Bloc Party - Hunting For Witches | Single and Video Review
by 
Dave Parrack on July 11th, 2007
This is Bloc Party, with their fantastically good new single ‘Hunting for Witches’ which came out on July 9th. The band have seemingly been everywhere in the past 2 weeks, with both Glastonbury and Live Earth performances under their belts. I think this song comes across really well both live and on record, and it’s my favourite song off 2nd album ‘A Weekend in the City’.
The song is highly political, with lead singer Kele Okereke making references to September 11, the London terror attacks, and The Daily Mail, a right wing British newspaper. Kele spoke about the song in an interview and said…
The 30 bus in Hackney, which is just around the corner from where I live, was blown up. [That song was] written when I was just observing the reactions of the mainstream press in [the UK] and I was just amazed at how easy it’d been to whip them up into a fury. … I guess the point about the song for me is post-September 11th, the media has really traded on fear and the use of fear in controlling people.
I also (maybe wrongly) took the lyrics to mean something bigger, with a general nod towards the way humanity has a very vigilante frame of mind at times. We always have to have someone to blame, to go after, and generalise about. In the UK, that used to be the Irish population, and that has now switched to Muslims.
I love the start of the song, with an endless array of voices, or radio reports passing between the speakers, cutting in and out. The jagged guitars then come in before Kele then starts talking about his, and the population’s state of fear. Some of the language used is very evocative, including the title itself, and lines such as “Kill your middle class indecision” and “the enemy’s among us, taking our women, and taking our jobs“.
The song rocks from start to finish, with a blistering pace willing Kele onwards and towards his goal of getting the point across.
The video is a strange one, and not the usual fare we’ve come to expect from Bloc Party. It’s one of the most stripped down and laid bare music videos I’ve ever seen, but it works extremely well. To me, it completely strips away all the politics and media perspectives and just shows the band at it’s raw best, playing their instruments in a dark room. And I think that’s the idea, forget the hype, and seek out the truth behind the headlines.
A brilliant single off a brilliant album, and a fitting video to boot. What more could you ask?
Tags: Bloc Party, Glastonbury, hunting-for-witches, irish, kele-okereke, Live-Earth, London, muslims, political, review, september-11, Single, terror, terrorist, UK, YouTube| 2.5 |
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POSTED IN: Bloc Party, Indie, Reviews, Singles, Videos
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