Bloc Party is a smiling, earnest throwback to the early 1990s heyday of the modern rock band. The London quartet’s bracing 2005 debut, “Silent Alarm,” announced a group that aspired to big ideas and big sounds and recalled a time when rock outfits crafted statement albums fueled as much by emotional ambition as musical aspiration. This period was marked by rock’s willful ignorance of what was going on in dance clubs and American cities, when rock was still pop’s lingua franca and club tracks and hiphop were niche sections at the record store.

Bloc Party’s new album, “A Weekend in the City” — a jittery exploration of urban ennui — makes a great leap forward in its chosen “modern rock” direction, and sadly, that’s why the album feels so irrelevant.

It’s no fun to deride a band for trying so hard to achieve the grandiose. “A Weekend in the City” opens with “Song for Clay (Disappear Here),” a whisper that explodes into a scream. Guitarist and vocalist Kele Okereke sings the clumsy opening verse — “I am trying to be heroic in an age of modernity / I am trying to be heroic, it’s all around me, history” — in a self-conscious sotto voce. A single keyboard chord hums like a church organ in the background as Mr. Okereke gently strums forlorn chords behind his falsetto. About a minute into the song, Mr. Okereke’s strumming becomes an arpeggio countdown into a propulsive, anxious thrust from guitarist Russell Lissack, bassist Gordon Moakes, and drummer Matt Tong.

The quartet maintains this tense lockstep groove like a clock wound too tight; when the song finally snaps as the instruments drop out and Mr. Okereke shouts “East London is a vampire / it sucks the joy right out of me” like a wounded loon, the band sketches a roadmap for the album’s mood and temperament. “A Weekend” is going to be about everyday urban alienation, threaded into music that reaches for anthemic highs and lows.

Mr. Okereke’s voice is well cast for such a bleak task. His fragile upperregister twitches through lyrical estrangement, from tales of “sitting in silence in bars after work” in the daily commuter saga “Waiting for the 7.18,” to the globalization detachment chronicled in “Where Is Home?” (“Second generation blues / our points of views aren’t listened to.”) On both songs, the band lays down sympathetic cinematic ribbons to blanket the lyrics, with chiming bells and a locomotive pulse underscoring the former and layers of fragmented collage sculpting the latter’s portrait.

Like too many contemporary rock vocalists, Mr. Okereke favors his falsetto, where no male vocalist should spend most of his singing career if his name isn’t Prince. When he leaves it behind, Bloc Party delivers much more compelling music. Mr. Okereke shows off a substantial tenor in “The Prayer,” a commanding and effective plea for self-confidence. The song rides a wobbly line between the meek and the determined, balanced in Mr. Tong’s juxtaposed martial pound and skittish high-hat and Mr. Lissack’s lissome guitar solo, which is remarkable for its brevity.

Unfortunately, “The Prayer” is the album’s lone taste of the sublime. Elsewhere, Bloc Party feels like an echo of its progenitors. “Uniform” traffics in the delicate selfimportance upon which Coldplay built a career. “Kreuzberg” fades in on an echoing guitar figure straight out of the U2 songbook. And the gorgeous, plush “I Still Remember” is a truly fabulous Echo and the Bunnymen song.

Therein lies the rub: Even at its finest, “A Weekend in the City” feels bygone. It’s great background music that fails to cling to the ears, much less speak to the heart. As a lyricist, Mr. Okereke treats his urban saga like a man who builds ships inside glass bottles, and being detached about detachment is inexcusably insincere. The album lacks Mike Skinner’s (aka The Streets) lived-in immediacy, and Mr. Okereke, despite his best efforts, comes nowhere near Jarvis Cocker’s gifts for packing daft short stories into fourminute pop songs.

Most distressing, though, is that “A Weekend” feels out of place in today’s musical landscape. Arena rock is now the dominion of milquetoast post-Boomer acts (see: Red Hot Chili Peppers, Dave Matthews Band), their teenaged offspring (see: The Killers, My Chemical Romance), and the evergreen ebullience of dance-pop (Justin Timberlake, Gwen Stefani). Today’s most thrilling rock is found in packed clubs, and it’s hard to imagine Bloc Party being that intimate. “A Weekend in the City” isn’t an album suited for collective release; instead, it’s tailor-made for iPod hibernation, a soundtrack for riding the subway alone.