Photo: Todd Owyoung

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w/ Smoosh and Final Fantasy 

The Pageant, St. Louis

The security guard does not like Final Fantasy. Shaking his head up and down, he will repeatedly remark on how terrible he finds Owen Pallett's set, and the two teenage boys in front of him will agree. "I'd rather listen to opera," one says. "I'd rather listen to System of a Down's lead singer doing opera."

"Actually that would be pretty fucking cool. That guy rules!"

Pallett seems to recognize his audience, joking in between songs that following his set, the show will be over. After little laughter, he sighs and laughs self-deprecatingly, "No, you didn't come to see this fag." Though that statement will garner more laughs, I also hear a lot of very suspicious cheering. When Pallett ends his set with a cover of Bloc Party's "This Modern Love," the audience nearly riots. Guys wearing Pink Floyd and Flogging Molly t-shirts actually look angry. People take their Bloc Party seriously around here.

A quick perusal of the merchandise table is revealing. Many audience members are sporting a shirt that reads "Live the dream like the 80's never happened," which invites the snide observation that for many attending, the 80's literally did not happen. But this seems to be only half-true; for every underage hipster wannabe or high school-age jam band apologist, there is an older audience member counterpart. The bar area is packed, and urban professionals will dance un-ironically to "Banquet" with Blue Moons in their hands. There seems to be little correlation between the band's high school rebel views on conformity and materialism and the $50 official Bloc Party track jacket, although those worried about blending in too much with the crowd could have been placated by the many varietals of $25 official Bloc Party t-shirts available.

The band opens with "Song For Clay (Disappear Here)," a song that is no less embarrassing live than in the studio version. Lyrically the song carries all the weight of a 14-year-old's faux-jaded and misguided rant on their Livejournal page, and any raw, visceral elements of the song musically fall flat: the mix is terrible, with the bass sounding muddy, robbing the band of perhaps their most redeeming quality, the precision of their more than competent rhythm section. On the other hand, the light show and fog machines seem to be working on overtime tonight, allowing band members to make rock star poses elaborately framed by expensive lighting.

The set generally breaks down into an even mix of crowd pleasers from both A Weekend in the City and Silent Alarm. Songs from Weekend are more formally ambitious to the point of being formulaic, but each chorus seems to be greeted with ecstatic cheer. As for songs from Silent Alarm, anthems like "Banquet" at least get the crowd moving without any pretense of intellectualism, but they sound incredibly dated, older than they should be. "This Modern Love" is performed and those angered by Final Fantasy's rendition are placated, though the sheer bombast of the song leaves me longing for the minimalism of Pallett's reading.

As the show progresses it's tempting to wonder if Bloc Party would sound better in a basement or a dingy club, surrounded by hipsters instead of System of a Down fans who hate Canadians. Though it might also be tempting to answer with a forceful yes, I'm not so sure.

When Silent Alarm arrived stateside, it made its way onto many critics' year-end top picks list through its aggressive charm and earnestness, but not through invention or breaking new ground. Silent Alarm was an album that dads could listen to in the car with their kids that didn't involve Jeff Tweedy. Though the Bloc Party of two years ago might have been subversive enough to garner praise from Pitchfork and the cover of Fader, the band's sound has never suggested elitism; if anything, Bloc Party shares more in common with U2's attempts at transcendent stadium epics than the pure pop gluttony of peers Maximo Park or The Futureheads.

It appears that Bloc Party has become the Chuck Palahniuk of music; both make quotable, sweeping statements about materialism, both seem to be a dumbed-down version of what their respective genres are supposed to represent. Chuck Palahniuk is postmodernism for people who don't read (or who like Brad Pitt); Bloc Party is indie for people who don't listen to Pavement (or who like Muse).

For the encore, Okereke will walk back onto the stage wearing a white boxer uniform with a large American flag tied around his neck. One might assume that this is meant to be an ironic statement, but what exactly that statement might be remains unclear. The last song is "Helicopter," an (ostensibly) anti-war diatribe against Westernization and cowboy diplomacy that still somehow manages to be undeniably catchy and danceable. It still feels dated, though, and when Owen Pallett and the prepubescent members of Smoosh rush the stage and begin jumping up and down while holding hands, the entire scene bears a strange resemblance to an episode of Full House. Have mercy. | Cindy Gao

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