One of the many interesting experiences that emerges when listening to the new Daft Punk album is the inner turmoil that takes place: a fight between the part of your brain which recoils in revulsion at the 70′s/80′s soft-rock stylings employed, and the part that just wants to get on and enjoy the great songs.

This dichotomy is the genius of the album – and the enjoyment doesn’t immediately reveal itself because if this. It’s also more enjoyable as a result.

I experienced something fairly similar with Honey Wild – which, I suppose, is wholly to their credit.

I have to confess …

ANBAD, as you know, is committed to bringing you the newest music… from six months ago.

This happens a lot – or rather, every time I have a clear out of my spam folder and find nuggets lurking in there – and this time it was Pagan Moon who had apparently written something innocuous that my over-zealous filters had thrust deep into Spammageddon.

Still, this exercise of sifting through pill-mail and scam-mail is almost always worth it, and Pagan Moon prove to be full of intrigue and teeter on the precipice of absurdity – yet survive through sheer sincerity and forcefulness.…

For a brief, hideous moment, I thought that Dalton were called Dalston, named after the East London hipster enclave, which would have been a sure sign of the End Of Times.

As it turned out, Dalton is actually from another hipster enclave, Brooklyn, but at least they had the good grace not to name themselves Williamsburg.

Even more happily, Dalton makes entirely un-hipster music, too: Breaker is unironic, sun-soaked and glassy.

Breaker is a song with heart and rough edges but a lustre that comes from these very same pushed guitar noises and scrabbly sounds.

There are moments …

It occurred to me yesterday that I’ve been running ANBAD for exactly five years now.

I’m not sure what to celebrate the most: the fact that I managed to stick to the premise of writing (hyperbole) about a new(-ish) band (almost) every (working) day (except weekends and holidays) or the fact that I haven’t gone clinically insane whilst doing it.

A minor landmark moment like this always induces some soul-searching, or at least simple head-scratching.

And five years is a long time online: Myspace was still the main online music resource, hashtags were a minority interest, and The Hype Machine …

Do bands really record demos any more?

While the pop world still demands that each song is shone to a brilliant glint with super-slick studio polish, many small bands are finding that they can record their songs for a pittance in the garage and still get it out to their audience, and even on the radio if they can keep it simple.

Whistlejacket are at pains to point out that Shimmer is a demo (so much so that they popped 10 pairs of {curly brackets} around the song title), which makes me think that maybe they have huge, money-splashing plans …

It’s not often that my jaded ears prick up at a song simply because it’s so downright unusual, but today I’m skipping the preamble and getting right to the chase, because Sturle Dagsland did just that.

The last time this happened, it was Seward who reached through my lugs into my brain, tickled the Parahippocampal gyrus, and ended up as ANBAD’s band of 2012.

And what was so unusual about Seward – their unique application of sound and language into music – is also the devastatingly enthralling trait in Sturle Dagsland’s terrifyingly brief Mokèlé-mbèmbé.

Well. Here’s a unique song.…

Today: changes of heart.

Interesting tweets pinged forth recently from the estimable Ryan Schreiber, the founder/editor of the monstrously influential Pitchfork.

In these tweets, he expressed his change of heart over a slightly damning review of Daft Punk‘s Discovery that he wrote back in 2001.

He gave the album a very average score of 6.4, and criticised, amongst other things the repetitive nature of the lyrics and the fact that no-one had asked for a house-prog-rock hybrid, but now we had one anyway.

And now, this is how he feels about the LP:

…