On the campaign trail for the Bloc Party

Like all the best glowing album reviews, Nick Southall's assessment of Bloc Party's Silent Alarm on Stylus makes me feel like I desperately need to own it (of course, the fact that I love the singles 'So Here We Are' and 'Helicopter' helps).

"Lyrically Bloc Party are intriguing, mysterious and emotive; sonically they are intricate and explosive in equal measure. They’re rhythmically taut, aesthetically pleasing, ideologically sound and probably contain no harmful CFC gases either. Silent Alarm is an astonishing debut album and I love it. Bloc Party are the first band in eight years that I feel I can care about. The sky is wide open for them."

Nick is, however, somewhat less enamoured with Athlete's latest full-length offering: "Tourist is dull but worthy. Life is short; I have no time for dull but worthy."

Lots of other music-related titbits that I'll lazily shoehorn in here, if I may...

Long-time SWSL pals Lovemat had the pleasure of gigging with Towers Of London at The Cluny in Newcastle on Wednesday night. By this point in their tour the Towers' frontman Donny Tourette had already caused £500 worth of damage at the Joiners in Southampton and been arrested following another destructive spree during a gig in Cambridge. In the event, the Newcastle gig barely registered on the Richter scale, the closest they came to wanton destruction being a mic stand flung out into the crowd halfway through the first song. An onlooker's considered opinion: "The sound was a very retro Sex Pistols / Motley Crue / Guns 'N' Roses one - all bands I like by the way - but the songs just weren't there. Had the tunes been there you could forgive them for being such arrogant annoying crusty bits of fanny batter - but they weren't, and so they are." Ahem...

Skif's offered to help out in accommodating Dutch band Persil when they visit Liverpool as the support act for the reformed Wedding Present: "Perhaps this will set a precedent and the VP villa will become the flophouse for all the rock n' roll waifs and strays coming to Merseyside. Perhaps Babyshambles will play a gig in our front room (actually, I'd rather they didn't)."

More Dears reviews! Kenny caught their Birmingham gig, and Pete saw them in Oxford (and The Bravery a day later).

Kenny has pointed me in the direction of It's A Wonderful Life, a new blog set up by former NME scribe Stevie Chick to showcase some of his favourite music features. In this piece from 2002, originally for Everett True's now-defunct Careless Talk Costs Lives, he goes a long way to explaining what it is that makes The Icarus Line so special: "At times, they feel like the only punk-rock band left." Last year's splendidly schizophrenic Penance Soiree LP is a grossly underrated record.