Yesterday I was interviewed for BBC Introducing Manchester. Live interviews are fun – talking about yourself is always a pleasant ego-massage – but one question left my mouth flopping hopelessly for answers.
“How do you make sure you don’t write about the same things every day?” is a fair enough question, and after a few agonising seconds of dead air I had to admit that there may be an element of similarity between posts.
By which, of course, I mean that every post is fundamentally identical: 250 words of enthusiastic jabbering about new music. It’s only the bands that change. As a result I’m now acutely aware of the words I type. Was that right? Have I typed that before? Oh God, I’ve become self-aware.
Having either nicked their name from an early 80s slasher movie, or having dreamt it up in a moment of lucid inspiration, New Years Evil tick all of ANBAD’s band-name requirement boxes (see every single post passim).
Shame is a huge splash of monotone black-fuzz/white-noise, a spasmodic frenzy of strobe-light noise arcing all the way from 1991. Speaking, as we were, of self-awareness, here is a band who seem unflustered by thoughts of their own being, choosing instead to simply get their lust for crunchy, blunt and rattling rock onto record before the moment passes.
As a result, Shame is a song that is unencumbered by any process beyond raw excitement and the thrill of it all. Nothing more is necessary, or desired. Brilliant, green, tangible and alive.