>Hilariously, there are workmen working directly above where I’m typing this. They are using power tools that resonate with the exact frequency that:

a) makes everything in the room vibrate unpleasantly, including my eyeballs
b) makes the sound you’d expect to hear if you were one of the trees in a Woody Woodpecker cartoon
c) is so deep and resonant that it may cause spontaneous bowel evacuation (I’ll keep you informed about this one)

I always contended that there was no sound that was so awful that some sort of pleasure couldn’t be derived from it if arranged properly. Look at the Drillcore scene and some of Aphex Twin‘s more esoterically ‘difficult’ music for ideas. However, I now realise that I was being wildly optimistic and probably a bit tree-hugging-peace-and-love to boot. There is, it turns out, such thing as irredeemably bad noise, and it’s currently being vibrated into me at about 100 decibels.

The weakening effect of the noise has shaken out a confession: I should have picked up Today’s New Band, Juno, a good twelve months ago. Shocking isn’t it? In an attempt to put a positive spin on such a poor showing, I’m convinced that this is purely because there is so much good new music around at the moment that they just never got through.

Juno should have popped up on my radar almost instantly because of their association with Manda Rin, of Bis fame. She pops up here and there on their songs, puncturing the noise hyperactively and as idiosyncratically as ever.

On Party Music, the lolloping relationship between the guitar and drums reminds me a bit of Happy Mondays, and this can only be a suitably happy comparison to draw. Jet Set Juno is a weirdnik Teen-C/electro-rock squash-up that sounds like it belongs as the theme song to the imaginary TV show featuring the cartoons you used to doodle at the back of French Class at school. These Boys Are Athletes has been rattling around for a year, but it’s still as much of a chant-along futuro-pop monster as it was a year ago, all power chords and carefree bleeping.

It’s always a joy to hear a band that are clearly drawing a huge amount of fun just from being in a band together. Juno are like that. It’s an even bigger joy when the band in question make music that’s just as much fun to listen to as well. Juno are like that too.

Juno‘s songs would go down just as well in an Indie disco as in a roomful of sugar-buzzed 8 year olds. That’s about as happy a recommendation as you’ll get. So check them out here!