***See below for the EXCITING CONCLUSION of GLIB COMPARISON WEEK - the gimmick that wouldn't die***

So, we're finally at the end of a great week on A New Band A Day, and to round it off, here's a band that will extinguish any lingering lethargy from your withered, useless bodies. That is unless you are a footballer's wife, in which case looking withered and being useless is all part of the job description, along with painting your skin with creosote and wearing the vilest, gaudiest clothes that frankly, have probably been invented as a joke by a blind tailor who lights his cigars with your £50 notes. Actually, if any footballer's wives are actually mentally capable of reading this, please let me know so I can contact the Guinness Book Of Records.

So, you've already probably noticed that Today's New Band is called AIDS Wolf. That's right, AIDS Wolf. Just slosh it around your mouth slowly, then suck some bubbles of air through it and really savour the name. AIDS Wolf. AIDS Wolf. I could just keep repeating the name over and over again for the rest of this post and, frankly, it would be enough. However, let's be fair - their music is ace. If you like fuzzing noises, half-terrified screaming and what may be the sound of a drummer being murdered as he's still playing, you'll love AIDS Wolf. If you're not sure whether you love those things or not, you must listen to their song Bethlehem Embargo Crystal immediately so that you can form a considered opinion. Then listen to Letter to Al Johnson, and wallow in the sound of the noise that The Terminator probably heard as he was lowered into the molten metal at the end of Terminator 2: Judgement Day.

Fry your brain, repeatedly, and listen to their noise-mentalism at their MySpace page!

TODAY'S (FINAL) GLIB COMPARISON: Bunnies playing in a field made of delicious soft fudge, cutely nudging bubbles of champagne to each other. Not really, they sound like a Wolf with freaking AIDS, for God's sake.

Labels: Glib comparisons week, NOISE, SATAN

Know a great band that should be on A New Band A Day? Email us or visit our MySpace page and tell us all about them!
Subscribe to A.N.B.A.D. by Email and receive it in your inbox every day!

***GLIB COMPARISON WEEK CONTINUES BELOW, FACILE-FANS**

So again, after reeling from the glut of greatness in today's previous post, which rounds up the best bands this month on ANBAD, we again take a delve back into our pockets to see what new great bands lurk within. (And to make that mangled mixed-metaphor-analogy work, try imagining we're wearing big clown trousers, filled with every band in the world. I think I'm digging myself further in a hole here.) And today's New Band is yet another nail in the Johnny Halliday-shaped coffin for people who think that French music stinks.

It's been a bumper year for French music however you look at it - and I prefer to look mainly at Sebastian Tellier's brilliant entry to this year's Eurovision Song Contest, a song that shouldn't have only won, but was so universally wonderful that it should have been put into those birthday cards that play a song when they're opened. So, yes, today's New Band is French, and are called The Whiffs - a name which virtually guaranteed them a place on A New Band A Day the moment the words hit my retina.

The Whiffs write songs which are slight, gentle and snappy, and whilst they stick with the tried-and-tested format of guitars 'n' drums, there's a lovely Gallic, non-mainstream influence seeping through the verses. Conned in Adelade is catchy, simple and the sound of two people having fun. Fun is a quality all too sadly missing in a lot of music, and choose to follow the ironic 'FUN' (Hi, The Tings Tings) or determinedly sullen (Hi, every band wearing purple and black stripy cut-off socks on their arms) route instead. Let's face it, if you're called The Whiffs, you can't take yourself too seriously. Listen to their tunes here, and forget your troubles.

TODAY'S GLIB BAND-COMPARISON: Like if someone had stolen the early Dandy Warhol's fuzzboxes, Valium and skinny T-Shirts and enrolled them on a Cognitive Behavioural Therapy Happiness Programme.

Labels: French, Glib comparisons week, simple sounds

Know a great band that should be on A New Band A Day? Email us or visit our MySpace page and tell us all about them!
Subscribe to A.N.B.A.D. by Email and receive it in your inbox every day!

