Oh, Bloc Party. The Rise and continual fall of the English Indie Rock band has been pretty sad to witness, especially considering how great their 2005 debut Silent Alarm was. However, in the years since that album, most everything has just been downhill for the group. Each follow-up album has been consistently worse than one before, from their Debut to A Weekend in the City to Intamacy. Most would hope that this pattern would be reversed on this album, but sadly it hasn’t been.

Four kind of was/wasn’t Bloc Party’s comeback.  This album, while kind of staying consistent with their original sound, still manages to sound even more generic and forcefully radio-friendly than ever before. So He Begins to Lie, which kind of feels like an old Bloc Party song, has a chorus that has a hook that feels like something I’d hear Brandon Flowers wail with The Killers. Real Talk is a slower song that has been done by every band on your local alternative station (Kind of like a slow Red Hot Chili Peppers song). Meanwhile Kettling has crunchy guitar riffs that fit more on a Smashing Pumpkins or Silversun Pickups track than a Bloc Party track. Not to say that if they were to be influenced by these bands is a bad thing, but all the sounds they experiment with here just sound better by a lot of other artists.

Most tracks are just so generic and bland, you can’t get much from them. The closest thing to an old Bloc Party track was Octopus, and we all know that they did that song much better when it was most of the tracks on Silent Alarm. Other tracks are just so boring. Nothing’s wrong with them on a technical level, but the album tries so hard to sound unlike their original sound and doesn’t get away with it. Maybe if some of the lyrics were a bit more interesting, but that’s just not the case. They tend to play second fiddle to the musicality of each song, and that wouldn’t be a problem if the musicality was a little less boring. But…

Not to say EVERYTHING about this album is bad. Day Four is a pleasant slow song, which even if it’s a generic little song it sure sticks out here. Plus The Healing is nice too, with some slower percussion. And again, it isn’t aggravatingly hard to listen to. It would fit in just find if it were to come on the radio or something. But that’s the problem. It seems like it was crafted to sound like that, and it feels too forced for it to be more than some pleasant background noise.

Summary: Four tries a bit too hard to sound radio-ready with boring songs, and it’s attempts at getting back to the good old Silent Alarm days don’t work out as well as they should.

Choice Cuts- Day Four, The Healing

1.5/5

The video for Octopus is below. Four is out on Frenchkiss now.