
MAN OF A THOUSAND FACES – Control
When, not if humanity will fall under the complete command of some nefarious forces, things will go through smoothly. Few will make a fuss. Most will say that they saw it coming. And even the ones who will hold the reins over their fellow human beings will end up bored. George Orwell’s predictions were on track with one single exception. People at the top get bored of winning all the time.
In fact, if anyone needs a bit of chaos, it is them. You can’t sell wars with the promise of peace all the time. You can’t make customers believe in great innovations when you tell them you’ve already delivered the best. And you can’t pretend to be defending a just cause when there’s nobody rebelling against it. We may just be cogs in the machine, but that doesn’t mean we should go slowly.
MAN OF A THOUSAND FACES is a band obsessed with the air getting stuffy, with rules getting more vague and with freedom being erased. They haven’t found a way to stop it, but they’ve found a way to react against it that doesn’t seem totally mad. “Control” is a punk-rock protest song, but not a boring, preachy one. Nah, this sounds like a band playing after having emptied the bar and finding out that the planet’s going to blow up in 20 minutes. This band’s holding nothing back, and the song’s memorable enough to withstand this kind of treatment.
Unknown Voidz – Lack Of Everything
The world’s never been a quiet place. There’s always been trouble around. Some of it was organised, like countries starting wars. Some of it was entirely spontaneous like someone jumping over the fence with a rock and crushing their brother’s skull. At most points throughout history, this didn’t even appear to be a big deal. It’s just the way the world is run.
Now that we’re civilised, you have to strain harder to hear the trouble. But you will hear it quickly. You’ll hear it in the traffic, among the people shouting at each other at demonstrations, in the words spoken by politicians.
World ain’t going to change, but we can. I don’t run an agency that deals with statistics, but I bet that the people who manage to take their natural aggression and write songs about it shoot up fewer schools than those who do not have this outlet. I ain’t heard of many painters who rob banks. And poets only do their murders, for the most part, through their words.
Unknown Voidz’s “Lack Of Everything” sounds like the music that might’ve saved someone’s life. This is a damn angry performance. It’s nearly unhinged. You can hear it whenever the singer yells, “for what?” as if hammering a nail. Who benefits? We, as the audience, are the happy recipients of this great performance, and the person who did the songwriter wrong is lucky that this energy was used up in this way.