Frankly, it was a minor miracle that any new bands got written about during June. A New Band A Day towers was massively preoccupied with Euro 2008, and thus was very busy with the important tasks of watching football all day, drinking beer to accompany the football and filling in the wallchart so that we would know exactly how hard France were tanking.

Still, confounding expectations is always fun, and what actually happened was the most exciting month on A.N.B.A.D..... EVER! Great new bands slopped out of our bucket almost non-stop, and here's a round up of the great and the good:

Q Without U were an early bright light, and we said this:

"Q Without U meld super-tuneful guitar rock with whizzy synths into punchy pop songs"

and we were right. Following soon after was the great ERRORS, and:

" If we were mildly cretinous, we'd make a poor joke about how there is nothing erroneous about their music, because it's fantastic."

But we didn't, 'cos we're dead clever, like. Then, during an ill-though-out "Roadtrip" gimmick, we got all excited about Envelopes, who are really, really ace, and from Sweden. Or Paris. we weren't totally sure. But, we said that:

"Their fabulous song Sister In Love somehow straddles the late 80's and early 90's, whilst luckily missing Shoegaze altogether - no mean feat."

And guess what, they almost were BAND OF THE MONTH, but were just pipped at the post by the mind-bogglingly good Paul Hawkins and Thee Awkward Silences. We raved like idiots at their song The Battle Is Over, gushing maniacally:

"Make no mistake, this is the best song you'll have heard for a long, long time - since, frankly, All the Rage by the Royal We. If you only listen to one new song this week, it should be this one - it's truly, brilliantly, wonderfully fantastic. Song of the year so far, easily."

Mmmm, nice to see we kept our 'calm-and-detached' integrity there. So well done, Paul Hawkins et al, BAND OF THE MONTH. Anyway, check all of these bands out, because they're the creme de la creme of a really good bunch. Bring on July!

Labels: Round Up

Know a great band that should be on A New Band A Day? Email us or visit our MySpace page and tell us all about them!
Subscribe to A.N.B.A.D. by Email and receive it in your inbox every day!

One accusation that I sometimes hear levelled at the truly incredible Boards Of Canada is that they've found a 'sound', and just ground out three albums' worth of songs that are all slight variations on a theme. There is probably an element of truthiness in this, but frankly, fans of BoC don't care. They just want MORE, because even assuming that BoC are a one-trick pony, it's such a wonderful trick, complaining just sounds silly.

But what would BoC sound like, if, you know, they shuffled things up a bit? Well, maybe somewhere close to Today's New Band, 747Music. Hailing from Ontario, 747Music is a self-confessed BoC nut, as an initial listen to his music will confirm. The love of softly and harshly deformed analogue-y sounds are all there as well as the samples of voices, and the tasty beats. But his work is no mere copying exercise - Untitled is a rolling, crunchy electric behemoth and Electric Epiphony is 10 times harder and faster than anything BoC have ever done, punching forward until it falls to bits. The songs are short, lilting and worm their way into your mind, and in some ways, they're mini-epics - a series of mental day trips, if you will. Worth a listen, without doubt - so do so here!

Today's Glib Comparison: Well, yes. Boards Of Canada having sex with The BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Whilst, inevitably, The Pixies watch, silently.

Labels: bleeps, Glib comparisons week, satisfyingly short

Know a great band that should be on A New Band A Day? Email us or visit our MySpace page and tell us all about them!
Subscribe to A.N.B.A.D. by Email and receive it in your inbox every day!

Weirdness is an underrated virtue in pop 'n' rock music, and for understandable reasons. It's too often, rightly, associated with acts who use a veneer of 'kooky' as an execrable cover-up for lack of talent - take a bow, Babylon Zoo. However, if these awful aberrations can be forgotten, weirdness is a Good Thing - if only as in indicator of deliberate step away from convention. Anyone with a pair of ears and a skull that isn't used as spare storage space for semi-ironic glow-sticks, back-combed hair and slogan T-shirts knows that the bands who tow the line and trudge the well-worn skinny-jeans-and-aimless-posturing path rarely innovate.

