My Top 100, No. 97: "I Still Remember" by Bloc Party

I've been a sportswriter for most of my time writing for publication, with occasional forays into technology or public affairs out of professional necessity, but back when I was in high school I wrote a lot about music. The first album I ever reviewed was Bloc Party's Silent Alarm, which came out in February of my senior year and was then--as it is now--magnificent. To this day I rarely put on a jacket or turn up the thermostat without belting out, "It's so COLD in this ... HOUSE."
The hallmark of that album was the wild and manic drumming of Matt Tong. Most bands use the drums to keep tempo and have the rhythm guitarist and/or bassist fill in the rhythmic flourishes. Not so Bloc Party, who'd pretty much strum eighth notes while Tong flipped out, layering syncopation with polyrhythmia (which is not a word, but I don't care) like he's making a lasagna out of sixteenth notes or something. It's incredible.

But the one Bloc Party song on this list is not from Silent Alarm, nor is it their third-album Japanese monster movie "Flux." It's "I Still Remember," in which Tong lays down as conservative a drumbeat as any in the entire Bloc Party oeuvre.

Now seems like a good time to reveal and explain a certain bias I have. Because sometimes I won't really care what happens in the rest of the song as long as it's got a couple killer lines.
And make no mistake, this is a really good post punk/indie rock song. It's got that driving beat that makes you walk faster when you listen to it because you think you're in a movie, and it has a climbing scale out of the chorus, which is one of my all-time favorite songwriting features, and the story itself is significant. Frontman Kele Okereke, who came out several years after Bloc Party released "I Still Remember," wrote the song about the experience of being gay and in the closet, or otherwise identifying as straight, and feeling attracted to another man and not knowing what to do about it. It's not a story that you hear as often as others in modern rock. This is, by any measure, a good song.
But no more so than any of five or ten other Bloc Party songs. I don't like this song more because of the beat or running eighths or the lyrical content--I like it because of the second half of the second verse, which comes up at about 2:12 in the embedded video.
Because this song is kind of repetitive and on-beat, it lulls you into a false sense of security through a verse and a half. It's predictable, and you're comfortably bobbing your head because you think you know where it's going.
Then, in the second half of the second verse, the melody goes from low quarter notes to mostly half notes sung the next octave up, and it's like a bucket of cold water in the face. I love songs that set up expectations only to confound them, and this is one of my favorite examples, because most of the time when I listen to this song I turn it on, hum along with the opening lead guitar riff, and then zone out for two minutes until it scares the shit out of me with this mournful, belted twist on the verse. It's that kind of killer line that's so good the rest of the song is irrelevant.