♪♫ ♪ ♪♫

Signs
Bloc Party
Intimacy
2008

I first heard this song on an episode of...um...Gossip Girl.  It was December 2008 and, in a perfect parallel to this December, I was counting down days on the calendar.  I worry that I will be counting down days all of my life.  That December I was feeling pretty depleted.  It's when all the back-to-McGill excitement had kind of worn off, and when I realized that actually teaching was really different from all of the concepts we discussed in the classroom.  True to my nature, I kept a precise tally of the number of days of substitute teaching that remained before we breaked for Christmas.  I lost myself in escape-to-London-or-New-York fantasies and kind of started to rely on old habits to make things seem more bearable.

Do you ever have a song that you always associate with another song?  I instantly associate this song with Placebo's "Song to Say Goodbye"...maybe because I listened to both songs constantly around the same time or because they stir the same feelings up inside me.  During one of the enlightening presentations in...Conrod's?...class someone played a YouTube clip of scenes from the movie Thirteen edited together with the (as I would later find out) Placebo song.  I immediately thought, I need that song right now.  I had that same feeling when I heard "Signs" for the first time--kind of like everything cluttering my head fell away and my focus narrowed down to a pinprick.

The beginning of this song does me in every time.  It sounds like ice.  It makes me think of the way the air can be during Winter--really clear and sharp.  Those chimes sound like thousands of fluttering snowflakes--the ones that fall in lightly-packed clusters before landing on the tops of your eyelashes. 

This song hollows me out.  I love that kind of empty part that starts at around 3:00, after the drawn-out "statuesque"...there is a heart-wrenching urgency to it.  The overall melody of this song makes me think of turning circles, being caught in a swirl of snowflakes or spinning on a too-fast merry-go-round--holding on to the pole that shoots out of the bobbing horse's neck with heavy, slippery hands that can't quite seem to grasp on tight.  Or of those times spent in someone's backyard, gripping the hands of a friend and twirling around and around together, gaining momentum, until you both collapsed in a heap, dizzy and out of breath.

Second album art in a row that I've posted of people making out, hahaha.