It's nicer when the wine goes down thicker.
It's great when it feels substantial, like for this one night, no one's fucking with us, when they're actually giving it to us straight, when we don't have as much to complain about as we might usually feel like we do. It's nice when it feels like there's a chance for us yet, like we've got just a little hope left in the tank and we're sending that wine down there to warm it up.
Whale Belly, a band from Brooklyn, New York, make us think about the way that the waters that we're swimming in feel. We are forced to consider their depths and their temperatures. We're forced to think about whether or not we've eaten today. Did we eat anything yesterday? Well, there was that coffee and the muffin for breakfast. Do those count? Surely, that's not enough to even register. Ah, whatever. We're not dying. We're sticking around and we just need to sustenance to think about the falls and the dramatic recoveries that we've made or are planning on making very, very shortly.
Singer Todd Bogin, drummer Nick Smeraski, violinist Josh Henderson and bass player Michael Broadlieb make songs that seem as if no one in them is sure of where anything's going to lead. Bogin sings, "I wonder what I'd be if I was raised at a different time/In a different nation, drinking some other kind of religious wine/But I hate what I am now/Raised in a different time/Different time/Well it's odds and ends/Ends and odds/Both the same person just believe in different gods/Mine is cruel/Yours is sly/I know what I hate, but I just don't know why." He suggests that we're "just like the deer, we are just like the grass and the sky," and if that's the way it is, no one's thinking about us. We might make it into the backgrounds of some photographs, but we're going to probably need some more of that thick wine.