Hell, it always sounds like such a jerk-off moment of clarity or conviction when someone comments about embracing the day, tell the people you love that you love them because you might never get another chance and just loudly voicing some obviousness about needing to make every day count because there are no guarantees. Yeah, yeah, yeah, got it. Life's short and shit. Pretty easy to figure that out. What's more confounding and what deserves more recognition are the disappearances. These are the people and places and feelings - those that were relied upon as givens - that fade inauspiciously from sight without your knowing it, or even with that sense of acknowledgment, only without any real emotion, or an appreciation for what it actually means.
When The Whigs lead singer Parker Gispert sings, "It used to be right in front of you, but now it's gone," on the song, "Dying," we're treated to a portrait of a death that was only sort of a death. There was a heart that had become lethargic. It needed help or it was just going to move along. The person would still be living and the person on the supposed receiving end of the heart would be less so. It's no matter though, because from the sound of it, this was a foregone conclusion and there was nothing that could be done. This was just going to be another one of those life things that put another fishing weight in the bottom of our stomachs, just to rest there and to weigh us down as they rust with us.
The band from Nashville, Tennessee, which consists of Gispert, drummer Julian Dorio and bassist Timothy Deaux, marks these occasions only occasionally, fittingly enough. Rather, they normally try to have a mechanism plugged in to deflect such nasty realities. They'd rather just spout off and say, "I don't care what your old man thinks of me/Cause I don't care/I'm already young," just so that they can go about their business, the way that they want to, minimizes the amount of pushback that could ever get through the crowd. They like to breathe the hot air and they like to release just as much of it back into the atmosphere for others to take in, often adding a considerable number of extra degrees to the temperature.
*Essay originally published September, 2012