What with all the excitement about In The City, which is only a week away now, and all the coverage of the forthcoming gigs, a NEW BAND BACKLOG has overwhelmed ANBAD Towers, piling up behind the front door like a post-holiday glut of junk mail. Except, of course, this is the kind of musical junk mail that you don’t shove straight into the recycling.
And after such a monumentally laboured metaphor, lets dive right in. It’s time for a clear-out. The ANBAD Donkey, as you can see, needs help. Mixtape!
FIRST! B& makes fidget house. Don’t worry if you haven’t heard of it – it seems safely localised to Melbourne, Australia. Sub-genre needling aside, fidget house is aptly named and ridiculously banging.
b& Luvs Fidget House by beeampersand
Usually any type of music that throws the kitchen sink into the mix is a cry for creative help – but it seems fairly clear that the normal rules don’t apply with fidget house. The endless tweaking, re-sampling and ADHT approach is not only the entire point, it’s the extent of its intent, which makes fidget house the kind of mentalist house-noise that would drag me to the dancefloor and leave me there for hours. Ace.
SECOND! Ice Black Birds are angular and jangly. So… Jangular? [Note to self – must resist the allure of creating these sub-genres.] Either way, Ice Black Birds have the kind of poise and control over their brilliantly choppy proto-post-pre-punk-art-pop [whoops, done it again…] that virtually none of their peers have. Highly recommended.
THIRD! The Diamond Sea offer an intriguing prospect – they are a band that has spent many years making electronic music and has now returned to ‘old’ instruments, made of wood and strings. So has the electronic mindset created a new twist on the acousto-rock sensibilities? Well, yes, kind of. But mainly, songs like Brand New are just lovely floaty rock. Good stuff.
FOURTH! Tallest Trees are not quite so new, but their spoken word/sung word/bliss-psyche-shuffle-pop is. Hypnotic, forceful, insistent and yet Über-delicate, Tallest Trees are gentle enough to charm, brutal enough to injure. Classy.
FINALLY! Clipd Beaks concern me. It’s just a gut feeling, nothing more. But there’s an unsettling air about them, but whilst I don’t like it, I just can’t bear to divert my gaze. Their songs wheeze with dusty, syphilitic sickness, and an undercurrent of menace is never far away. They’re all the better for it.