Today, I’ll be adding to my haphazard eclectic collection of transcriptions with a childhood favorite: “Like Eating Glass” by Bloc Party, off of Silent Alarm. I have a WIP of a torch song from the 70s, but I couldn’t finish it in time for Valentine’s Day weekend. “Like Eating Glass” does at least have a bit of a romantic tinge to it.
My dad and I discovered Bloc Party when we stumbled into some sort of BBC music special 15+ years ago. This is the closest video I could track down — I honestly can’t remember if it’s the same performance, since it aired before Silent Alarm even came out, but it’s the closest thing that fits the bill:
Even as an adolescent, I do remember being seriously impressed by the drumming on the album version. It’s a challenge to properly appreciate art and artistry when you’re a kid, but this was one of those moments when I first started to really put some effort into understanding what makes a good drum part.
The drummer on this album is Matt Tong, who ended up leaving the band in 2013, with some vague explanations after the fact. It’s a bummer that he left, but he seems to be keeping busy at least. A lot of die-hard Bloc Party fans will tell you that the band was never the same after the first two albums, but many groups suffer the same fate.
Matt has a great drum part for this number, which has a very interesting structure: after a lengthy intro, there are two verses, an instrumental, a third verse, then the chorus, a bridge, another chorus, and finally the outro.
Listening to the grooves, you can hear a lot of pop-punk and thrash energy in Matt’s playing. He uses two different grooves with similar structures for verses 1 and 2, combining them for the third verse:
Matt backs off a bit during the hook, but the song still has some serious drive. I’m quite a fan of the bridge, which has some disorienting space around hits that are played between the drums and the guitars. Notice how the different phrases alternate between the kick on the offbeats and the snare on the offbeats:
Not much more to say about this one, but it’s a killer song, and drumming along to it is a blast.
