It's the morning after now, and that cute hipster in the corner with the horn-rimmed glasses that had seemed so enigmatic the night before doesn't seem so intriguing anymore.

One of my favorite David Foster Wallace short stories is "Good Old Neon," narrated by a severely depressed yuppie speaking from the grave after committing a particularly gruesome suicide. The synopsis reduced to one sentence, the story seems hackneyed; the alienated and empty yuppie stereotype has certainly been done enough to warrant snide asides and comments. But here's the rub; Wallace's protagonist decides to kill himself upon the realization that his supposed plight is at best, a horrible cliché. Watching a rerun of Cheers late at night, all it takes for Sadsack Jones to decide to end it all is Frasier to casually joke, "If I hear one more yuppie complain about his inability to love one more time..." before he's barreling down a highway in his Porsche, taking dead aim at a lamppost.

Now, I don't know how popular Cheers is over in Britain, but I can't imagine Bloc Party frontman Kele Okereke's ever seen that episode, or for that matter, read David Foster Wallace. Bret Easton Ellis is more his speed, as evidenced by Okereke's referencing American Psycho in the atrocious opener "Song for Clay (Disappear Here)." The first two lines of A Weekend in the City betray everything; Okereke's embarrassingly emotive vocals plead, "I am trying to be heroic/ In an age of modernity" as a plaintive Telecaster dramatically strums in the background. You can cut the postmodern angst with a knife. Where 2004's Silent Alarm started terrifically, "Like Eating Glass"'s blaring and insistent guitar sounding like a call to arms, A Weekend in the City is simply blaring and insistent. All pretense of subtlety has been dropped; who needs refinement when you've got a message to feed the kids?

I could go on about how Okereke's message of "fuck this, capitalism has sucked everyone's souls and I'm going to EMOTE ABOUT IT" permeates through the entire album, listing every single trite and forced line and making plenty of jokes at the band's expense, but I can't do that. It's too painful, and I'm not speaking as a snobbish critic, but as a fan. I loved Bloc Party. I have British singles on import; I have every single North American release on vinyl. The first time I listened to Silent Alarm, I fell asleep as the album ended, clutching the liner notes in my hand. To say that A Weekend in the City is a disappointment would be an understatement.

Unfortunately, that's not to say that Weekend doesn't seem like a natural progression for the band. What set Bloc Party out from the rest of the NME British Invaders of 2005 was that they were the intellectuals. Bassist Gordon Moakes talked a lot about art and discourse and used (relatively) big words in interviews; Okereke derided prominent British indie figures (Pete Doherty, we're shaking our fingers at you) for being too destructive, too excessive, too rock star-ish. In the NME's loving review of Silent Alarm, they were quick to decree, "It's the antiheroes time."

But unlike more low-key indie bands that thrive on such a humble foundation, Bloc Party—all blistering guitar solos and manic drums—has always been about the rock, which leads to some disconnect. What's dangerous about Bloc Party's attitude about its fellow post-post punkers is that it lends them an air of elitism—which frankly, they don't have the shit to back up. We understand, you've read some books and you're disillusioned with modern society. That doesn't excuse lyrics like, "All the young people looked the same/ Wearing their masks of cool and indifference/ Commerce dressed up as rebellion." This is shit even Holden Caulfield would trash. But it's not hard to see how they got here; "Helicopter" may have made us dance, but the politically charged lyrics hovered dangerously close to tired Green Day's Bush (or Blair, in this case) bashing. With Silent Alarm, Bloc Party got by on obliqueness; with Weekend, the band's ambition proves too irresistible for them to handle. The songs sag, overloaded with larger-than-life ideas and deep thoughts just dying to soundtrack your next epic makeout session in Grandma's basement.

I really hate to discourage ambitious rock bands; if anything, it's a welcome change from the garage-rock stragglers still swaggering, or lazy indie bands praised for tacking on nonsensical words to jangly guitars. But it's not easy to control that ambition; the bravado of the Killers is just a few Bruce Springsteen songs away. There are some truly lovely moments on the record, like the beautiful chorus to "Waiting for the 7:18," but for each spark of brilliance there are ten regrettable moments, cringe-worthy in their execution. "Where Is Home?" suffers from terrible overproduction, "Uniform" sports some of the most atrocious commercialism rants this side of high school, and "Kreuzberg," while sounding every bit sonically like "This Modern Love: Luxe and Reduxe," explores indie love with less aplomb, awkwardly stumbling over lines like, "What is this love/ Why can I never hold it?"

It's a shame that the lyrics must be discussed to such length, especially when musically, Bloc Party actually stay very much intact. Sure, the dance-punk numbers have largely been replaced, but when the choruses kick in on most tracks, it's not difficult to dig out the skeletal frames on which the band built its (however tentative) reputation. But it all comes back to that intellectual stereotype that is inevitably at the heart of a band that named itself after the Eastern Bloc of the Cold War. Silent Alarm's terse language barely hinted toward the laborious language of A Weekend of the City, dazzling listeners with a spectacularly solid debut filled with impeccably crafted songs. But it's the morning after now, and that cute hipster in the corner with the horn-rimmed glasses that had seemed so enigmatic the night before doesn't seem so intriguing anymore. As it turns out, his stylish frames are outfitted with plastic lenses. C+ | Cindy Gao

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