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*Justine*

By *Justine*
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Jiminy Cricket

Jiminy Cricket

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http://blocparty.sandbag.uk.com/Store/DII-322-5-intimacy+mp3.html

 

Download will be available from 9.00am 21st August.

 

 

 

 

http://www.nme.com/news/bloc-party/39035

 

Bloc Party will release their new album in three days time (August 21) - but you'll be able to hear a new song from the record exclusive on NME.COM from Tuesday (19) afternoon.

 

:cool:

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Marisa

Marisa

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Haven't been here in a while!

 

But of course I have to head straight to the Bloc Party thread.

 

 

I love love Trojan Horse and love love the fact that the new album is coming soon!

 

Best news of all though is that I'm seeing them very soon. Sept. 5th. At this great venue with a great guy. Can't believe all this time I've been working with this incredibly good looking guy and suddenly we start chatting about music and he says how one of his favorite albums is Silent Alarm and he's a huge fan! So right then and there I asked him to go with me to see them. hahaha.

 

 

Oh and Lolla was awesome! Kele had the colorful Obama shirt on and was truly working the crowd despite a few technical difficulties. Ahh I just wish I had been closer but the concert coming up will definitely make up for it.

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Dejan

Dejan

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Bloc Party's Intimacy isn't the first album to be released shortly after the announcement of its very existence. Nor is it the first to utilize the internet as a launching pad before it makes its way to stores. (Intimacy will be released digitally tomorrow, with physical copies to follow October 27 in the UK via Wichita and October 28 from Atlantic in the U.S.) In fact, just shy of a year on from In Rainbows-- and with recent experiments from the Raconteurs, Nine Inch Nails, Gnarls Barkley, Girl Talk and others still fresh in the minds of many-- the release strategy for Intimacy almost seems, well, typical.

 

Nonetheless, we're always curious about the motivations leading to such release decisions. We spoke with bassist Gordon Moakes about the rationale behind the unexpected Intimacy, the album's music, and getting back into the game after paternity leave.

 

Pitchfork: I think it's safe to say no one outside of the Bloc Party camp was expecting this album. Or at least not so soon.

 

Gordon Moakes: No, you're right. You're right. That's kind of big news.

 

Pitchfork: Can you tell me just how recently the album was finished? From what I've heard, it hasn't been long.

 

GM: The recording effectively was finished in July. So not a huge amount of time ago. It was mixed fairly recently, so I got a final master CD probably last week.

 

Pitchfork: Wow. What made you decide to turn it around so quickly? I mean, I'd read interviews as recently as last month in which [bloc Party frontman] Kele [Okereke] and [guitarist] Russell [Lissack] talked about a new record either late this year or early next year. So this decision must have been made since then.

 

GM: I think we just wanted to see how it went. I think the worst thing you can do is sort of go "Yeah, it'll be ready as a download in August," you know. We were working very much towards winter, I suppose. And then, if it was ready sooner, then, great, we can put it out. But there's nothing worse than telling your fans the record's gonna be here in August and not be ready. We've come out on the wrong side before on that one, so the whole idea was sort of, be conservative and then get it out if it's done, you know?

 

Pitchfork: Sure. Are you prepared for the onslaught of all the attention and the tour and everything?

 

GM: I'm ready. I've kind of had a bit of time off 'cause I just had a baby.

 

Pitchfork: Oh yes, congratulations, by the way!

 

GM: Thank you. So I'm actually kind of raring to go, 'cause the other guys have been on tour and I've been home. But in terms of Bloc Party stuff, it's been quiet for me. So, yeah, I'm quite ready to get going with something new. I mean, we always knew that if we did it this way, it would just be sort of a nice surprise for people. I don't think any of our fans expected this early to have anything out this year, so we always knew that it would be a bonus for us as a band to be out playing new stuff and hopefully for the audience to have new material, too.

 

Pitchfork: Were your record labels, Atlantic and Wichita, supportive of your decision?

 

GM: I mean, kind of the daddy of our labels in a way is Wichita in the UK, who were the first label to find us. So even though we are now sort of effectively going to Atlantic in the States, you know, most of the ideas are led by us and Wichita, and Wichita are a very kind of cottage sort of label. Just the number of people work there and how accessible they are. It's four guys who work in an office, not far away from where we live. So we can pop in.

 

We've worked very closely with them with the ideas. It's very much been a collective sort of effort. If we'd been outside the label system... you haven't mentioned it, but there's a precedent with this new Radiohead, which, you know, has supposedly sort of shaken up how this kind of thing is done. They weren't on a label at the time, so they had that freedom. With us, ultimately, this label wants a return on their investment. But the nice thing about it, I think, was that they were just as keen for it to be innovative as we were. You know, that's what I love about Wichita. I trust them, really. I'm not suspicious of their motives when it comes to releasing our music. They love it, and they want to see it do as well as we do.

 

Pitchfork: That's a very good relationship to have. Do you feel if you were a smaller band, you'd be able to do something like this and have it be successful?

