Intimacy would have been a good name for Bloc Party's previous album, AWeekend in the City, which was so vulnerable and confessional that itoften felt like barely edited diary entries set to music. The album'stake on 21st century life and love was heavy listening in large partbecause it felt so personal. Bloc Party's mood is just as dark onIntimacy, which plays a lot like A Weekend in the City's mirror twin:it's a breakup album that gives personal situations a political heft.The similarities aren't really that surprising, considering thatIntimacy arrived just a year and a half after A Weekend in the City andalso features production work by Jacknife Lee (as well as Silent Alarmproducer Paul Epworth). The album begins with two of Bloc Party'sangriest, most experimental songs, which revisit the beat-heavyterritory of A Weekend in the City's "Prayer" with even more chargedresults.

"Ares" is a modern-day war chant, with seething processed guitar linesfueled by huge pummeling drums, the likes of which haven't been heardsince the big beat heyday of the Chemical Brothers and the Prodigy."Mercury" is cleverly astrological, using a straight description ofMercury's retrograde conditions ("This is not the time to start a newlove/This is not the time to sign a lease") as a springboard to aself-loathing rant set to wildly spiraling brass and more of thosebludgeoning beats. Bloc Party push the envelope hard on both of thesetracks, almost to the point of pretension, but not quite; actually,it's a little anticlimactic when they return to more familiar terrainlike "Halo," which could fit in easily among Silent Alarm's angstyrockers.