What really sets the pulse racing and induces involuntary grins of deee-lite is that moment when you hear something new, something that sounds enough like everything else to be bearable, and far removed enough from exactly the same things to be exciting, surprising and, well, new. If you don't quite follow, Today's New Band, Paul Hawkins & Thee Awkward Silences, are a good place to start. There are a number of antecedents that his music could be favourably compared to (see the super exciting SECOND INSTALLMENT of today's GLIB COMPARISON GIMMICK for more details), and yet his grouchy, slightly deranged vocals and frankly tremendous tunes are something that are enticingly sparkly and new.

In The Evil Thoughts, he chunters through a scenario about a woman who is shunning him, and the result is, indeed, slightly sinister - "And even though I'm nice to your face, the evil thoughts form in my brain." An even better track, though, is The Battle Is Over, a similarly half-crazy, all-wonderful story of a man returning home from war to find his woman telling him that, whilst he, "went away to play soldiers with your friends/I had to rely on other men". The female vocals are sung by the fabulously voiced Candythief. Make no mistake, this is the best song you'll have heard for a long, long time - since, frankly, All the Rage by the Royal We. If you only listen to one new song this week, it should be this one - it's truly, brilliantly, wonderfully fantastic. Song of the year so far, easily. Listen to it, and the others, here, now, or you'll regret it, young 'un!

TODAY'S GLIB COMPARISON: Like Nick Cave having a drunken brawl with a theoretical newly-acoustic-folk-change-of-direction Pop Will Eat Itself, whilst Shane McGowan watches, caressing his knuckle duster. And the Pixies. Again.

Labels: actual brilliance, deranged, Glib comparisons week

Know a great band that should be on A New Band A Day? Email us or visit our MySpace page and tell us all about them!
Subscribe to A.N.B.A.D. by Email and receive it in your inbox every day!

After the RIP-ROARING SUCCESS of the lazy comparisons undertaken whilst reviewing last Thursday's Band Of The Day, Monster Island, I took a long, deliberate ponder during the 25-minute 'Holocaust' brain-destroyer section at the end of the My Bloody Valentine gig on Saturday. Just before their mind-bogglingly loud replication of the sound of 20 jet planes all taking off at once, then crashing one by one into a volcano caused my soul to leak out of my ears, it occurred to me to continue this easy reviewing style for one week only, and brand it Glib Comparison Week. So expect this week's dazzlingly good array of new bands to be wholeheartedly sullied by an increasingly stupid method of review.

Moronic, bowel-looseningly-loud-noise-induced decisions aside, this week's first New Band Of The Day is really rather special. They're from London - but isn't everyone? - and are called William. Like James, The Smiths, and, er, The Johnsons out of Antony and the Johnsons, they're following in the noble tradition of having a band name that's also a person's name. It's a mystery as to which William they're named after, though I'd hazard a guess that it's more likely to be this one than the tabloid-friendly Prince. William, frankly, sound great, with punchy melodies and half-yelped, half-casually drawled lyrics. South of the Border is urgent and a bit weary at the same time, and Five Minute Wonder is even better, picking up pace as it rattles along, churning guitars not able to mask a lackadaisical cry of "I spend too much time on my own...You do too? Well, alright."

Their songs are a huge stride ahead of the mundane identikit rock that's polluting CD players worldwide at the moment. Listen to their great songs here, and catch them live in the next month - but only after you've been overwhelmed by the half-baked lump of lazy reviewing below:

TODAY'S GLIB COMPARISON: "A bit like the Pixies slowdancing suggestively with the White Stripes as Art Brut play non-po-faced Jam covers."

Labels: chunky, Glib comparisons week, yelping

Know a great band that should be on A New Band A Day? Email us or visit our MySpace page and tell us all about them!
Subscribe to A.N.B.A.D. by Email and receive it in your inbox every day!

