WENCH! – Be Tame
You shouldn’t expect rock n’ roll to do anything on your behalf, but you should be politely surprised when it does. Unlike the hippies or the punk generation, modern musicians feel as much need to use their platform to shine a light on important issues as tech gurus, athletes and the people who come when you need someone to fix the plumbing. This sort of behaviour would disgust WENCH!
Ask them why they simply don’t care about these sorts of things, and they’ll tell you that it’s not in the job description. They’ll tell that it’s everyone for themselves.
Such gestures, first of all, involve taking great risks. The Beatles may have gambled on their careers by insisting that segregation at early U.S. shows be banned, but why should anyone learn anything from them? The only time you hear Chris Martin or Bono make political statements these days is when they’ve been pre-authorised by every company financing their big tours.
WENCH! aren’t afraid of losing the contract or alienating business partners. Quite the contrary. The group’s punk-rock manifesto, “Be Tame”, is meant to stir up conversation, preferably about difficult topics that are typically ignored in polite conversation. The music’s rousing, but do we still need this kind of music? Are you kidding? There’s a hint of “you never had any rights to begin with” hanging in the air and smelling particularly putrid in what you’d expect should be the most developed countries in the world. Sadly, we need bands like WENCH! More than ever.
San Mitch – Bird
Of course, big brands across the world are dying to work with the top pop artists of the day. These famous entertainers do half of the brands’ job for them. They do, it primarily, because pop songs always tell you how to feel and what to do about it. Mystery isn’t a requirement in pop songs, but, typically, an impediment, a missed opportunity to sell emotional real estate.
However, bands like San Mitch view these standards as much too restrictive. They’re part of the alternative bands that work with mystery and the undecipherable. These are groups where the audience is allowed to fit into the creative process. They’re artists that, sure, want to manipulate the way you feel, but won’t force you to think in any particular way about it.
San Mitch’s “Bird” feels like, somehow, walking by mistake into an amusement park ride and not having enough time to walk yourself out. It’s music that spins around your head at varying speeds, zooming past and stopping surprisingly. Is it fun? Is it terror-inducing? That’s something that can only be decided by the one strapped in the chair. The image that Romania’s San Mitch loads this up, buzz past your eyelids mercilessly, and those synth patterns pull you in like quicksand.
Laughing, crying, or screaming are all perfectly natural reactions and all up to you. But it’s in that unpredictability that lies the greatness of this kind of music and its lack of potential in ever getting used by giant brands to hypnotise masses into following fit-all calls-to-action.
