Bloc Party w/ Final Fantasy & Smoosh

The Bloc Party show at the Egyptian Room was an unexpectedly beautiful collision of non-sequiturs. I’ll explain:

My friends and I primarily wanted to go to the show to see Bloc Party’s style of young, energetic dance-punk. I really liked their first release, Silent Alarm, and the follow up, A Weekend In The City, was a great album as well. We didn’t even know who was opening, but decided to go despite that detail.

Smoosh was the first act to go on. The girls in the band played fun, lighthearted indie pop songs using drums and keyboards, and occasionally brought their younger sister, Maia, out to play bass guitar and wurlitzer. By younger, I mean 11 years old. It’s probably also worth mentioning that the two oldest members of Smoosh, sisters Chloe and Asya, are 13 and 15. They’re barely teenagers and are already on tour with Bloc Party, not to mention that Chloe and Asya are protégé students of Death Cab for Cutie’s drummer, Jason McGerr. What was really crazy was that they were actually pretty good, all age issues aside. This band wasn’t exactly what I’d pictured when I thought of who would be opening for Bloc Party, but it was an interesting performance and their music was pretty enjoyable.

Next in the line-up was Owen Pallet, aka Final Fantasy, another front-runner on the list of bands I wouldn’t expect to open for Bloc Party. The band is made up of Pallet, his violin, and some pedals. That’s it. These three elements create a soothing blend of baroque pop featuring Pallet’s Vienna choirboy-like voice. While not upbeat enough to incite dancing, the delicate music still captivated quite a few members of the audience. At one point he shouted into the pickups on his violin instead of into his microphone, causing his voice to take on the timbre of the small, stained instrument in his hands. In addition to the music, a friend of Pallet’s performed a kind of modern shadow puppet play by using an overhead projector. She played with the shapes and colors, telling a host of tales I couldn’t keep straight; one dealt with issues of a father’s rejection of his son’s decision to go out to sea, another seemed to be about medieval squires’ ghosts. The abstract symbolism held off during one part, however, and the artist shifted multiple speckled transparencies across the screen. Each had tiny holes shining through thick blackness, and the film of one sheet held a dark blue tint. The effect of moving these three at the same time created the image of an expansive night sky, filled with twinkling stars. Combined with the sound of Pallet’s voice and violin, it was one of the most spectacularly beautiful things I’ve ever seen. And all it took was three sheets of transparency paper, a violin, and a guy singing. Simple yet amazing.

Bloc Party finally came on to thunderous cheers from the crowd. Singer Kele Okereke greeted everyone, and drummer Matt Wong sent everything into an up tempo frenzy. As far as drummers go, he could be my favorite to see live. Every theatrical expression on his face makes you believe he’s pushing his body to the limit to keep time with incredibly intricate rhythms; his shit is fire. The rest of the show was good, especially Kele’s insistence for the crowd to get hyped…after crowd surfing he ran close to 150ft. out into the crowd still holding his mic and singing, then dropped it so that he could go get an opening act’s tshirt from the merch table and ran back to the stage wearing it. I wish their set could’ve been mixed a little better because at times it seemed a little hollow. There’s so much force and urgency on their records that they couldn’t really capture last night, but it was only the second show of their fall tour. It was still and enjoyable show even if it was a bit strange.


Bloc Party - Waiting for the 7:18