It's takes a trick and a half not to think about the springtime when listening to Louisiana's GIVERS' debut full-length album, "In Light." We tend to think about watering cans and the sprinkles that they bring. We think about the long, green hose running from the faucet at the side of the yard, packed with a powerful stream of water, ready to bathe some tilled earth or the blades of a begging lawn, ready for some drink and some reflection. We think about the seeds that were lovingly placed into the tiny little crevasses in the dirt, covered over and left down there in their incubating graves, waiting for their birthdays and a hole in their roofs. Without too much trying, we consider all of those soon-to-be-living things that we place underground, keeping our fingers and toes crossed that they'll find their way up to the sun that they aren't aware exists, but they can feel the warmth from it for half of every day. Those seeds then have to wonder about the change that takes places during the overnight hours, when it gets so chilly. They must be so curious, when they first begin to sprout and have more feeling in their extremities than they ever have before.
GIVERS makes us feel like those planted seeds must start feeling. They make us feel the faith that those seeds were placed into the ground with. There's nothing that can be done for any of those seeds, but to give them the very basic things that time has taught us they will need to poke themselves out of the soil and amount to anything that can be recognized as fruit, or grain or vegetable. It's the same thing with people. It's that blind faith that anyone knows what they're doing to get from Point A to Point B, with most of us learning rather quickly that points C-through-Z are all mixed up and often fall there in-between our shoving off pier and our true destination. There's a lot of growing, a lot of reading, a lot of failing, a lot of drowning and suffocating, a lot of seeking that has to come before anyone ever gets to a place where they feel that they're amounting to anything that could bear any figurative fruit.
GIVERS music is full of that life blood, of that heavy pulp that comes from the wringing out of the insides, of getting into those spaces where the muscles are tougher. It bellows CARPE DIEM, as if Tiffany Lamson, Taylor Guarisco, Kirby Campbell, Josh LeBlanc and Kick Stephan were are tattooed with the word over and over, forced to look at those nine letters, arranged as they are, and ruminate about the meaning of the phrase and what they're doing about it on a daily basis - the full embodiment of the phrase. You can hear it all over "In Light," that need to wake up, shake out the lethargy and just get to it. It's about stretching the limbs out as far as they can possibly go and living, goddamn it. Lamson and Guarisco sing, at one point on the record, "Don't get stuck in the meantime/There's no such thing as the meantime." It all means the same thing. It may as well just say, "Live, goddamn it," and it may as well double back on itself and trail off, out and to the distance, the gleaming of a smile and the purest of manmade exhaustions left behind.