Bloc Party at the Kentish Town Forum
This popped up extremely late in the day after a friend of mine needed to flog an extra ticket. Thankfully, she texted me in enough time for me to get to Kentish Town. Bloc Party are a band who I’ve always wouldn’t have minded seeing live but their last two albums have failed to really strike a chord with me in the same way as Silent Alarm did. As I said in my review of Intimacy a couple of months back, their experimentation is to be applauded but sometimes it just doesn’t work.
But the band are on fine form tonight. In front of a partizan fanbase crowd that will cheer at most of the small things tonight (like drummer Matt showing off his guns to the crowd before Talons), they’re clearly comfortable on stage, in particular the notoriously shy and interview-hating frontman Kele Okereke. It amazes me even now that he seems to have a switch that either turns him into a bouncy, exciteable and smiling man that gets into the music heavily or a moaning and cynical individual that the press makes him out to be most times.
The setlist was incredibly solid. It had a smattering of songs from Intimacy, the live standouts being Ares and Mercury. If you’re not too keen on Mercury, then you should watch it live. It’s like Supermassive Black Hole by Muse in the sense that the live version towers over the studio version and crushes it with its giant behemoth-like hands. A Weekend In The City didn’t get much of an outing but the songs that were aired were the best songs on the album – Hunting For Witches and Song For Clay (Disappear Here).
It also had a great deal of songs from Silent Alarm. The frantic energy and post-punk guitars on songs like Banquet and Positive Tension resonated well with the crowd. This Modern Love and So Here We Are spark mass singalongs. Like Eating Glass and Price Of Gasoline are as gloriously epic as I’d hope they would be on the live stage. But the real spark of the lightbulb comes when Helicopter closes the first encore. The crowd go absolutely crazy and shake the Forum to its very core – it’s a miracle that it is still standing.
One final surprise came at the end when the house lights and PA came on. As people made their way to the exits the band surprised the crowd by returning for a surprise one-song second encore. That said song was to be chosen by the fans. The fans spoke and picked Silent Alarm b-side, and fan favourite, Skeleton. It ended a gig that was celebratory and energising, and all of this whilst dealing with the horrors that is the Kentish Town Forum sound system. They really need to get it sorted out.
Setlist:
Halo
Hunting For Witches
Positive Tension
Talons
Signs
Song For Clay (Disappear Here)
Banquet
Better Than Heaven
Mercury
This Modern Love
The Prayer
So Here We Are
Like Eating Glass
Ares
Price Of Gas
Flux
Helicopter
Skeleton
Pictures are up on my Flickr and I also got to record a couple of videos. You can find a recording of Banquet here, and down below you can watch Talons.
Like this? Try these!
Posted on October 7th, 2008 by Max
Filed under: Gigs, Reviews
[...] but an entertaining evening was to be had. I firstly have got to mention the crowd. I thought that Bloc Party the previous night was nuts, but that had nothing on the general frenziness of the Stevie Wonder crowd. There were [...]