Another week, another brief missive from the Great ANBAD New Band Pile That Threatens To Topple At Any Moment And Kill Us All. Whilst stationed in Brooklyn, I've been missing most of the breathless reporting on what mildly-degrading actions Official ANBAD Mascot Alex James is undertaking this week. Thus please accept another endearing image of our favourite bassist from the stockpile that has steadily built up. MIXTAPE: FIRST! Front and, indeed centre on this week's mixtape is the gloriously be-monikered Hooded Fang , who have spliced together kaleidoscopic (is [...]
As if to demonstrate how ANBAD is nowhere near as wildly varied as it likes to think it is, here's another rumbling, grit-pop song with buzzy chord changes and punchy chorusus, less than 24 hours after the last one . Of course, this is solely the fault of my sloppy scheduling, and has no bearing at all on The Quiet Americans ' strikingly fuzzy oeuvre. Be Alone could have been stymied by its own ambition to be crunch-rock, but rails admirably against the [...]
Having just experienced my first Superbowl, I can exclusively confirm exactly three important facts about the performer of this year's half-time show, the weirdly pillow-faced Madonna . Firstly, her music still leaves me as cold as a polar bear's lollipop: a career that no amount of tedious forced controversy can redeem. Secondly, her composition is now 70% sinew, 20% gristle and a remarkable 10% human; and thirdly, when your biggest gig in years is upstaged by not only a bored-looking MIA but also a man bouncing up and down on a rope, it might [...]
For better or worse, I discover most of my new bands via the internet, not live gigs. A lot of people would tell you that this is counter-intuitive, but then a lot of people also buy Nickleback records, so feel free to treat their remarks with as much or little contempt as you like. However, I'll never deny that lurking around in the recesses of a murky venue is a great way to discover ace new bands. (It's also a great way to watch, as I did recently, a terminally average band spend 45 [...]
A curtailed Midweek Mixtape this week, due to the fact that living out of a rucksack is not conducive to the Peak Music Bloggery™ that we have all come to expect/long for on ANBAD. So, this week features less poking fun at Blur bassists, and more moving quickly on to the new bands. Oh, OK then, there's still room for a picture of Alex James looking foolish. MIXTAPE: FIRST! You'd kind-of hope Hernia were a gut-bustin' Sludge/Doom Metal band, [...]
Remember when electronic musicians had overwhelmingly simple artist names? Plaid, AFX, LFO: all of them kept it simple, stupid. Now exhausted of the mono-syllabic monikers, artists are having to dig deeper. This doesn't mean that Holobeams and Broken Machines have bad name, it's just that we all know that if they'd existed in 1994, they would have been callewd simply Beam . No matter: songs like Ground Frost (or to give it its mid-902s name, Frost ) will slip quietly and effortlessly into your collection of skitteringly rigid, pumellingly soft dance [...]
As birthdays begin to whistle by, and the realisation that you'll soon be halfway through slowly dawns, people begin to say inappropriate things to you, as if shifting their own mortality-panic onto someone else is either beneficial or kind. And yet, continue they do, pointing out how a lot of people are younger than us these days, and have you noticed how the Younger Generation are inferior to us in some ill-defined way. None of this is true: The Kids, as we already know, Are Alright. And the kid du jour , Dream [...]
Well. It's taken me a week to pull my brain out of a jet-lag fug, but finally I've managed to find a Brooklyn-based band, and semi-justify my presence in New York. OK, so Happy Lives were pretty much the very first local band I stumbled upon, but I'm going to chalk this one up to serendipity. That's because Happy Lives are a great band (aren't they all? ), replete with songs filled with the kind of sounds that reach out of the speaker and shake you warmly by the throat. [...]
It's my birthday today, and I'm going to have to dream up a whole new excuse to explain away my age. Though, as Einstein would tell you, having recently completed a trans-Atlantic flight, I am, in effect, slightly younger than I would have been if I'd stayed in the UK. This may be a hard concept to fully grasp, so Blur's Alex James demonstrates the molten fluidity of time in the only way he knows. MIXTAPE: FIRST! Le Parody is at pains to explain that [...]
Not to harp on about band names again or anything, but hasn't Olly Gale done himself a favour by releasing music under the moniker Blue Boats as opposed to the name on his driver's license? I mean, not that there's anything wrong with the name his parents chose, but - and I don't wish to be mean, Olly - it's more befitting of someone doing something more normal with their life than recording songs drenched in echo, lust and wonder. A song like The Fear has all these characteristics, and [...]
