A few weeks ago, ANBAD posted two quasi-incendiary articles voicing concern with the music industry’s overwhelming focus on the Live Gig Experience, and the resultant negative effects on recorded music:

[The Trouble With Live Gigs, Part One]

[The Trouble With Live Gigs, Part Two]

The articles stirred up broad and vociferous responses. Peter Marinari, a musician who runs the excellent, long-running Philadelphia music blog Crushing Krisis, replied with a passionate defence of live gigs and their impact:

I agree with the two articles, to a point. I’m with you on the false…

The act of band naming is a wade through the mire that, befittingly, makes either no difference or all the difference in the world to the band in question.

We all know that the competition for Worst Named Band is fiercely fought between Puddle Of Mud and Nickleback, both of whom managed to scrape the barrel stencilled ‘Utterly Facetious’ in their bids for the prize.

The recent craze for punctuation in band names – see Los Campesinos!, Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly. etc – is, sadly, an ongoing phenomenon, for which !!! are probably to blame, though at least it…

Remember when Radiohead were just a classic rock band?

No, I’d forgotten too – but there it was, plain as day, when The Bends shuffled onto my iPod (is using one considered retro yet?). The slick, wide, guitar sound is there. A four-square rock structures all the songs. The lyrics are tangible, comprehensible, forward. It’s classic rock, all right.

The Bends offers no hint of the genre-busting right turn they would take over the course of their next three albums. The Bends‘ big, beautiful rock could just as easily be an album by a band who were about to morph…

Constantly searching for new bands leaves you strangely myopic.

Tunnel vision develops insidiously and subtly, until one day you realise that the only bands who will spark your synapses any more are the most obscure, defiant and truly gauche; the bands for whom melody is a dispensable luxury and strange noise-making is all that counts.

These bands are all well and good – and in fact, they might well be my favourites – but focussing on one small niche of anything is a crime against balance. Too much of anything is a bad thing. (With the exception of peanut butter…

Arrrghh! Couldn’t… resist… today’s… band… because… of… vague… punning…

It’s a sorry state of affairs. I’ll apologise right now. But why even try to put up any defence any more? I’m loud and proud about it now: I just love rubbish puns, and Godzilla Black have a song called Fear of a Flat Planet.

A frankly crummy half-pun, yes, but also one that conjures images of a world made entirely of still-boxed IKEA furniture, with cardboard cut-outs of Chuck D and Terminator X (Flava Flav is already a cardboard cut-out) shouting angrily at all and sundry.

You can tell…

All music recycles the past – it has to in order to generate new ideas, just like any other art form. But it’s safe to say that, within the realms of guitar music at least, this retrospective thievery has become the ends and not the means.

‘So what?’, you might say. But when bands steal ideas, attitudes or sounds from the past and fail to add their own splash of colour to the mix, then we’re all being short-changed, and the bands become, essentially, tribute acts.

And if I want tribute act, I’ll brave the onslaught of weak puns and …