 

GM: I think that how it's broken down in terms of the value of money, I think it would work at whatever level you're at. Five pounds for a digital record seems to be like a good value, and yet you're probably gonna make back a fair deal with what you paid to record it. But I mean, yes, with us there's certainly an element of relying a bit on a media story to go with it. That's mostly where you guys come in. [laughs] But yeah, I think there's no reason for a band of any level not to do this. It's not like we're giving it away for free, which I know some bands have tried as well. So, you know, I think this is quite the way to go, really.

 

Pitchfork: Do you have any sense of how many folks have pre-ordered it at this point or anything like that?

 

GM: [laughs] No, I haven't gotten any figures. We'll see over the next days and weeks what the take on it is, I suppose. But the other good thing for us in terms of feedback is it will be out playing pretty soon, this record. I've missed the most recent tour, but again, we weren't really playing new stuff, partly just because we didn't want to build up any expectations. So by September we'll be out playing this record, and we'll see from that how it's going down.

 

Pitchfork: Is there a reason you made the announcement on Monday and are releasing it on Thursday? Any motivation behind the small pause?

 

GM: I think one idea was to sort of just create a pre-order thing. People have something, on one hand, to look forward to, and on the other hand, just sort of build up a bit of interest there. But I think there's a new song now up on our MySpace, so those kind of things will just help kind of get a head of steam on it, I suppose, before the end of the week, and then hopefully by the time people respond to it, then the word will spread.

 

Pitchfork: I understand that part of the reason that you decided to do this was to combat the album getting leaked on the internet early. Certainly with [the band's 2007 sophomore LP] A Weekend in the City, it happened months before it actually came out. Did you feel as though that affected either sales or the reaction to the record?

 

GM: I mean, the only drawback for me with that was that it just felt like it dribbled out a bit, you know. You want a sense of occasion, I suppose, when you put out a record. But I'm very much of the opinion that it's not necessarily a bad thing. Certainly, as a listener to music, I don't necessarily go looking for illegal versions of records that aren't out yet. You know, a reasonably legitimate way to get used to music is to download it. It's a very good thing to download if it's legal, but I think it's just one of those new phenomena, the dissemination of music, I suppose. So with this, it was just like "oh, maybe we can use that to our advantage." It's almost like we've got an advanced copy of ourselves, basically.

 

Pitchfork: So let's talk about the music on Intimacy. Bear in mind, I've only heard a little bit of it. There's been talk of the album being more electronic than your previous work, but I've also heard you guys sort of dispelling that notion. Is that something you want to address?

 

GM: Even internally, I think it's fair to say we recognize different sides of what we do and we know our tastes differ, I suppose. It's pretty fair to say that it's kind of 50/50, the one hand being certainly more electro in the "Mercury" vein, though there are live instruments mostly in there. On the other hand, we're sort of pushing it on the other side in terms of live playing and riffs and things. All of the elements are important to us collectively, and I guess we put them in a different order individually. But I'd say there's all parts of that on the record, really. There's almost quite synthetic stuff that we hinted at previously, and also more traditional-sounding rock sort of riffs and licks, if you will.

 

Pitchfork: Did you set out with any sort of theme or concept in mind with this record, like that attached to A Weekend in the City?

 

GM: No, and I think in a way, that was almost a reaction from us to how we'd approached the previous record, in that we didn't really want to go down that route again. I'm speaking for Kele in a way here, because he's sort of in charge of the lyrical side. I know that he was a bit more keen to just write from the heart rather than kind of take a scene and sort of burrow into it that way. So, yeah, not so much of that idea.

 

Pitchfork: You mentioned that a lot of these songs haven't been played live. Did they largely come together in the studio, then?

 

GM: In the end, yes, although most of the ideas we've sort of been trying out in soundchecks and things in the year before. Like on the Weekend tour, we'd be writing and playing things together. But some things were completely sort of turned around in reverse, and some things we just sort of stripped down from the bare basics. But I think probably about 60, 70 percent of what we went in with was not really very formed at that point, the starting point, and it was sort of shaped in the studio. And that was certainly a new approach for us.

 

Pitchfork: You worked with two different producers on the album: Paul Epworth, who produced Silent Alarm, and Garret "Jacknife" Lee, who produced A Weekend in the City. Do you have a different style of working with each producer?

 

GM: In a way, it's almost a bit obvious when you actually work out which track's which. I think we took sort of the more live stuff into Paul Epworth and the studio stuff was stuff that was worked with Jackknife Lee. I guess for us, we just wanted to incorporate the ideas of what we've done before that we liked on the first two records and push that a bit more. Those producers felt the same way, but they didn't want to just do the same thing they'd done the last time they'd produced us.

 

Pitchfork: Is intimacy a lyrical theme on the record? It certainly comes up on "Trojan Horse".

 

GM: Yeah, I certainly felt that if Kele had a spouting point for this record, it was just things that were on his mind, and that he was going through, so maybe it's a bit more personal. But he does have a habit of kind of splintering ideas that he has about things he's been through and kind of projecting them into sort of new worlds of lyrics. So you start to try and read them as being kind of personal, and then they seem to take on sort of a wider scope. But, yeah, I think the spouting point for him was relationships and what's the actual kind of detail that goes into relationships, and the most intimate sort of parts of human behavior. I think that's probably the only thing that maybe strings some of the songs together, but then again, you know, I'm sure that not all the songs will even fit into that kind of assessment.

