While Bloc Party's debut album Silent Alarm didn't pull in the ungodly sales of say… The Killers' Hot Fuss, it did build a pretty strong public following. It wasn't an overnight success though. Constant promotion and touring for two years straight, including arena opening gigs for mega-successes Panic! At the Disco led to Bloc Party's second album being quite anticipated.

I'm not going to beat around the bush here and give A Weekend In The City a slap on the wrist and chalk it up to being a sophomore slump. There's no slight slump about it, this album is flat out terrible. Not since I heard say… The Killers Sam's Town has a band's album smacked of such self-importance and pretentiousness. Lets start off with the production and work our way down shall we? Producing this tripe for Bloc Party is Jacknife Lee, none other than the man who turned Snow Patrol from a decent Rock band to a bunch of whiny weenies. Here, Lee has slowed every song on A Weekend down to a crawl and has completely killed what made Bloc Party interesting in the first place: their ferocious intensity. Instead of fiery emotion, lead singer Kele Okereke now sounds like something between a piss-weak Morrissey and a third-rate Ranking Roger from The English Beat/General Public. While I wish I could lay all the blame on Lee, in all actuality almost all the fault of A Weekend In The City being such an thorough disappointment lays solely on the band.

Lyrically, this is one of the more massive eye-rolling groaners in years. Nothing is worse than listening to a bunch of boys in their mid-20's trying to act profound and authoritative. "The Prayer" is one of the biggest culprits. With the line "I will charm, I will slice, I will dazzle them with my wit" I find myself thinking that nothing is more witless and charm-absent than these guys. First single "I Still Remember" is about the only thing here that's passably decent. If you consider yourself a big fan of Silent Alarm though everything else here is just a waste of your time and hard earned money. For me, this gets an early vote for what will probably go down as one of the biggest stiffs of 2007.

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