>I’ve got to the age where all of your friends start to get married. At the weekend, I’m going to my third one this year. There was supposed to be a fourth, but the bride and groom-to-be got stroppy and split up. Once my initial disappointment at the vanished possibility of a free bar subsided, I was actually quietly pleased. Three weddings in one year is exhausting enough. God knows what it’s like for the bride and groom themselves (and that sentence, I’ve just realised, works both as a rhetorical musing and a statement).

From what I’ve seen this year, weddings are usually 10% for the couple’s benefit and 90% for everyone else’s. You might want to get married whilst wingwalking on a biplane over the Grand Canyon, dressed as Paul and Barry Chuckle, but the hard-earned familial clout of Auntie Mabel and Granny Ethel’s desire for a church wedding with meringue dresses will usually win out.

It makes me wonder if this same dilemma is broached by bands. Sure, most bands at the start just ‘play what we like playing, so if anyone else likes it, that’s a bonus,’ and most of them trot out that banality to the NME with ever-impressive gusto. But some bands must arrive at a point where they start playing to the gallery, or else there would be no explanation for Coldplay‘s transformation from mildly-interesting indie band to world-straddling MOR, AOR behemoth.

I think Today’s New Band, Dada Yakuza, are an example of a band that does both. It has to be for the crowd – music this brilliantly mental can only be designed with a roomful of heaving, sweaty bodies in mind. BUT – their music is so un-selfconscious in its slavish devotion to just getting on the dancefloor that it’s not worried about what other people think.

Perhaps they’ve managed to straddle the divide. Perhaps they don’t even think about it in the first place. Perhaps I’m just trying to read too much into their fabulously BANGIN’ CHOONZ.

With the latter thought in mind, it would be unfair to delve any further into their music, other than to say, it’s wonderfully messy, loud, ridiculous and stupid, in all the best kind of ways. Dada Yakuza are noisy, hard, carefree and intent on having a good time, and if you can find a better way to end the week then don’t click here. But I bet you can’t.