Over the past couple of days, ANBAD has thrown all its possessions, including the incredibly weighty and seemingly less-important-with-each-passi ng-day CD collection, into a garage and headed over to New York for a few months. This in itself is exciting for all sorts of reasons; but will chiefly allow plenty of opportunities to fully take advantage of NYC's thriving, bustling new band scene and showcase plenty of New Yorkian talent. (We could call it A New (York) Band A Day , or something. I'll get back to you on that one.) Anyway, [...]
Oh Alex James from Blur. Alex, Alex James. From Blur. You once blew a million pounds on Champagne . You were once the bassist in the brightest, breeziest Britpop band of all. Then you made cheese. This is fine. I like cheese. My sister met you, and said you "smelt of cheese from three feet away," which just enamoured you to her even more. Now you hang with right-wing dolts at dull music festivals , make processed cheese for a KMART-owned company and write articles praising McDonalds for a [...]
Once again, a mere band name influences ANBAD's choice of featured artist. And once again, this ludicrous intuition serves ANBAD well: welcome Wet Nuns , a band whose very nature makes the niggling question, " I wonder if I've featured these guys before?" entirely superfluous - as if a name like that would be quickly forgotten. The one element of Wet Nun 's persona I couldn't grasp from their name alone was the type of music they made. And then I listened, and slapped my forehead: of course [...]
Sometimes people ask me "where music is going next." These are people labouring under the misapprehension that I, as a music blogger, have my "finger" on the "pulse", when actually, nothing could be much further from the truth. Regular readers know that ANBAD is not good at predicting and riding new waves of genrefied interest. Today's new band, The Drum , are probably hoisted high on a wave of their own creation however, and so for once maybe ANBAD is near the front of the curve. Or not. You choose. [...]
***This is a Sponsored Post *** Remember last time I asked you to check your pop calendar? It was just before Christmas , and you'll fondly remember how we all marvelled at the fact that not only was 2012 close, but how the BRIT Awards 2012 were also agonisingly within our collective grasp. Well guess what? The UK's annual musical blowout is now within spitting distance, arriving on February 21st. Not that you'd want to expectorate anywhere near it of course; what [...]
There's a certain theatricality subliminally associated with rock 'n' roll. We all want the garish outfits, the ludicrous behaviour, the out-there posturing: witness The Darkness ' unexpected - but entirely understandable -rise to fame a few years ago. It's just that most of us now hide that desire under the guise of being "cool'. Cool doesn't want silly hats, or outlandishness, or fun: it wants a bunch of weedy music snobs in leather jackets glaring at us from under their ruffled hair. Felix Hagan understands [...]
Now that the ANBAD Midweek Mixtape is merely a conduit for another picture of Alex James pouring molten cheese onto something, the pressure is well and truly on. Sometimes it's a struggle to find a suitable, current, timely cheese victim. And sometimes, Justin Bieber dresses up like Gary Glitter , and it all seems just a bit too easy. Thanks Justin. And so, on with the first Mixtape of 2012. FIRST ! Since being named Britain's Best New Band by, er, ANBAD this time two years ago , Egyptian [...]
For the last few days, ANBAD's internet connection has been madly spluttering like a Daily Mail reader at a Gay Pride parade. Thus this post nearly didn't get online at all, even in this wildly curtailed form. This is fortunate, because Sick Friend are the kind of band you want to discover sooner rather than later. There haven't been many Canadian bands on ANBAD of late - not because Canada is lacking in good new bands (it's positively teeming with them) - but because, well, them's the breaks sometimes. [...]
Yesterday I visited BBC Radio Manchester, at the impressively futuristic Media City UK in Salford (which, when lit up at night looks just like a spaceport), to tip some bands for the coming year. The show goes out on Sunday night, so I can't tell you which bands I staked my flimsy reputation on yet, but needless to say it was a uniquely stressful half-hour - not only because I was suggesting who might 'make it', but also because I was asked to comment on the state of the modern music scene, and where it was [...]
Yesterday brought us a crash course in new-band marketing ; today presents simplicity: a band with songs online to play to you. Wait, here's the first problem: Burning Building 's songs aren't simple at all. They're complex, leaping from one idea to another, styles and genres akimbo. And yet, they're easily accessible to even the most unadventurous of ears. This, of course, is the band's chief achievement. Is Knowing/Not Knowing a heavy rock chug, a clattering post-rock cacophony, a math-rock pitter-patter, or all of the above? Should we even care? [...]
A New Band A Day!
My Funny Valentines
Download: James Blake Live Album (Unofficial)
Lana Del Rey - Without You (Kill Paris Remix) [Dubstep]
Miike Snow - “Paddling Out” Jacques Lu Cont Remix (MP3 Stream)
Iron & Wine and Patty Griffin
