SOUND BITES

  Inviting comparisons to your band's best work when talking up a new album is a dangerous exercise for anyone, but it's on a whole other level when you're in Bloc Party and the work you're drawing parallels from your new album to is Silent Alarm , the 2005 post-punk masterpiece that basically perfected the band's approach the first time out. They would spend the next three records running away from the sound they helped start a miniature British invasion with in the mid-aughts, incorporating more and more electronics into their sound before imploding the band with the gnarled, heavy overcorrection of Four in 2012 (I liked it personally, but I'm in the minority there). Not long after that, the rhythm section would be replaced as Kele Okereke and Russell Lissack created Bloc Party's divisive fifth album on computers; Hymns failed to register much of any goodwill upon release, and it feels like much longer than six years since Bloc Party's attempted reintr...

For anyone who's paid attention to Bloc Party since they burst onto the scene a little more decade ago, an album likes Hymns isn't a wholly surprising development. Since that album's breakthrough of angular post-punk menace, the group has slowly but surely distanced themselves from it. By the time they got to Four in 2012, the rocking tunes were the surprising ones and the majority of the band's output had leaned further and further toward blissed out, electronically enhanced lite rock. Hymns , their fifth album, perhaps suffers from some nasty preconceptions borne out of the weird and warped pop-gospel of lead single The Love Within . That's not totally unfair, as the point of a lead single is to build hype for the album as a whole; that said, it's not all that representative of the album, more of a palette cleanser to dissuade any thoughts of this new incarnation of the group throwing back to 2005 (Bloc Party's bassist and drummer both left the ban...

For as dry as the last couple months of 2015 were, I'd have expected to be looking at a slew of exciting releases to ring in 2016. As it stands, though, not a lot has been confirmed as of yet. Still, what the release schedule is lacking in certainty is more than made up for in its possibilities for the coming twelve months. Before we head into the murky waters of speculation, let's check out some of 2016's sure things:

BLOC PARTY Ratchet From: The Nextwave Sessions (EP) Released: August 12 Considering the inter-band problems leading up to its release, it's a minor miracle that Bloc Party's fourth album (2012's Four ) ever got recorded (go ahead and look into that). That said, it's not entirely surprising that they're on another hiatus. I'd never rule out a reformation at any time, but if The Nextwave Sessions and its pulsating single Ratchet end up being one last thing to remember them by, Bloc Party left us with a formidable body of work.

BLOC PARTY Coliseum From: Four Released: August 21 With the world expecting another step away from their angular rock roots, Bloc Party pulled a big time swerve in 2012 by not only going back to their roots, but going back even further. Four mostly ignores the jangly guitars that fell out of favour not long after their lauded debut Silent Alarm , opting to turn up the distortion and rock out. It's more subtle on some songs than others, but Coliseum is the whole amusement park in one quick ride; starting off as a swampy toe-tapper, it soon mutates into a menacing, paranoid chugger, a rollercoaster that stops using those pesky rails as a guideline at the one minute mark and drags you along helplessly through a minefield.

Stream Bloc Party's Four in its entirety here. A lot of uncertainty has surrounded Bloc Party in their eight or so years of existence. Leading up to the recording of Four , it was widely rumoured that they were finished, with the members recording with various side projects and Kele Okereke embarking on a solo career singing dance-oriented songs like the ones that, by 2008's Intimacy , had begun to usurp the powerful angular blasts that had propelled Bloc Party's breakthrough debut Silent Alarm .

Honestly, I'm not trying to slag on Octopus , the lead single from Bloc Party's new album Four ; truth be told, I think it's a solid track that should get them a fair amount of buzz for the album. It's just that, while listening to its heavily processed, pristine soundscape, I can't help but remember their gloriously noisy debut Silent Alarm .  More specifically, I can't help but hypothesize that Octopus would have been an absolute rager on that album. Silent Alarm didn't put Bloc Party on the map simply because they used angular guitars at a time when angular guitars were garnering popularity.  It put them on the map because underneath those guitars was a messy, tense atmosphere, a mangled snarl of paranoia and defiance. Given seven years and three albums to incorporate synth and dance elements to their music and learn studio trickery, it seems it's all on display here.  The guitars don't sound authentic, all chopped up in Pro Tools and pr...