A weekend in the city is Bloc Party’s Ulysses.

Albeit they took less than ten years to come up with it (unlike the Illustrious James Joyce), they managed to write an allegory of modernity, loss, despair and desire all wrapped around the many dirty, mean streets of London.

There is underling of profound, urban discomfort running among the eleven tracks of Bloc Party’s sophomore efforts. The city looms like a preternatural being ready to obliterate all the emotions from its inhabitants.

Because East London is a vampire,
it sucks the joy right out of me (Song for Clay)

All the characters moving among the debris of a landscape of loss seems to float above a reality that has been almost annihilated by apathy and cruelty and Kele Okereke’s voice stretches with a melancholic flexibility wrapping his words around sounds that melts his words into music.

This is (by the band own admission) a record that was in part fuelled by drugs and the easy escapism offered by a city like London, but it is a record of undoubted beauty.

A beauty that lies in the perfect dichotomy created by lyrics imbued with the longing for something that shimmers behind the garish neon lights of East London and a music that can mutate like the whims of the city itself.

There has been an immense growth within the ranks of Bloc Party, where Silent Alarm was abrasive, unpolished and sometime redundant, A weekend in the city is sleek without being artificial, powerful without being cheaply anthemic and immensely pleasurable to the ears without losing any of it’s beauty.

The prayer is a perfect example of how all the components, all the details, all the singularities of this band come together.

Blessed with a hook that is practically unforgettable and with a rhythm that is, purposely, out of rhythm, the song reflects the skewed view that you get when lying on the pavement at 2am on a Friday night. Everything is blurred and tastes funny in your mouth, but the lights dance around your eyes and there is a dirty kind of beauty of the rubbish on the street and the black under your fingernails.

Standing on the packed dance floor
Our bodies thrown in time
Silent on the weekdays
Tonight I claim what's mine

Is it so wrong to crave recognition?
Second best, runner-up
Is it so wrong to want rewarding?
To want more than is given to you?
Than is given to you

Tonight make me unstoppable
And I will charm, I will slice
I will dazzle them with my wit
Tonight make me unstoppable
And I will charm, I will slice
I will dazzle, I will outshine them all

Like Joyce with his Dublin Okereke lives and sings London like a much beloved whore. There is no escape from this love and the dreamy quality of memories of a time of purity are sung among the sad realization that they won’t come back and that, in its omnipresence, London is the only lover he will never be able to give up.

This is a record for late nights and dark, bleary eyed mornings, a record for impossible beauty and the beauty of the impossible.

And I can see our days are becoming nights.
I could feel your heartbeat across the grass.
We should have run.
I would go with you anywhere.
I should have kissed you by the water

You should have asked me for it
I would have been brave
You should have asked me for it
How could I say no?

And our love could have soared
Over playgrounds and rooftops
Every park bench screams your name
I kept your tie

I would let you if you asked me

I still remember

Music wise this is the best British record of the year.

Lyrics wise Kele Okereke has written something timeless.

Like love.

Like life.

by Laila