single while your down there as well.

Bloc Party, Live @ Bank of America Pavillion 7.28.06:
01. “Waiting For The 7.18″
02. “Positive Tension”
03. “Banquet”
04. “Blue Light”
05. “She’s Hearing Voices”
06. “Uniform”
07. “This Modern Love”
08. “Like Eating Glass”
09. “So Here We Are”
10. “Helicopter”

Encore:
11. “Two More Years”
12. “Price of Gasoline”
13. “Tulips”
14. “The Pioneers”