For many years now, music that comes, to use a conventional term, ‘from the source’, whether urban or rural, has done everything to distance itself from its own roots. Dressed up like a shop dummy, kidnapped by ideology, it was emptied of all life and reduced to the status of a fading sepia photograph that helped tired hearts to continue beating, too often in a faraway place or in a foreign country. But for this music to rebecome the cultural pearl it once was, it needed no more than to have its energy and wisdom restored, to be placed in capable hands, and played with unaffected joy. On their latest record, Tęgie Chłopy provide ample proof not only that this must come to pass, but that, in fact, they have succeeded in making it happen.
Wojciech Waglewski