It's amazing how a silly little thing like love can fuck with everything that you do. It can mess with your taste buds. Suddenly, those favorite foods aren't so great any longer. Set within the confines of a broken down relationship and it's as if some invisible entity has taken a house painter's brush and slapped a coat of gray paint right down your tongue. You're in the land of the bland and crunchy. It can stifle your energy and make you unable to lift your limbs up off of anything. They just get thrown into a lumped position and they feel weighed down by your days - each one that goes by counts for another sandbag. It can make your head feel like its top has come unhinged and your thoughts and concentrations are up there, just floating along in the breeze, fleeing their home, off to vaporize. Nights get strained and our blood tends to pump faster and harder - whether the reason is for the good or for the opposite. It's all very draining and only occasionally - usually briefly - liberating.London duo, Big Deal, makes the draining feeling of love had or love incarcerated very prominent in its songs, dealing them very sparse qualities and the sort of exasperated sighing of someone who's not quite sure how much longer they can take any of it. Kacey Underwood and Alice Costelloe, both of whom sing and play guitar, cook up a male-female vibe that somehow doesn't strike as adversarial, but more along the lines that they've ganged up on the frustrating perpetrators and they're bound to let them know just how badly they're mixed up in their waking hours. They've lost their focus. They're tired of all the beating about. They can't get their homework done, for shit's sake, because all they're doing is thinking about that someone who either doesn't realize it, or absolutely knows and is just without a concern. Costelloe sings, "All I wanna do is talk/But seeing you just fucks me up." What's one to do, with a situation like that, but to sit around hopeless, trying to un-stock the refrigerator of whatever beer it's holding in its lightly humming bosom?*Essay originally published April, 2012