Bloc Party: "Mercury"
First impressions of the new Bloc Party single: sounds like a gahhh-rage remix of Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer." The music's just OK, but the video -- like whoa. Every election needs an overblown, paranoid music-video allegory replete with nukes, Planet of the Apes apes, and grainy Pentagon footage . . . don't it? We'll take a wild guess and assume the subject of this particular dystopia is a Republican: he looks an awful lot like the Slayer goat-beast (only it's a cow, wearing a lab coat, with a lobster claw) and appears to be thoroughly enjoying himself while steering the world to a fiery demise. Scary dude, obviously. But we bet this guy, unlike the actual Republican nominee, could at least read the word "Lexington" off a teleprompter.
"Mercury" gets a UK release in August, in the US somewhat later. The band is still in the middle of recording record #3, and is in no particular hurry to finish, since they could get away with dropping UK singles for the next eight months and nobody would bat a lash.