It's Glastonbury Festival this weekend, and for the first time in about 6 years, your intrepid ANBAD troupers aren't going. Why? Well, forget all the at-best-idiotic, at-worst-racist fuss about Jay-Z headlining. The real problem with Glastonbury 'these days' are the awful Pete Docherty and Peaches Geldof-wannabes clogging it up with their pristine hair and designer wellies.

Unfortunately, it's no longer a wonderful brain-altering weekend in the countryside, but is now a tourist experience for Gap-Yearers to tick off their moronic 'Must Do Before I'm 30' list. I saw a number of girls straightening their hair with heated tongs last year, shortly after witnessing a queue of people waiting to waste gallons of water to wash the mud off their wellies. Before stepping straight back into the mud again. At a music festival who turns over millions of pounds to Water Aid. This idiocy must stop. At least nature is kicking back by raining on them continuously.

Glastonbury has never been about the big bands for me - in fact, it's rarely about the music at all, and more about 'finding yourself' by buying unusually healthy-looking weed cakes from a topless hippy woman and then staring at the sky whilst curled up in a giant bird's nest in the Green Fields. That said, the most enjoyable experiences at Glastonbury for me have been stumbling on an unknown band in one of the many tiny stages scattered all over the site.

So, with that in mind, today's new band is up to you! Have your own virtual staggering-around-at-2-in-the-morning festival experience. Start here, and wander around Myspace until you trip over a band you like. It'll be like Glastonbury, but warm, dry and with hardcore pornography a click away. And if you have their misfortune to meet a Kate Moss/Russell Brand wannabe, you can click on a new page to get rid of them, as opposed to suffocating them with a clod of earth as I had to do last year.

Labels: Pick 'n' Mix, ROAD TRIP, wandering minds

Know a great band that should be on A New Band A Day? Email us or visit our MySpace page and tell us all about them!
Subscribe to A.N.B.A.D. by Email and receive it in your inbox every day!

One of the really hard things to resist when reviewing bands is to draw comparisons between them and other, more established, bands. On one hand, it gives the reader an instant point of reference, but on the other, it does neither party any favours. No band sounds exactly like another (apart from Razorlight, who seem to have cribbed the Boomtown Rats' sound wholesale). But when a band comes along that sounds like a combination of three great bands - let's say, The Fall, Pavement and The Pixies - wouldn't it just be more stupid not to mention the fact?

Thought so. Thus, let's start by stating right now that Today's New Band, Monster Island, sounds like a ragged combination of The Fall, Pavement and The Pixies. This sounds like a grand boast, but it's true. To mention The Fall is a bit of a given - Monster Island are an off-beat indie band from Manchester, and therefore it's virtually a legal obligation to mention Mark E. Smith's grumpy lot. But it's fair, this time, as in songs like Hothouse, there's the same sparse, threatening griminess that pervades the best Fall records. See Twin Towns too for a Pavement-y lollop and and the Pixies' patented loud 'n' quiet dynamics are oozing out all over too.

Beyond glib comparisons, there was one moment when listening to Monster Island's songs that actually delighted me. Yup, actual, tangible delight, bordering on glee, a feeling which made my wizened, blackened heart start to flutter. Throughout their chuntering (and free-to-download) song They Never Sleep, the music is occasionally interpolated with screeching sounds of tapes rewinding, bleeping and electronic interference. Deliberate or not, it's a fabulous, pointless detail which screams of lethargic, understated, inventiveness. Brilliant.

So that's my justification for taking the easy comparative route to describing them. Listen for yourself here, on their Myspace page.

Labels: 90's, lo-fi, wandering minds

Know a great band that should be on A New Band A Day? Email us or visit our MySpace page and tell us all about them!
Subscribe to A.N.B.A.D. by Email and receive it in your inbox every day!

