Since music festivals became part of the summer social scene, and started to get crowbarred into mobile phone companies' TV ads as part of yeah-we're-down-with-the-kids campaigns, and become an item to tick off a tedious bucket list , the way they are reviewed has had to change too. Before, you could get away with simply writing about the bands . The parameters are different now - it's about the experience, yeah? As such, this article is about the festival itself - reports on the music will arrive tomorrow . [...]
ANBAD is still enjoying the long, deep sleep that can only be fully appreciated in a normal bed after a few days of camping in a field* at a music festival; thus the written review will follow when consciousness has fully returned. In the meantime - here's a picture gallery of things that flashed before our eyes at Bestival when we were aware enough to be holding a shonky camera that could record it. Fair Warning: there are a lot of pictures of the AWESOME LASERS in the Big Top tent. [...]
Name changes really affect a band, don't they? Just ask Viva Brother (or whatever band they're all in now). Breton - now there's a decent band name, and all the better after their decision to change from BretonLABS , which made them sound like a denim manufacturer . All the same, you're not likely to find them popping up on the Radio 1 A playlist, or lurking on too many iPods , but it's a start. If Massive Attack decided to make indie-films, produce videos [...]
Gosh, Saturday was a whirlwind - almost literally, as gales whooshed through Bestival, blowing off many a novelty wig from the heads of people who dressed up for the rock star-themed day. Sadly the wind did not blue over any of the douchebag minority who used the theme as an entirely un-hilarious opportunity to black up. ANBAD learnt that: *PJ Harvey has the best dressed band in the world, and was uniformly brilliant. *Last Month's Band of the moment, Yuck, are good, although exactly as expected *Primal Scream's Screamadelica works OK live. [...]
Well, Friday at Bestival was fun . Highlights include: *the LASERS at Boys Booze 3am show *the amazing sound on the main stage- loud and clear. Whoa. *The drunk guy who was vomitting and mocking his friends for not being 'hardcore' enough. *The LASERS. Today, ANBAD will bravely explore the site in daylight and report back promptly. Also, Coming soon: some very dark photos. Related posts: YAAKS // Bestival 2011 [...]
Well, the time is nigh, and the ANBAD Posse/Crew/Massive* (*delete as appropriate/bearable) are hoppin' onto the mud-train and are trundling at moderate speed down to Bestival on the Isle Of Wight. Mud awaits. And rain. This is just the usual British festival experience, albeit more bearable, because of a terrific Bestival line-up, with Appropriately Big Names like Bjork, The Cure and Public Enemy nestling snugly alongside a glut of delightful new bands , including Friend of ANBAD, the one-man heavy-heavy house-adelica machine, D/R/U/G/S . You can follow [...]
Here's the final Bestival Preview before the 'ANBAD massive' head off to the delightful mud-stravaganza festival itself tomorrow. After that we'll be live-blogging and tweeting about how the mud isn't stopping us from having a good time, OK? OK - let's cut to the chase. ANBAD is obsessively curious about band names. And NOSAJ THING is an artist name with what is surely his real first name spelt backwards in it and in doing so forms a weak pun. It's [...]
Before today's Bestival-Themed Mixtape, a brief statement: Today, ANBAD is thrilled to announce that it has become the official Alex James' Easy-To-Use-Cheese-Product Fan Club discussion forum. The ANBAD team has long been a huge fans of Alex James' pioneering work in the field of making generic mass-produced cheese into shapes and selling it to kids whilst pulling 'wacky' faces. Lt. Drebin raises a likeness of our hero aloft. And so, the Bestival Mixtape, featuring bands who are going to be entertaining happily muddy punters this weekend - FIRST: [...]
ANBAD is off to the UK's best festival, er... Bestival, this weekend - and here's another new-band preview... Hold it right there, bub. There's something important to relay to you before we get started. Remember Blur ? Remember when you wore your button-collared Ben Sherman shirt, sipping lager without irony, singing tunlessly along to Country House ? Remember how you thought, "Well, these bouncy basslines are just lovely , but what the bassist needs to do is produces a range of novelty cheeses?" Well, sigh no more, [...]
With the truculent ascendency of bands like Yuck, suddenly good old-fashioned Lo-Fi is a valid and admired musical art form again. Yuck's pleasantly crunchy and malformed rock is Lo-Fi in its traditional form, albeit one with a little more PR push than I'd imagine Pavement had at this stage in their careers. But Lo-Fi doesn't hold exactly the same meaning now. As an indicator of how "lo-fi" has come to encompass a lot more than the grainy sounds of some thoughtfully-awkward men wearing padded shirts and holding guitars covered in stickers, take a listen to [...]
