Bloc Party’s Third.

Don’t call it ‘doing a Radiohead’. Don’t call it a rush-release. Don’t call it underwhelming and for fuck’s sake don’t judge it on the relative merits of first single ‘Mercury’. Sounding like a drum machine loaded with a shit vocal relay malfunctioning in a bowl of cereal, its the baffling sound of the best guitar/drum combo in UK indie (messrs Lissack and Tong) being made to wait quietly in the wings until precocious nit Kele had finished playing silly buggars with the mixing desk. ‘Mercury’ is certainly put into a greater perspective over the course of the album, but in the wake of several disappointing follow-up’s this year from the mainsteam indie bedrock (Kooks, Fratellis, Dirty Pretty Things), ‘Intimacy’ is thankfully more than enough to live up to critical expectation and sate the hardcore. It certainly won’t win any new fans, but perhaps that was never the intention.

Whipped out in three short days after a humble online announcement, ‘Intimacy’ is stripped-back from the thrashing stomp of their previous effort, ‘A Weekend In The City’, offering up an altogether more complex and considered beast. Where their sophomore effort was at its peak when Kele found the off button to the drum effects marked ‘Dalek falling down an escalator’ and let the band simply rock out like bastards (see ‘Hunting for Witches’ and ‘Where Is Home?’), ‘Intimacy’ shows infinitely more skill in its application of the electronica – with significant growth in both scope and songwriting prowess to boot. ‘Signs’ and ‘Zephyrus’ show that the fellas have spent exactly the right amount of time listening to the bump-thumpy beats of RJD2 and ‘Kid A’ whilst ‘Halo’ and ‘Ares’ showcase Bloc Party’s enduring ability to craft balls-out apeshit-inducers that can move heads and hearts from bedroom to dancefloor. Whereas the previous album was all about urban degradation and malaise (gum on your shoe at the bus stop during the morning commute, drunken fights over disinterested girls in darkened nightclubs, that sort of thing), ‘Intimacy’ pulls outwards and upwards in its search for something more. This is evident on tracks such as ‘Trojan Horse’ and ‘Better Than Heaven’, demonstrating that original ideas still exist as long as you know where to dig, and that Bloc Party have more strings to their bow that the majority of the baying indie-rock pack.

However, it wouldn’t be a Bloc Party album without a few stinkers and lyrical fluffs so leaden they could make Chris Martin wince. Kele obviously has himself down as a mix between Thom Yorke and Brett Easton Ellis, all urbane and knowingly frank about the dichotomy between late capitalism’s death-rattle of indulgent conceit and the shimmering lure of a pop culture loaded with enough breath in it to maybe still mean something. However, with lyrics such as “I’m sleeping with people I don’t even like” and “if I could eat your cancer, I would… but I can’t” (the latter being a fairly blatant rip from Nirvana’s ‘Heart Shaped-Box’), Kele comes across more of a pouty teen stropping on Bebo than a man with any burning insight or poetic aphorisms. Similarly lumpen misfires are carried out sporadically over the course of an album, cumulatively as annoying and cloyingly unpleasant as a hot day spent on a crowded bus in piss-stained leather trousers – representative of the only definite bruise on this album’s otherwise fairly flawless surface.

Still, as ol’ Moz once remarked, why dwell on the snags? Perfection lacks personality; it’s our flaws that make us lovable. For the most part, Bloc Party embrace theirs enough to ensure that, come next year’s (headlining?) festival slots, there won’t be any shortage of people in attendance to sing along. For now, Canned Applause will leave you be with the choicest cut from the album: ‘Biko’ (another lyrical snatch? if so, this time from the decidedly less credible Peter Gabriel). A heartfelt plea to Kele’s ‘sweetheart melancholic’, it’s a song that will leave anyone with even a flutter of emotion in their chests doing whirly dances around the kitchen table within seconds as it subtle majesty slowly uncurls and blossoms into a ballad to rival ‘This Modern Love’. Its spoken word refrain (“you’re not doing this alone”) is sure to cause even the most recidivistic hipster to pause for a second’s clarity and pretend they’ve got something in their eye. And all that before a deftly processed beat nicks in and creeps to the foreground, skittering about like pensioners slip-sliding on a frozen pond in their slippers, building with such assurance and melody to a climax so beatific that you’ll wonder why you ever doubted them in the first place.