Brevity, as anyone who has sat through the full-length version of Lynyrd Skynyrd's Freebird will testify, can be merciful. I've had power naps shorter than Freebird. Freebird is so long that you could boil three eggs, one after another, whilst listening to it. You could boil two of them during the guitar solo. If you did this at a Lynyrd Skynyrd gig, by the end of the song, you'd have enough hard-boiled eggs to throw one at each band member - which is useful, and eco-friendly.

Today's New Band, Grandmaster Gareth, however, could play a bare minimum of 10 songs during the same amount of time. Grandmaster Gareth, you see, specialises in one-minute long songs. He calls them, suitably enough, 'Minute Melodies'. Remarkably, although each song is only 60-ish seconds long, each seems fully formed as a song, with snippets of stories, super tunes and a fearsome sense of fun will invade your ears. Most of the melodies in his songs are so super-duper that many a musician would expand them into a full song. Not Gareth, though, who has realised that short 'n' sweet means that the songs are always regarded as tasty morsels - musical tapas, if you will.

Listen to all of the songs on his Myspace page - go on, it'll only take 6 minutes - and chuckle with glee at the wall-to-wall diversity of his musical treats. Dr. Dre's imagined tussles with the mundanity of life pop up as a reoccurring theme in his songs, with Dr Dre Gets Complacent only rivalled by Dr. Dre Buys A Pint Of Milk for true every-day Gangsta status. Organs, brass, computer noise samples, old clips from films and TV shows are all tossed into the mix and out pops a mini fairground meisterwerk each time. Grandmaster Gareth: touched by musical genius - but only for a minute. Listen to his songs here!

Labels: dr. dre, Pick 'n' Mix, satisfyingly short

Know a great band that should be on A New Band A Day? Email us or visit our MySpace page and tell us all about them!
Subscribe to A.N.B.A.D. by Email and receive it in your inbox every day!

Sometimes, overblown rock is just what you need. I rediscovered a huge bundle of CDs the other day, and amongst them was the Manic Street Preachers' half-good, half-poodle-rock debut LP, Generation Terrorists, an album I hadn't listened to for years. It's a pleasant Über-slick chug through a weird combo of late-80's RAWK and the punky aesthetic that they later became better known for. That said, super-smooth rock grates after a while, and unless you own a pickup and live in Arkensas or Texas, I imagine that the slick radio-friendly stylings of Nickelback at al are as far away from your stereo as is humanly possible too.

An antidote to slick RAWK is Today's New Band, Computerization, fresh from a bedroom in New York. Cobbled together from synths and bleeps, his songs are cheap 'n' cheerful - literally, in fact. He has a brilliant service where for a meagre $9 you can order your own song, to your specifications - subject matter, tempo, instruments etc - and he'll make it and mail it to you. The songs that he makes for himself, like Go Back, with its lovely chorus, and 1Point14Me, a slow, scattered pop song, are the sound of an abandoned computer singing to you from a skip - vocodered, slight and a bit world-weary.

It's all very simple, basic and rough and ready, and like his super-slick antipodal counterpart Generation Terrorists, you might not want to hear a whole album of it. But so what? Pop music is about short, creative bursts of happiness and with Computerization's songs, that's just what you get. Listen to his songs here, and apply for your own custom song here!

Labels: human-computer hybrid, lo-fi, slightly mournful

Know a great band that should be on A New Band A Day? Email us or visit our MySpace page and tell us all about them!
Subscribe to A.N.B.A.D. by Email and receive it in your inbox every day!

You've had a busy weekend haven't you? I know you have. All weekends are busy. You head home after a week at work, intent of some R&R, and then remember that you have to do all the jobs you've spent a week ignoring. Then Monday comes around again and exhaustion saps the life out of your body before the grind has even started. Such is life.

