Despite their band name—Typecast is never a stereotype except if one thinks and associates it with a very famous rock band like The Sex Pistols or Greenday, then that would be alright because the first time I got to encounter their music, I thought it was from some popular punk band from America or perhaps, Australia. And that should be a compliment.
Music critics often lauded local bands such as Hale and Cueshe to be so foreign-sounding, in a positive tone. Usually it was entirely virtuous to propel high originality in the local music scene like for example in that of The Dawn and The Eraserheads, two bands that had navigated success so well while being so Filipino in musicianship. To be so well-rooted into the nativeland’s culture is one good element for every Filipino rock band most especially.
However, in another sense of virtousity is the desire to be world-class and by this, to sound just like every successful band flying high in the international scene. For by the way, un-American bands like INXS and Coldplay was able to embrace global stardom by sounding so well like the standard rock stuff that are so patronized in America at their respective times. So why not a Filipino band to be sounding just like any other famous American rock band and be famous for it so well? Who could blame Typecast for being that?
Typecast is to me the local rock band that could might as well be the one to be described so aptly as so foreign-sounding that it becomes entirely a compliment. Like hey, “I didn’t know “Will You Ever Learn” is a song by a local band. It sounded so good I thought a foreign band sang it”.
Being foreign-sounding is not only the sole virtue of this great new Filipino band; Typecast exudes great musicianship and inflects enormous confidence; with an attitude that states out loud how they are in the scene not merely for fame and fortune but are here to rock and shake the local music scene, to wake up and instill an unknown virtue in musicality, to bring local rock music towards another level.
Typecast has great attitude and lots and lots of confidence in their music. Spunky and brave, they are.
Watch this well-made music video of Typecast’s “Will You Ever Learn“.
Note: I have reservations however about their photo take (with a semi-naked woman in the middle) in the cover of PULP magazine. I don’t subscribe to this form of imagery, I must be clear. I hope as a band they would skirt away from such outlandishness. It would be just unideal.
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