Never Too Late for "Too Close"

Alex Clare, famed by his hit song Too Close, seems to have written a pretty diverse set of relatively long songs in his 2011-released album The Lateness of the Hour. I discovered Alex Clare only after hearing his song featured on an Internet Explorer commercial which was made about a year after his album released. Personally, I find Too Close to be the best mixture of a variety of sounds. The only way I can describe it is if you took dubstep, soft rock, and sick rhythms from rap, and threw them all into a blender. Too Close is the V8 juice of modern music: it is a mixture of a bunch of things that fuse to form one energizing song that pumps me up! Clare was able to mesh a multitude of aspects that individually worked, and combine them into one passionate song. To me, Alex Clare is the male form of Adele. While not nearly as famed as the goddess Adele, the two artists are more similar than not. Alex Clare sings with the same deep, soulful passion that Adele seems to reach for when writing and belting out her variety of hits in which have made her famous around the globe. Clare’s great vocal range from soft to a near-cry out of exasperation unites everything together. His voice, like Adele, makes the emotion-packed lyrics of his song come alive. In my opinion, he has the capability of turning the poetic lyrics into a heart-stabbing song about break up and moving on. While I'm usually not one to heavily cherish lyrics, Clare makes them matter. This straight-from-the-soul feel is what makes this song a piece of pure rock and why I think it is so refreshing amongst the Justin Bieber, Nicki Minaj, and Lady Gaga randomness that clogs our ears daily.

While the earlier description may make this song sound too love-oriented for my hard rocker fans, this song is nowhere near the ditzy melodies strummed by Taylor Swift. Judge for yourself:

The perfect mix of synthesized instrumentals building suspense and an epic set of drops, only found and cherished in the dubstep community, really accented distinct shifts from soft vocals to emotional cries found in the chorus. While not a huge hardcore dubstep fan (which I think sounds more like a dial-up modem battling a robot than music) Clare utilizes just enough of these synthesized sounds to make a bowel-twisting, stunning song. The insane melody and disco-techno rock sound it offers in correspondence with Clare’s powerful vocals pulled me in like a fish caught on a hook. Now that I’ve broadened my musical horizons, I can see a crazy Jerry Lee Lewis playing a similar song in modern day. Unlike Lewis, though, Clare has a much better balance between passionate insanity and softer breaks between chorus.

Overall, Too Close, does exactly what the song title suggests. It brings me in close to the lyrical meaning behind the song and I feel connected to Clare and his tough decisions over moving on, which is what his surprisingly intense love song depicts. Despite its rage-seeming climaxes, this (at its lyrical roots) is just another song about love. But Alex Clare makes it worthwhile to listen to.