So if that's left you in the mood to reach for the bleach and Ribena for easy mixin', you'll love* today's new band, Bleak Black Branches, who, by the sound of their chosen name, don't spend their pocket money on fizzy sweets and Hello Kitty merchandise. Whatever their state of mind - and there's no saying that an absence of E-numbers and mentalist Japanese toys is the sign of a sound intellect - the music they produce is perfect if you need calming on a nerve-jangling Monday morning. In fact, it might even be the sound for Monday night-time too, as If Tired Sleep is the humming, gurgling sound of the blood slurping around your ears as you fall asleep. Circular Cause and Consequence is, comparatively, frighteningly upbeat - circular, looping and organic.

The songs mostly fade in, drift by and seep out of your mind again a few minutes later. It's all a bit 1977-David-Bowie-Brian-Eno-side-two-of-Low, introspective, cold and yet warm. This is a good thing. Listen to Bleak Black Branches at their MySpace page here. Excitingly, all the songs are available to download from here.

*"be condemned into an even tighter circle of introspection by"

Labels: I am calm, slightly mournful, Welsh

Know a great band that should be on A New Band A Day? Email us or visit our MySpace page and tell us all about them!
Subscribe to A.N.B.A.D. by Email and receive it in your inbox every day!

That's right folks, this week's borderline-awful ROADTRIP! gimmick is drawing to a close. And yet, for all its conceptual craptitude, we've dug up a lot of ace bands so far on our virtually-drunken, imaginarily-debauched trundle around Northern Europe. Sweden's Envelopes, Norway's Hiawata! and Poland's MR BEEP have provided us with a ADHD-fat-kid-in-an-ice-cream-parlour sample of Upper-Euro music, and brilliant it all has been too.

Thus, before we head back to Cyber-Calais (Yes, this is getting tedious now), for the ferry, we've stopped in France for one final hurrah, and look who's Today's New Band - it's Facteur! Now, as the observant of you ANBAD readers will readily acknowledge, if there's one thing we hate to regularly do, it's to recycle old musings and pass them off as new. So, without further ado - just what is it that makes French dance music so awesome? We may never know - it's certainly not the legacy of Johnny Hallyday - but Facteur aren't concerned, and certainly aren't hanging around to find out, as they're too busy thrashing wildly around the room, losing themselves in their ridiculously thumping songs.

Pick any of the songs - any - on their Myspace page, and you'll be yearning for the dancefloor instantly. If you can't imagine yourself going chicken oriental in a nightclub to their frighteningly CHOON-tatsic remix of Asshole by Giko, you may have exhausted your brain's supply of serotonin, in which case, call a priest and wait calmly for death. It's Friday night. Go nuts and dance in your bedroom to his brilliant tunes, and worry about how daft you look afterwards. You deserve it.

Labels: CHOOOON, French, stupidly bangin'

Know a great band that should be on A New Band A Day? Email us or visit our MySpace page and tell us all about them!
Subscribe to A.N.B.A.D. by Email and receive it in your inbox every day!

It seems that we're taking a virtual road trip around Northern Europe this week on A New Band A Day. A road trip, that is, without the casual sex, drunken debauchery and gradually itchier genitalia of a real one. Yesterday, we had Poland's wonderfully er, beepy, MISTER BEEP, and prior to that it was the turn of Sweden's brilliantly-chorussed Envelopes. So, taking a swift detour to Norway seems a perfectly reasonable turn of events, assuming you can afford to pay the exorbitant beer prices.

And, to continue a tortuous theoretical-journey-theme, joining us in Oslo is Today's New Band, Hiawata! They're a part Teenage Fanclub, part Belle and Sebastian, and all-super. Listen to their Song, Animal, and bask in the lovely ringing guitars and harmonised choruses. Then, when you're done swooning in delight, cower in fear as they threaten to "make you forget everything that you said, cos I'll love you like an animal", which is disturbingly close in intent to W.A.S.P.'s ludicrous hit, Animal (Fuck Like A Beast).

Their other songs follow a similarly endearing jangly-guitar template, which is a good thing. It's funny when music from outside a country's 'scene' creeps in, insidiously - there's a hint of the tabloid-loving skinny-jeaned brigade's sound in some songs - but it always gets distilled through another country's musical sensibilities, and in Hiawata!'s case, it works like a charm. Have a butcher's at their summery sounds here!

