U.K. sensations Bloc Party combine four distinct personalities and varying musical tastes to concoct their infectious Indie Dance Rock.

Winston Churchill once said something to the effect that America and Britain were two great nations divided by a common language. This is still true. Today, music is a big part of the language barrier between Americans and the British.

The British music scene has seemingly always been more advanced than in America, and that continues to be true today as bands like Bloc Party continue to roar out of the U.K.

With unbelievably catchy hooks and danceable beats, the band's first record, Silent Alarm, lit a fire on dance floors and at radio stations across both Europe and America. Reaching No. 3 on the U.K. charts, Silent Alarm set the band up for a hectic tour schedule. Most of the themes on the band's second album, A Weekend in the City, come from the hectic lifestyle of always being on the road.

"I am trying to be heroic," is the album's opening line, crooned by singer Kele Okereke, "In my heart I am lukewarm, nothing really touches me."

Three seconds after these lines, Matt Tong rages into a driving drumbeat -- met with a bass line from Gordon Moakes -- and "Song for Clay (disappear)" has taken off. The juxtaposition between heartfelt lyrics and intensely driven song structures is something the band explores heavily throughout A Weekend in the City.

"Nothing was set in stone," says Moakes, discussing the process of making A Weekend in the City. "It was a journey from one point to another."

As Weekend proceeds, the songs continue to explore the driving forces behind being young and living in the city. "The Prayer" matches forceful beats with fragile, insecure lyrics. The trend continues for the duration of the album, meshing together to form a collectively raw and very cerebral follow-up to Silent Alarm.

As the lyrical subject matter of Bloc Party's songs continues to change and grow, their live shows continue to remind critics and fans alike why the band has gotten to where they are. With lyrics and beats matching each other in flamboyant style, the band has sold out venues across the world.

Moakes is articulate and reserved, making sure not to say anything that could be "ammo" for this story. When asked of the band's recent tour with young Pop scenesters Panic! At The Disco, he quickly brings up that the tour was the doings of Atlantic Records.

"I think the idea is that we could reach a lot of teenagers who are just starting to get to know music," he says, "and playing in front of those kids would be interesting."

The tour was cut short after three days when drummer Mat Tong was hospitalized with a collapsed lung. Tong is a driving force within the band, propelling their live sets to extraordinary heights.

On A Weekend in the City, Okereke penned a group of songs much more reflective in nature then those on Silent Alarm. With more mature lyrical topics, the band slowed their sonic pace down, something Moakes attributes to "our need to grow."

Moakes is the total antithesis of what you would expect and he spends the majority of our interview trying to push the idea that Bloc Party is just a normal group of musicians doing the normal things that normal people do. But it's clear after listening to both of the bands releases that he might be the most humble person on the face of the earth.

He attributes much of the band's success to luck. Everything from playing Live Earth to getting a record deal is pushed aside as nothing more than good fortune.

"The music was always what led us and when we have songs, we want to play them, and we would play wherever we have the means to," he says of the band's early days in England.

Once Tong joined the band on drums, they seemed to hit the ground running.

"We struggled for a long time trying to find drummers and when Matt started playing with us we knew that we'd found something that we hadn't had up until that point," Moakes says.

Early on, Bloc Party was pinned as a political band because of the themes and words on Silent Alarm. Yet the band has always resisted the notion that they were political. It could very well be the fact that the band members are young and their music shows it. They're no more political then your average mid-twenties person living in a big city. They don't want the world to melt, they don't want racism to be as prevalent in society and they don't want children in war-torn areas to starve. Maybe that does make them political ... or maybe that only solidifies the notion that they are, in fact, just regular guys.

Moakes openly admits that the band isn't the most talented group of musicians in the world, but there's not exactly a Sid Vicious in the group either. Bloc Party brings four very different people with different backgrounds together, which led to a stylistic melting pot from the get-go. Everyone in the band has different musical tastes and instead of trying to force one style or genre into their music, they have allowed the infusion of these styles, which explains their unique sonic and visual aesthetics.

"There's been a tendency to focus in on a lot of the personal factors," Moakes says about how the band has been portrayed, particularly by the sensationalistic music press in the U.K. "I don't really think it's that key. We just make music."

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BLOC PARTY plays the Madison Theater in Covington Wednesday with Deerhoof and Smoosh.