>
My friend Martin is also a friend of The Lines, a rather good band from the unfashionable West Midlands. A disproportionate number of Britain’s bands come from the West Midlands (Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath to name two), partly, I always assume, because being in a band is a good way to get out of there.

Martin recently joined the band on a road trip to play in a festival in Austria, and got to say things like, “I’m with the band,” to girls, pester Jarvis Cocker backstage and live like a rock star. He told me a number of stories that would scare your mother, all of which featured heavy drinking and an enjoyable lack of morals, cleanliness and social etiquette.

Such is the life of a hard-working rock band. I often wonder whether the characteristics of any given band is related to their behind-the-scenes behaviour. If this is true, then I worry for Today’s New Band, Run DMT, whose schizophrenic music is a jumble of wired creativity.

Run DMT don’t take music to bits as much as crazily stomp all over it. Songs like the pun-gasmically named Tequila Mockingbird are so newborn and rough that they sound as if they have been streamed directly from their creator’s mind. Though hardly consisting of any more than sound of a drumkit falling down the stairs, it is fascinating, wild and skewed.

Dramatics Mix (Fuck) is an Aphex twin B-side slowed down to a tenth of its normal speed, groaning, squealing and plucking tortuously, and then rebirthing itself over and over. Let It Load is a wild banjo shoot-out, and the title of the song Mad Weed, a slow, blindingly bright chill-shimmer, might hint to the source of such invention.

Run DMT are daring, imaginative and downright bizarre. Their songs sound like they were born after some sort of perverse musical DNA-splicing experiments, or if your iPod could separate individual sounds from a million songs and then shuffle-play ten of them at once. Listen – it’ll be an exhilarating brush with real creativity.

**Note: A worthy, wierd recipient of an ANBAD ‘Actual Brilliance’ tag.**