Labels: Jaunty, ROAD TRIP, sex

Know a great band that should be on A New Band A Day? Email us or visit our MySpace page and tell us all about them!
Subscribe to A.N.B.A.D. by Email and receive it in your inbox every day!

Just as the Emo scene attracts people who like to wear black, cut outrageously stupid fringes and look identical to one another, and the Nu-Rave scene attracts 15 year olds who want a legitimate reason to dance to Scooter, the Chiptune set attracts people who are A) Nerds and B) Musicians. This is an unusual combo - mathematically-minded musicians are hard to come by - you don't hear Thom Yorke yapping about logarithms. Actually, that's probably a bad example, but you get my point. Nevertheless, the Chiptune scene is a monster on the Tubular Interwebs, and we have lavished much praise on it's luminaries such as PixelH8 before.

Much of the enjoyment of chip music can rely heavily on nostalgic memories of late 80's video games, though occasionally people like PixelH8 transcend those boundaries. However, just because Today's New Band, MISTER BEEP, produces music which sounds like it really could be from an 80's ZX Sinclair Spectrum game (because it has, kind of), doesn't mean the music is like listening to someone on the bus play all of their polyphonic ringtones to their 'bezzie mate'.

MISTER BEEP's music sounds great, at least to my ears - the ears of someone who spent much of their youth trying to complete Switchblade and Fantasy Island Dizzy on their ZX Speccy. Like how Orbital produce music that sounds like the soundtrack to a film never produced, MISTER BEEP's sounds like the tune that would have accompanied Chase HQ 3, had it ever been made. Those of you who used to revel in the excitement of spending 10 minutes waiting for the screeching loading noise for Operation Wolf to finish will find Who's That Robot and Escape From 16-Bit Land leaving them joyously happy. Perhaps that's the point of the chiptune: nostalgia through new (old) music. Pleasure through rubber keyboards. Mmm, sexy.

Listen to his ZX-tastic tunes here!

Labels: bleeps, nostalgia, ZX 48K Spectrum

Know a great band that should be on A New Band A Day? Email us or visit our MySpace page and tell us all about them!
Subscribe to A.N.B.A.D. by Email and receive it in your inbox every day!

I watched a BBC4 documentary about Britpop the other day. It'll be on Youtube if you look for it. There's loads of documentaries about Britpop, possibly because it was such a recent popular period in music, and possibly because it's all very simple to explain: UK bands get bored by grunge, look back to the 60's, make great songs, get coke bloat and collapse in on themselves.

However, it ended with One Very Important Thought: that trailblazing Britpop wonders like Suede, Blur and Pulp ultimately didn't affect music much at all - the bands that traded in inane, emotion-lite songs with huge, soft choruses, like Oasis and the Verve have spawned the similar big bands of today - I'm waggling my finger at you, Coldplay and Snow Patrol.

The point is that the early 90's were a fertile time for actually new, interesting music, before giving way back to cruddy average music. And so when I listened to Today's New Band, Sweden's Envelopes, I immediately thought of the early 90's. Possibly because their fabulous song Sister In Love somehow straddles the late 80's and early 90's, whilst luckily missing Shoegaze altogether - no mean feat. "Is your sister in love?" chants the chorus, joyously pinging from person to person in the party, kissing each on the cheek.

The chorus is so much fun, they don't waste much time on verses and get there as soon as possible, and Freejazz, similarly, is a big, fun-tastic romp through a delirous chorus. Party even is as cheeky enough to interpolate some of Bonnie Tyler's Total Eclipse of the Heart, and guess what - it works. Brilliant. If only all music could stop and deviate from here. Listen to their great songs right here!

Labels: 80's/90's, actual brilliance, chorus-mageddon

Know a great band that should be on A New Band A Day? Email us or visit our MySpace page and tell us all about them!
Subscribe to A.N.B.A.D. by Email and receive it in your inbox every day!