Bloc Party woo 'handsome' Christchurch crowd with old favourites

Bloc Party's Christchurch show was sold out months in advance. Yes, the Town Hall has a modest capacity and the supposed void of international headline-worthy acts to these shores in recent times has been well-chronicled. I’m looking at you Franz Ferdinand, one of Bloc Party’s yesteryear contemporaries.

There could also be a cumulative element in play. Bloc Party has never quite seized a truly wall-to-wall commercial breakthrough off the back of some promising early peaks, and they have gradually built a career on fluctuation. Restlessly flip flopping back and forth across various stylistic pockets over the past 20 years, may have left the London quartet with a certain far-flung drawing power.

The more likely theory was that nostalgia was the ticket. And the band’s Sunday night show all but affirmed that.

Let’s be frank. Bloc Party’s first two records - 2005’s Silent Alarm and 2007’s A Weekend in the City- stand head and shoulders above the remainder of their mixed-bag later albums. For older millennials, their initial foray represented a thrilling moment in time, when the turn of the century post-punk revival finally began to hit its straps in the UK. The band were once one of the most exciting examples coming out of Britain’s indie rock camp, where the bluster of their rhythm section, angular dual guitar jangle, and frontman Kele Okerere’s hot-blooded romanticism, captured a sensation of urban-set nervy youthful energy. They were well on track to becoming their generation’s answer to Gang of Four or XTC.

But the subsequent years would see curious and somewhat jarring album detours and multiple hiatuses, a period which would see the departures of founding members, drummer Matt Tong and bassist Gordon Moakes.

For an expectant crowd, would the band lean in heavily on past glories, or deliver up a representative carefully curated career retrospective?

It was the former. The crowd came for the early stuff, and that’s what they got. About half of their 80-minute set was of songs from Silent Alarm. They opened with ‘So Long So Gone’, they closed their five-song encore with ‘This Modern Love’. It was songs from this era that garnered the biggest audience response. Okerere barely needed to sing the verses as the 2500-strong crowd belted out the lyrics to ‘Banquet’, ‘Like Eating Glass’ and ‘Helicopter’.

Always the magnetic performer, Okerere regularly engaged in playful affirmations. “It’s been a hot minute since we’ve been to New Zealand. So this is exciting,” he said. “It’s so great to be up so close. Y’all are so handsome.” At times though, his vocals were swamped in the mix against Russell Lissack’s guitar and Louise Bartle’s pummelling drums.

It was a show that mostly traded off the jerky velocity of their classic material and some of their raucous later career moments. The fuzzed out offensive of ‘Song for Clay (Disappear Here)’ went extra hard in the intimate Town Hall and as did the grinding Alpha Games single ‘Traps’. Bloc Party’s 2015 single ‘The Love Within’, in what was essentially recorded as an uplifting, but kind of bizarre sounding dance-pop song, was retooled into an edgier, grittier shade of indie rock.

The harder stuff was offset by Okerere’s more tender, starry-eyed ruminations. He segued into ‘Song for Clay’ off the back of a fleeting low-key run through of Sneaker Pimps’ ‘Spin Spin Sugar’. He later ushered in ‘Blue’’s minimalist slow build by declaring it as a “song about true love”.

The mid-set run through of mid-to-late parts of their catalogue did highlight the band’s declining creative returns over the years, and how they are short of an anthem or two to call upon among their seesawing experiments. But to their credit, their less celebrated touchstones were weaved in neatly without much surrender of the momentum they had established from the outset.

It was a special night for Bartle, the band’s powerhouse behind the drum kit who was celebrating her birthday. After running through the penultimate song of the night ‘Flux’, balloons abounded before ‘Happy Birthday’ could be heard unprompted from large quarters of the Town Hall. A delightful way to cap off a night where the band’s most enduring music reigned supreme.