Too often people falling in love associate the early days of their relationship with ill-fitting songs or lame musicians that ultimately devalue whatever love is there in those precious first dates.
They slow-danced to Live’s “Lightening Crashes” the night they met, or they rocked out to The Offspring’s “Self Esteem” at the school dance. Perhaps Ben Folds Five’s “Brick” or Rise Against’s “Swing Life Away” was on the radio during an unexpectedly intimate moment. And it was beautiful … until it wasn’t.
Listen up. Those songs aren’t meant for that purpose. Even though Matchbox Twenty’s “3 a.m.” is a song about love and hope and coincidence, if that’s your song, you should be punished simply for having bad taste.
Instead, check out Bloc Party’s “This Modern Love,” a song of love and hope and coincidence, and so much more. It’s the kind of song that makes you want to fall in love, to find somebody with whom you can grow old – and stay young.
Vocalist Kele Okereke sings with a clear, plainspoken passion that comes off prophetically. His thick baritone delivers words that are as poetic as his voice is cliché, but it’s the combination of his delivery and the surrounding sonics that makes “This Modern Love” the soundtrack for letting go and singing along and falling in love.
The song’s mix is ridiculously tight. It starts out hushed with Okereke’s voice detached from the slowly building music firmly in support.
“Baby, you’ve got to be more discerning/I’ve never known what’s good for me/Baby, you’ve got to be more demanding/I will be yours.”
But then the drums build on the eighths – snap-snap-snap-snap – and Okereke’s voice comes into focus as the adorned, adored messenger.
“And you told me you wanted to eat up my sadness/Well jump right in shortly, you can gorge away.”
The penultimate question (“What are you holding out for?”) and answer (“This modern love breaks me”) are indeed heartbreaking – but after an ’80s-nodding, guitar-fronted bridge is the happy, optimistic ending that resonates with the romantic inside everybody: “Do you wanna come over and kill some time? Throw your arms around me.”
Bloc Party plays the Fillmore Auditorium on Friday with The Kills and Noisettes. Tickets, $20, are available via Ticketmaster.
Pop music critic Ricardo Baca can be reached at 303-820-1394 or rbaca@denverpost.com.
