Kele's Doing It For The Kids

Fuck. I know a month has passed since Valentines day but the wound is still fresh. I don’t know what happened; usually my impenetrable shield of outright cynicism keeps me safe from any feelings of aloneness on February 14th. This year I woke up and actually felt the longing for a girlfriend. A few candy hearts and a couple text messages would’ve kept me content in past times but no, this year they just didn’t cut it.

Fuck. Last nights Bloc Party show just dumped a whole bunch of salt onto that wound. When you think about it, all of Bloc Party’s bangers – even “Banquet”- are basically ballads. “Like Eating Glass”, “Blue Light”, “I Still Remember”, “This Modern Love” and “So Here We Are” all could’ve been boring new wave retreads. Yet looking around at the amount of couples inside the sold out Orpheum, it seems both hipsters and high schoolers get down to these tracks.

So how do they pull it off? The credit here has got to go to front man Kele Okerere. He sings lines like “I could feel your heart beating across the grass” with the sheerest of conviction. That line is really no less cheesy than any found in “Mr. Brightside” or “Fix You” but Kele doesn’t come off like a whiny little wimp; he forcefully immerses the audience into their very own John Hughes movie. Except without dancing, cause the security guards were Nazis.

Near the end of the show I guess I wasn’t feeling so bad. All the kids looked happy when they got to jump on stage during rousing closer “Helicopter”. I even smiled when some dude grabbed the mic and shouted “good night Vancouver, you’ve been great” in his squeaky puberty-less voice. I guess that wasn’t the only reason I smiled. After all, I had just watched a taut, professional performance by a band on top of their game. Also, a few rows in front of me a Kristin Cavallari wannabe was shaking her ass like we were in some sort of JLo perfume commercial. That made me feel a little better too.