You know, it’s one of my few many weaknesses, but like any weakness, it’s rooted in pleasure, however dubious. People sometimes ask why I feature video-game-style chiptuning artists with such gleeful abandon on ANBAD, and the simple answer is that I can’t help it.

Plenty of listeners don’t get this kind of music – they think it all sounds the same, or that it is too basic and punctuated, or that it is simply reductive. And to an extent, these are the exact reasons why I like music such as Tristram Burfield‘s.

At least that’s what I thought.…

This week’s news has been fluffed and plumped into a tasty political paella thanks to Wikileak’s genuinely brave and diligent exposure of what has really been happening in Afghanistan.

We asked the boffins at Wikileaks to run their beady eyes over the ANBAD Donkey, the stubbornly airborne totem that has always aroused suspicions here at ANBAD towers.

Some devilishly complicated compu-prying behind the scenes found this shocking evidence [left]. Dubya was behind him all along. Truly astonishing developments.

Sigh. MIXTAPE:

FIRST! Bravestation are easily confusable, at first glance, with UK soft-core sleaze TV channel Babestation. For clarification, there…

Oh come on. Sometimes, a band presents you with an opportunity that makes writing this stuff just too easy. It’s almost embarrassing.

When  band provides you with this much ammunition, the exercise becomes not finding things to write about, but an agonising flurry of cuts as the article is snipped down to an acceptable size.

The source of all these trimmed and scattered superlatives? Well, Lenin Was A Zombie, of course. Yep – that’s right. Read it again and scratch your head in wonder that no-one has pulled that name out of the hat before. Perhaps its because anyone…

You wait, you hope, and then it appears. Sometimes it feels as though there’s a gap – a hollow – an absence – and waiting for the jigsaw piece to fall back into place is the hardest part.

Bern and The Brights were there when I needed them most. Isn’t it strange how music can do that? How did they know?

The whys, wheres and hows are unimportant – I needed that certain lift, a deft yank from the fug billowing around my mind. Right on cue, Bern and The Brights sidled up, slipped a dainty arm around my shoulders…

Islet are a new band. That much is obvious. Less obvious is the route they took before emergence, which is suddenly, strangely radical. And they don’t even know they’re doing it.

I know you’re out there
I know you’re gone
You can’t say that’s fair
Can’t you be wrong?

-Dinosaur Jr., Out There, 1993

Islet are a band who have done it differently without even trying, and the story is not so much a breath of fresh air as a huge, Mistral-sized gust of clean, sweet change.

There was a…

Sometimes I wonder why bands even bother.

I look at my bulging inbox, filled with suggestions of new bands, and I wonder this, because it’s almost impossible to conceive how any band can be heard through the white noise of ten thousand new, hungry bands all playing their buzz-saw guitars at once.

And then a band comes along that makes me realise: “Ah – that’s why.” The thought pings into my subconscious as one band peeks stridently through the weeds like a stubborn dandelion.

Bands do it because the rewards are so great – the feeling that you and your…