I wasn’t too keen on A Weekend in the City, and from the sound of Bloc Party’s new single “Mercury”, streaming on the band’s official site, I’m not really itching to keep listening this time around either. I’m all for bands shifting and branching out and evolving, but Bloc Party seems to have lost the ability to write, you know, a song. This sounds like a garbled mess. Pretentious artsy-ness for pretentious artsy-ness’ sake is no fun at all. This is the sound of a band taking itself waaay too seriously.