It may only be March, but already Bloc Party look like bagging the title of the year’s best new band. The fast, frantic foursome from in and around London sailed straight into the Top 10 last month with their debut album, Silent Alarm, and are a huge hit with critics seeking the new Franz Ferdinand. At a sold-out Forum on Friday night, they oozed an infectious energy that will serve them well come the summer festival season.

An almost faultless performance that began bang on time and squeezed 15 songs into a 50-minute set was at times breathtaking in its brilliance. Driven by a superb rhythm section and fronted by a singer, Kele Okereke, with a powerful stage presence and an uncanny knack of knowing when a yelp would be better than a line of lyrics, Bloc Party poured punk, disco, pop and funk into edgy, arty, complex songs that clattered along at a furious pace, but never strayed far from a toe-tapping tune.

It was almost impossible not to bounce along to the old single Banquet, the stop-start Helicopter and This Modern Love’s blend of chiming guitars and jerky beats. When Okereke sang “Something glorious is about to happen” halfway through Positive Tension, it was hard not to think something rather glorious was already taking place.

There weren’t so much set highlights as variations on a formula. Even so, She’s Hearing Voices, an old single released when the band were still finding their feet and overhauled for the album (and notable for sinister lyrics about a paranoid friend of the singer), and The Marshals are Dead, another early track not on Silent Alarm, were given the loudest greeting by the hip, mostly male, audience. Yet when Bloc Party played Blue Light, the closest to a ballad, there was a sense of relief that at least one song was cut from a different cloth. By the end of the set, the similarity of much of the material meant that the audience’s attention was beginning to wane.

There was a change of pace for the encore, however. The current single So Here We Are was slower and more atmospheric. The Price of Gasoline had a stripped-down sound and was an obvious nod to Eighties Echo and the Bunnymen. Compliments, a track that the band had never played live before and proved it by messing up the intro, boasted Cure-like droning guitars and layers of woozy, background sound.

Perhaps a set-list rejig is needed in the future. It’s a small quibble on a night that almost lived up to its hype.

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