Blog: A New Band A Day!

There's something odd about Today's New Band, Play People, that has proven difficult to quite pin down. They sound so surprisingly polished and confident for a virtually unknown band that I wondered initially if I'd missed a class in the Rock 'n' Pop 101 course that I took all those years ago, and they had just passed me by. Their songs shine and glisten. Oh What A Life is weary and reflective, yet chimes and rings lushly throughout. Just Don't [...]

Sometimes a band's influences are obvious - not necessarily in terms of sounding like other artists, but the ideas their brains keep returning to as a starting point when making music. Paul McCartney's songs always hark back to a music-hall rumbustiousness, The Clash's angry buzz, in keeping with punk's Year Zero ethic, is brimming with 50's rock 'n' roll tricks, and Johnny Borrell clearly grew up in a locked windowless room with only Boomhouse Rats LPs for company. Other bands influences are not so clear. Today's New Band, Doctor My Eyes [...]

Women often get left behind in rock 'n' roll bands. Usually relegated to the status of either doe-eyed 'n' slutty hanger-on or occasionally bunged the token role of bassist (because it's 'easy' and 'not as strenuous as drumming') , women are severely underrepresented , with only the fearsome Courtney Love a household name. I suppose one of the joys of hearing a woman-centric band is that, at a very basic level, they are simply a break from the masculine norm. As a male listener, it's a happy change to hear [...]

Cities shape bands. Listen to Manchester's Happy Mondays, and the influence of a city dragging itself up from dereliction on a cloud of E-fuelled excitement is clear. The La's jangly indie sea-shanties have Liverpool's mucky fingerprints all over them. The Clash were born from both the racial tension and collaboration of late 70's London. Today's New Band are another child of their home city. The King Blues are a rare example of a band that aren't happy to grind out the same-old songs, but [...]

So, it's a Summer Bank Holiday today in the UK, and as such, we're once again spending the day inside, avoiding the rain, and watching The World at War to cheer us up. So, no new band today. But normal service will resume tomorrow, of course. If you're desperate for a new band fix, try the ANBAD Archives , in case there's some you might have missed. There's bucket - loads of the damn things. Happy Holidays!

Mixing things together is one of those childlike pleasures that never leaves us as we're drawn, inexorably, towards adulthood. Presented with a table of food, what child doesn't think, "I wonder what happens if I stir that gravy into that ketchup/mashed potatoes/custard and then taste it?" It seems like only a whole load of good can come from dedicated investigating like this. The truth is somewhat harder to swallow, literally and metophorically, and surely the real reason for the glut of knuckle-chewingly idiotic 'mash-ups' that polluted the internet a while ago. [...]

There's a short documentary knocking about the internet about the making of Public Enemy' s astonishing It Takes A Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back . In it, one of the Bomb Squad production team explains that when recording the album, they wanted to bring the noise to the fore, to disorientate and shock the audience. "The Noise", he explained, wasn't just some half hearted hip-hop shout-out to be "Brought", like the song Bring the Noise might suggest, but was a whole alluring entity to itself: every single noise coming at you [...]

Another Liverpool band? This is getting silly. A New Band A Day has been littered with them recently, with Indica Ritual and My Amiga most recently using all their Scouse powers of persuasion on us. And look, here comes another one, with stereotypically jaunty tunes, and melodies coming out of their eyeballs. When will these bands learn that if you want to be a rock star these days, it's not about having good songs, but about being photographed falling out of nightclubs, getting shabby on crack [...]

What room is there in today's ZAP-POW society for calmness? If you've not achieved exactly what you wanted by yesterday, you've failed. We rush forward frenetically, and the music we listen to while doing it reflects the ultra-economic, all-surface-no-feeling, instant-impact world around it. Stopping and reflecting is for WIMPS! It turns out that this might not be so smart. Anxiety reigns supreme and worry is pushed at everyone, from everyone. Relaxing and observing might have benefits after all. Today's New Band is the Danish septuplet Efterklang , and, if [...]

GIMMICKS! Here at A New Band A Day , we love them - to the point that we aren't afraid of using cheap, near-moronic devices ourselves in an attempt to crowbar some variety into our shallow lives. Anything like that in the world of rock 'n' pop is worth a go, I suppose, and if it works and raises the profile of a good band, all the better. So: Today's New Band, The Very Most , are giving away a free custom song with every purchase of their new album until the [...]

