Rarely does an album effectively convey two polar opposites: exploring light and dark, anger and sorrow, fist-beating defiance and biting melancholy. Bloc Party's second album does this and more. Like any great album it dashes through a kaleidoscope of emotions, whilst still producing a handful of tracks that are hideously catchy and something for the kids to dance to.

The first half of the album drips with bitterness, brooding on the nation's ills with just a hint of desperation, a longing to hide away. Opening track Song For Clay (Disappear Here) is a dark, thumping number which portrays a struggle to escape from a morass of superficiality and complacency. Next is Hunting For Witches, and there's nothing subtle here, as the media are ripped into for creating hysteria and hatred. The tone is briefly lifted by the euphoric and idealistic Waiting For The 7.18, a track about driving to Brighton on the weekend. That's obviously because London is so horrifying, people can't wait to escape to somewhere nicer...

The tribal drums of single The Prayer elbow their way in next, returning to a more dark and oppressive sound. It's not quite the same Bloc Party that fans will be used to, but it makes for a vicious and empowering track. One of the understated gems on the album is Uniform, which starts gently, building to a crescendo of monolithic riffs, before subsiding back down again. It bemoans a generation of disaffected and apathetic teenagers, but reveals a disdain for a society that puts them there, prizing the ultimate and unattainable virtue of 'coolness'.

The album's second half changes tempo to something gentler and lighter: both On and the brilliant Kreuzberg encapsulate a determined sense of optimism in the latter half. On is the bridge between the album's two sections, and may not be the best track musically, but the image of clarity, and the assertions that I can charm them all are a welcome change. Kreuzberg is ostensibly a song about the fall of the Berlin Wall, but it also portrays a message of hope and self-determination in the simple chorus: I have decided...at 25...that something must change.

A complete contrast to Kreuzberg is found in the following track, I Still Remember. In a style reminiscent of 80s stadium rock, it is the most upbeat sounding piece on the album, yet it is about unrequited schoolday love, and unfulfilled wishes. The juxtaposition of the two together provides the most poignant and reflective moment of the album: one is stuck in dreamy reminiscences, melancholic and introspective, whilst the other is looking forward, proactively and with confidence in human agency to change.

This is, you feel, where Bloc Party find themselves torn. It is natural to dwell on past mistakes and lost opportunities, natural to feel anger at the injustice, ignorance and bigotry in the world today; but as the fall of the Berlin Wall showed, things can change, with hope and determination. A Weekend in the City is fundamentally still a darker album than Silent Alarm, but that only serves to make the lighter, hopeful moments stand out with more heart and more honesty.

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