Part two of ANBAD's Bestival preview features YAAKS .. . Intriguingly, Bestival's organizers haven't announced the set list times yet. Ostensibly to allow for last-minute scheduling changes, cynics might point to the potential dent in sales of the official Bestival Apps that an A4 print-out would make. Whatever. Who needs a schedule anyway? Wandering aimlessly at a festival as fun as Bestival is its chief pleasure. Discovering bands by sound alone is a rare enough event as it is, and to do so where there's a high chance that [...]
ANBAD is having sleepless nights in anticipation of attending the UK's most brilliantly realised festival, Bestival , in a week and a half -whence the ANBAD 'posse' will have yet more sleepless nights due to the amazing line-up and by camping next door to some drugged-up loons who won't stop laughing at 5am . ANBAD is, of course, the UK's primary 360-degree, full turn-key New Music Sourcing Solution, and over the next week, we'll be showcasing a few of the new bands [...]
Looking backwards - in terms of musical creativity at least - is both the essence and the enemy of song-writing. Almost nothing else can provoke such rapid leaps in the evolution of a song, and yet, of course, this is the double-edged sword that results in both M83 and Nickleback . Rifling through old records has also whelped forth the music of Magicks , though you may rest easy in the knowledge that Jason Magicks has used the past to craft a wonderfully enveloping maelstrom of sound. [...]
Now, I'm no expert - as regular readers are painfully aware - but even I can figure out exactly how Petit Fantôme translates into English. Let's indulge my obsession with band names for a moment (again). Petit Fantôme is an example of a band name dovetailing snugly with an artist's particular sound - and in Yallah we are presented with a song that is both translucently ghostlike and cutely diminutive. There are a whole host of ways for synth-burbling songs to fail; the chief danger being that the songs [...]
Waters do not seem have anything to do with Roger Waters, or even John Waters. But if they have, they hide it very well - with both prog noodling and movies with poop-eating transvestites being conspicuous by their absence in Waters' hittish, trash-garage pop song For The One . Of all the hyperbolic adjectives bandied around on ANBAD like confetti at an earthquake-stricken wedding, "crunchy" is surely my most lazily over-used. What music today, in the midst of a laptop compression free-for-all, isn't crunchy? But For The [...]
Memotone is defiantly an artist . You can tell. His songs are the archetypal male-alone-in -a-room-with-lots-of-electroni c-boxes music, and his website has lots of videos of him performing such rituals. His music is life, animated. Take Fractal : a quiet cacophany of clicks, found sounds and clips of everyday noises - spinning a coin, picking up some keys - all suddenly take on a huge importance when exposed to the punishing glare of a song that is as sparse as it is brightly lit. What is most [...]
The content of ANBAD is, of course, almost wholly dictated by world events. While Libya has crumbled, hope and joy have sprung eternal - and who better to expound such life-affirming virtues than a 56 year old human man who thinks he's Peter Pan ? Lt. Drebin is examining the evidence to determine if Randy will, in fact, ever grow up. Probably a good time for a mixtape: FIRST! SEAMS uses samples of a woman playing the hang outside a market hall he shops at. I [...]
There's something undeniably appealing about two-piece rock bands. It's the limitations, of course. There's always an innate admiration that two people can tease enough variety out of the smattering of instruments that their limbs can accommodate, and partly because such an arrangement almost always results in music that is unequivocally primal in its make-up. So can you guess what Ghetto Ghetto sound like? You'd be close, of course - as Ghetto Ghetto are a two-piece rock band, and thus fulfil the criteria outlined above. They're from Melbourne, are called appropriately basic rock names [...]
The hardest part about painting someone's portrait is not trying to attain a perfect likeness of the sitter - it's knowing when to stop adding more paint. It turns out that The Modus Torn broached the same issue, albeit with sound, not something squeezed out of a tube. Suddenly has an entirely ill-fitting title - slowly uncoiling mumbled sounds from a different time, a different place. There's something half-finished or half-missing about this track, and this vagueness is not a flaw - [...]
Vaudeville pop is tough . One mis-step and you sound like a tedious Edinburgh Fringe comedy troupe - the kind that does Clash songs in the style of Gilbert and Sullivan. When it's done right - as in the case of Friends Of ANBAD, Louis Barabbas and the Bedlam Six - it's entirely enticing: simply because, deep down in every human heart, lies a desire for debauched theatricality. I will understand if Says She's Ms. Blat are offended by being lumped into the Debauched Vaudeville camp, but it fits. The band also [...]
A New Band A Day!
Princesse - Tell Me | MP3
Prince – Controversy (Mighty Mouse Re-Edit)
Beck - 'I Just Started Hating Some People Today' [Listen]
[LISTEN] Gotye (Passion Pit Remix)
Azealia Banks – ’1991′ & ‘Van Vouge’