 

Pitchfork: So I have to ask: was there any sort of Peter Gabriel influence...

 

GM: [laughs]

 

Pitchfork: I mean, there's a song called "Biko", and "Mercury" sort of...

 

GM: Well, I noticed that Pitchfork were the people that were pushing this, and actually, I didn't, no, I didn't know the song ["Shock the Monkey"] at all, to be honest. So I don't know if that means I'm ignorant.

 

Pitchfork: Ha, no, but it certainly answers the question!

 

GM: My wife is American and she was saying, "yeah, I hear it." And I don't know if maybe that song is a bit more popular in the States, but that's a song I didn't even know, so I have to be educated on that song. I will say that there's no Gabriel influence, and that there's also no Gabriel cover. An entire coincidence.

 

Pitchfork: Good to know.

 

GM: And it's a probably a good thing, too, 'cause I happen to know that Simple Minds' cover of "Biko" by Gabriel was not something you want to spend much time with.

 

Pitchfork: Ha, no.

 

GM: [laughs]

 

Pitchfork: There was a mention in the press release about Intimacy that there will be different tracklists for the digital release and the physical. Can you tell us what the differences will be?

 

GM: I think that we're still sort of finalizing what the physical release will be. I mean, you've got the record there pretty much and maybe an additional bit of material, but we're not sure quite what format it will take.

 

Pitchfork: Is the album cover really the black square with the gray text?

 

GM: Oh no, that's not the album cover. Again, we're still working on that. I mean, I suppose it just reflects the fact that we are acting quite quickly on this and not everything is entirely finished, apart from the songs, and hopefully the mixes are all as we have approved. There are a few details to finish off before it's actually the physical kind of phenomenon of a record.

 

Pitchfork: Sure. Physical product seems to have fallen by the wayside of late, so it's nice to hear that you're putting some effort into the actual tangible release.

 

GM: Yeah, you know, it's something we've obviously discussed. We're quite keen, and the record label is also quite keen, for it not just to be a sort of theoretical, digital thing, but actually there is an item, an object, that you can own. To that end, we put together this big package for "Mercury" with a 12" and everything. It was almost a bit disappointing, the kind of uptake on that. We thought more people would actually want to get their hands on the vinyl. But it is kind of less of a priority for people these days.

 

And I'm the same, I've got to be honest. When I'm buying new records, you know, I could get on the bus, go into town, go to a record shop. Or I could download and pay the same kind of figure to get it sooner. I'm the same with it. We just try to think of ways to make it a bit more memorable, that actual moment of buying and owning and listening to a record. But we'll see, you know. We'll see.

 

Pitchfork: So do you leave the house and get back on the road soon?

 

GM: Yeah, I mean it's been an amazing road for me. Life has changed drastically, but I'm quite keen to sort of get back into the day job, really, and in a way, also kind of more so because I've got a family to provide for now, so, you know. [laughs] For me it was never a case of it being indefinite. I'm looking forward to getting back into the whole arena, touring and such.

 

Bloc Party:

 

08-21 Dublin, Ireland - Marlay Park

08-23 Reading, England - Reading Festival

08-24 Leeds, England - Leeds Festival

09-05 Detroit, MI - Royal Oak

09-06 Toronto, Ontario - Virgin Festival

09-09 Edmonton, Alberta - Edmonton Events Centre #

09-10 Calgary, Alberta - MacEwan Hall #

09-12 Quebec City, Quebec - Envol Macadam

09-13 Fredericton, New Brunswick - Harvest Jazz & Blues Festival

09-14 Halifax, Nova Scotia - The Marquee Club ^

09-15 Halifax, Nova Scotia - The Marquee Club ^

09-17 Montreal, Quebec - Metropolis %

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polkahard

polkahard

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No comments on the album itself yet? I've gotten about 3 listens in already and I'm thinking it's pretty good.

 

Is anyone getting Sigur Ros-ish vibes from Signs? Seriously, it sounds like it could be a Sigur Ros song--minus Kele singing of course.

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crazyduckette

crazyduckette

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On a first listen, this album has really beautiful touches everywhere, I'm really, truly loving it so far. It goes from dark and heavy and electronic, to soft and understated songs here and there...My fave so far is Better Than Heaven.

:heart: :nice:

 

BETTER THAN HEAVEN - MY SONG OF THE YEAR

 

I just feel so connected to it.

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Dejan

Dejan

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No comments on the album itself yet? I've gotten about 3 listens in already and I'm thinking it's pretty good.

 

Is anyone getting Sigur Ros-ish vibes from Signs? Seriously, it sounds like it could be a Sigur Ros song--minus Kele singing of course.

 

signs is a very good song,reminds me of the beginning of Waiting For The 7.18

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Lauve

Lauve

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Hi my name is Lauren.

 

It is funny to compare them with Sigur Ros, what with the different set up and rythms, but I was actually just doing the same. It is the intensity. Tighter and my heart would explode laughing and crying at the same time....

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