Bloc Party - Live Review

Bloc Party review - the last wet fart of a rotting corpse

O2 Guildhall, Southampton – 30^th January 2015

Back after three years in the wilderness, the infamously fractious Bloc Party headline the NME Awards tour on supposed return to form. With latest album Hymns released a day previously, a new line-up and something of a return to the indie-dance of beloved early records A Weekend in the City and Intimacy, common logic dictates 2016 would breathe new life into the band after a lengthy hiatus. Founding members and mainstays Kele Okereke and Russell Lissack are joined by glossy new rhythm section Justine Harris and Louise Bartle on bass and drums respectively, and the band’s set list gives equal airing to the oft-maligned new material – half the set compromises songs from Hymns and 2012’s savaged, Nirvana-mimicking Four – and the heavyweights of yesteryear (Helicopter, Ratchet and This Modern Love). However, what pointed to a glorious comeback amounts to little more than Okereke’s tired secondary solo project; and seems like the latest low point for a band stuck in seemingly terminal decline. But perhaps most dishearteningly, a band that resonated so strongly with their young audience spend 70 minutes going through the motions with the same crowd nearly a decade later. A plodding, static set falls noticeably, uncomfortably flat - met by little but the occasional, seemingly obligatory mosh-pit. Then the band’s beloved 00s material recedes to little more than so much of the landfill-indie churned out the same decade, and Hymns’ (Virtue, The Good News and Different Drugs) both impressively and depressingly manages to sound dated a day after its release. Okereke makes admirable, but nonetheless fruitless, effort to psych and pump Bloc Party into life. But aside from Banquet and Ratchet’s lively curtain-call, it dies a sad death; and the punters filter out of the Guildhall like bored rats fleeing a moored ship.