Stick your hand down your throat. Keep reaching. Reach until you find what you're looking for. You'll know it when you get there. Now, at the end of this short exercise, there is a dilemma. Do you pull out the thing you have squeezed between your fingers, or do you leave it lie? Surrender, or savor? Strip, or succour? An optimist might persuade you to pop the lid on that can of worms, retch it up like day-old spaghetti, and let it squirm around on the floor like it had a knife in its back. "Better out than in," they might say. Optimists are the great sadists of our age. Human emotions are more than just circus performances for others' ponderance and amusement, and it is a vicious thing that we do when we convince ourselves that we don't need space away from prying eyes to feel. Pronouncements in the manner of potents and protests reverberating up from the internal reliquaries of our soul's meat cage are essential, but there always needs to be room for retreat, a ladder back down the well. Baltimore's Natural Velvet appears to grant themselves such a balance of courtesies on their Cruel Optimism, pulling the listener to the precipice of porous confessions, hanging them over the ledge, but never lowering them in or granting gravity its due- forcing one to eternally weigh the awful unknowing, a cold curiosity in regard to how far one might fall before bedrock absorbed their momentum. Songs like "Guarantee" come up from these hidden fathoms like a forceful Southern wind, warm and bitter, while "Signifier (Desire)" inverts the trajectory, beginning by floating above your plane of perception, as if suspended by the surface tension of a phantom body of water, before progressively sinking as the weight of revelations mount and a cloudy maelstrom of feedback, shrouding a gracefully torrent of severe guitar grooves, rises to envelop vertical descent. Pushy, guarded theatrics and long-fused incendiaries dot "Data Trail" like landmines waiting to miraculously dig you a memorial sinkhole, while "Swan" lifts off from a treacherous terrain and into the night sky, like a woman whose bargain with a nymph has finally paid with interest, bestowing her with a libratory uplift in which she sheds the burden of gravity and the dictates of others, as if such limitations were water droplets spilling off the tips of long, slotter feathers. Those slimy bits inside of all of us need a good airing out from time to time, but like a bushel of thorny blossom sprouting from a neglected section of plumping, there is no telling how deep the roots go, or if you'd even survive the hundreds of puncture wounds you'd acquire in any vain attempt to find out. Only an optimist would be so cruel as to convince one to uproot such a splendid and dangerous thing.
