When history looks back on ’90s pop and makes its final reckoning, one hopes B*Witched will be but a footnote, a temporary blip struggling for a fingerhold on the lowest rung of the Spice-ladder. Current indications, however, purport that they will not be so easily forgotten. History is less likely to ask who they were, than to assess the damage they wrought. For B*Witched are not just a banal, harmless outlet for the pocket money of our nation’s five-year-olds. B*Witched are poisonous.
The fact that they are responsible for the propagation and dissemination of unspeakable fashion offences is the least of their evils. They are clumsily choreographed. They have failed to heed the ban on the use of banjos and fiddles in popular music. And, as ‘Awake And Breathe’ so ineloquently demonstrates, they are just plain sinister.
This is B*Witched‘s second album – the time-tested proving ground for increased maturity and songwriting talent. Bereft of any ideas of their own, however, B*Witched have identified formulas that work for other acts and, like cultural succubi, filched them. So they ‘do’ Alanis Morissette on ‘If It Don’t Fit’, Sheryl Crow on ‘Red Indian Girl’, Britney Spears on ‘The Shy One’, Madonna on ‘Leaves’. Yet even these somewhat feeble templates are so dumbed-down they are an insult to their young audience. Sample lyric: “Don’t wear that shirt ‘cos you know it drives me insane/I go for colours and you go for plain…”
In this light, the title ‘Awake And Breathe’ takes on [I]Invasion Of The Body Snatchers[/I] connotations. One imagines B*Witched as glassy-eyed synthetic replicants roaming a musical wasteland, sucking the life out of all that is passionate, honest, creative and vital. Diabolical and dangerous. 0/10 is far too kind.