Mitch, Please are a four piece pop punk band from Brisbane, Australia, who released their debut EP titled The Bin Collection earlier this month. With cats on the EP’s artwork and a band name as good as theirs, I was already a fan of Mitch, Please before I hit play… Thankfully, I still liked them after listening as well!
The Bin Collection opens with Temporary Punks and the line ‘Oh hey there punk’ (seemingly) welcomes us into the EP. Mitch, Please proceed to sing about how some, typically ‘old school’, punks can judge others in the scene to not be punk enough because they don’t dress or act a certain way or, in this case, deem them to be merely temporary punks. Of course, this is stupid and punk is so much more than the cliché image of old. Temporary Punks is a mid-tempo pop punk tune with some super catchy harmonies of ‘Temporary, I’m so temporary’ in the chorus that I can instantly imagine singing along to in a live music setting. Rubbish is up next and the pace and overall heaviness is immediately ramped up with an almost metal-like opening guitar riff. When the vocals come in, they are a lot more aggressive and hardcore in style than I was expecting from the previous track. This increased anger certainly makes sense with the lyrics of the song however – ‘I have never needed your approval, You think you validate me? So you’re the ones to cut me out now, Good fucking riddance, You’re fucking rubbish.’ Rubbish is about feeling better off without someone in your life and realising that you don’t need their praise or acceptance because, quite frankly, they are a rubbish person. Cola Drunk Polly is a 12 second interlude of sorts that features a heavy repetitive guitar riff, pounding drums and three words – ‘Cola drunk Polly.’
The fourth song, Neighbourhood Cat, has got to my favourite song on The Bin Collection. A fast paced tune that sits somewhere between the poppier pop punk of Temporary Punks and the more hardcore style of Rubbish, this song is about when you keep seeing the same cat everyday on your street but the cat hasn’t, as yet, decided that it wants to be your friend despite how much you want to win it over. I’ll be honest, I can relate to this song a lot. The intense repetition of ‘Why won’t you rub your face on me?’ is both infectiously catchy and amusing, although then it got me thinking that if you didn’t know this song was about a cat these are quite worrying lyrics. Perhaps that’s the point. If the cat wants to be your friend, it will be. The penultimate song is Polygon Pit and this is perhaps the song that is most reflective of the ‘nerd punk’ label that the band have given themselves. Polygon Pit is about a variety of different shaped mosh pits – but not a circle pit, because where’s the fun in that? As you might imagine for a song about mosh pits, this song is on the more aggressive end of the Mitch, Please musical scale. I particularly enjoyed the friendly voice that introduces the song, after the opening verse, with ‘This is a polygon pit and I am your professor of aggressive geometry’ which is quite a contrast to the song itself. It’s all a lot of fun, that’s for sure. What We Do closes the EP by slowing things down a notch. It definitely pulls back on the aggression that’s been on display in the last couple of tracks as Mitch, Please deliver a more straightforward mid-tempo pop punk song. The chorus is a bit of a tongue twister – ‘When you watch me watch you, Say what you do, say what you do, When you watch me watch you, Do what you do, say what you do’ – but the addition of some whoa-ohs in the background make it enticing to join in one way or another. Whereas Rubbish was about excluding someone from your life, What We Do seems to be about accepting someone’s apology and giving them a second chance. It’s certainly nice to finish the EP on a positive note.
The Bin Collection is an excellent debut EP and I would highly recommend checking it out if you like your punk music to be fun and/or not really too serious. I can’t wait to see what Mitch, Please do next.
You can stream and download The Bin Collection on Bandcamp and like Mitch, Please on Facebook.
This review was written by Emma Prew.
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