Some songs you feel like you’ve heard a million times but can’t really put your finger on the first listen. Some, though not in your iTunes top 25, had a memorable introduction that embedded in your brain, and now you can’t help but think about that experience any time it comes on. Is that a virtue of the song itself or more a combination of the company, the volume, the situation as a whole? Music cognitive scientists, talk amongst yourselves.
Hearing "Like Eating Glass" by London-based indiesters Bloc Party (no real political significance, they claim) takes me back, each time, to my girlfriend’s car. She was picking me up for a drive into Chicago and the moment I buckled in, without any other greeting or exchange, she just said, "You have to listen to this."
She cranked the volume in her little Toyota Corolla as high as it would go and pushed play on the opening cut from Bloc Party’s debut album "Silent Alarm," which had recently been released. The tense buzzing as the track opens had her speakers vibrating immediately. As the spaced-out guitar and the cymbals rattling with hectic, building energy added their angsty thoughts, the dainty sedan filled with sound. Then singer Kele Okereke came wailing in like Morrissey’s angrier, more high-pitched little brother, and things really got going.
Also, we were driving, so that helped.
It’s a sad song, this one. Okereke could be lamenting a broken relationship. Or his might be the lovedrunk snarls of a spurned admirer. Either way, the emotion is raw and visceral, and pretty damn catchy.
And if the drum-tight ensemble you see here on Jools Holland is anything to go by, the recently reunited group (returning from individual projects in September 2011) should be a riot at Lolla. If it’s your first time hearing them there, hopefully the experience is embedding, car or no car.
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