It's a truncated post today on A New Band A Day , due to the A.N.B.A.D. 'editorial team' travelling all over the place on a well-deserved* break, which will hopefully involve multiple BBQ s on a beach. Though, as the aforementioned beach is on the north coast of Wales, it's more likely to be a weekend of staying inside to avoid the rain, drinking warm cans of lager whilst gazing longingly at the beach outside, and dying a bit inside. So, cutting to the chase and letting the [...]

So after frothing at the mouth a bit yesterday over Band Of The Day Indica Ritual, here's hoping for something a little less mentalistic and more soothing today. And that's exactly what Today's New Band, Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, are. In many ways, Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin are perfect A New Band A Day fodder - in so much that they fulfil all these precise and extensive A.N.B.A.D. criteria: a) The band has great tunes; and, for [...]

I had one of those iPod mental tics this morning. You'll recognise the problem - wandering along, scrolling through the albums, but none of them that scram up the screen seem to be the one that's just right for that exact moment in time. This morning I knew that I needed a sound that was just so, something that was fast, hard and upbeat but that wasn't gabba or screamcore. Something like a cross between early-90's period Prodigy and, I dunno, The Fall. One of those kind of moods. Funnily [...]

When I was a young 'un, before I bought a guitar and sat in my bedroom mangling Smiths songs and wondering if I could convince my parents to let me paint my bedroom walls black, i used to while hours away playing on my Sinclair ZX Spectrum . It had sticky rubber keys, 48k of memory and the games took five minutes to load off a C90 tape. It was my nerd-baby though, and I'm still proud that I completed Magicland Dizzy without losing a life. These halcyon days were tarnished a bit though, when my friend [...]

Posturing and rock go hand-in-hand. This self-awareness often results in musical bombast partnered with hollow and blustering lyrics. After a while, some bands only seek to consolidate their public image, their music becoming a tick-box exercises in retreading the inevitable. It's partly this laziness that gives new bands an allure - music made by people who don't have personal masseurs (yet). Today's New Band are The Molotovs, and their songs are thick with weary recognition of life's frustrations. They don't pose or worry about their appearance as they're too busy [...]

When I recently went to see My Bloody Valentine , the general consensus as we staggered out of the venue, wiping the blood from our ears, was that it was entirely unlike any other gig we'd ever been to. There was no moshing, no singing along and no middle-aged men standing near the back 'appreciating' the band, just a room full of shell-shocked gawpers struggling to comprehend the savage softness of the noise that was comically blowing their hair backwards and flapping their collars around. The other universally agreed point was [...]

I have a friend who runs a sweetshop, called Kandy Pop , in Manchester. She spends all day selling all the best sweets from your childhood - Dolly Mixtures, Fried Eggs, Flying Saucers - that kind of thing. It's the cutest, most sugary place on the planet, and to compound the outright sweetness of the experience, she plays cute punky music all day long. If you manage to leave the shop without looking or feeling like you've been dunked in sucrose, then you, sir, are a stronger man than I. [...]

I sometimes feel sorry for bands. Not that sorry, what with all the booze, girls and urinating up against the Alamo that they manage to find time to do, but a bit sorry all the same. It must be tough to keep touring material that you love, only to find that either a) it doesn't fit in with the majority's taste; or b) they come under pressure to make it more in fitting with the mainstream. Some bands then choose the "We-do-what-we-do-and-if-anyon e-else-likes-it-that's-a-bonus " route and plough on regardless, whilst others let their record company lead [...]

Ah, July. You just whoooooshed by again in a blur of ice cream vans, newly-released schoolkids scuffing knees and day after day of relentless staring at the cloudy sky, screaming profanities at Baby Jesus, whilst waiting for a ray - just one single ray - of sunshine. Fortunately for those of you who are trapped in a similar tupperware-skied hell, July was a BRILLIANT! month on A New Band A Day , positively overflowing with bands so good that the Vitamin B your should have got from the sun was absorbed through your earholes instead. [...]

A New Band A Day is, apparently, indulging in Americanophilia at the moment. Over half of last week's super-duper new bands were from the USA (scroll down for more, pop-pickers!), and guess what - today there's another one cluttering up your ears with sweet sounds. An astute reader can draw a few conclusions from this. Firstly, that A.N.B.A.D . band choices are entirely arbitrary and dependant on the whim of an easily bored writer, desperately looking for new things to listen to, whilst quietly sobbing. Secondly, A.N.B.A.D. 's geographic [...]