I usually need no extra incentive to listen to another chunk of Swedish lo-fi guitar pop.

Listening to a new Scandinavian band is like taking part in a lucky dip where the prizes are hidden amongst other prizes. It’s surprisingly hard to go wrong.

Swedish jangle-pop is about as close to a sure bet as you get in the world of new bands. They’re almost universally exciting, quirky or dreamy. Sometimes they’re all three.

Kudos is reserved for Petter Seander, who successfully gilded the lily by not only providing the requisite slice of blissfully skewed scuzzy pop, but by giving away …

I had a conversation with someone recently that touched on that well-worn topic of Music These Days, Hey?

To cut a long story short (these kinds of conversations are always long, especially when they take place in a pub), we came to the conclusion that we’re entering the most thrilling period in music creation in memory.

This entirely spurious claim was based on the rise of technology that has finally allowed the people who always wanted to create music – but never had the time, money or nerve – to actually make it.

A whole section of society can now simply flip open a …

Sampling is not so much a lost art as it is one that has been shoved brutally aside by the twin ravages of mindless litigation and the mutually shrivelled attention span.

Why bother spending ages digging around for great sound snippets to sample and crowbar into a new song if you’ll get sued until the pips squeak, or if it’s easier to simply download a curated pack of pre-assembled sounds, make a generic Dubstep record, and still have time to brag about it on Facebook?

Records like the ones made by Monster Rally – yet another superb release from the …

I’m going to a music college today to talk to students about How To Promote Yourself To Music Blogs. No, I’m not sure why they didn’t ask someone more suitable either.

I was fairly certain that this talk was going to take up a lot less than its allotted time, as the advice could be boiled down to ‘make sure you have three great songs’, and then I realised I was simply kidding myself.

Because, as my regular reader will know (Hi, Dad!), if there’s one other thing that guarantees attention – on this blog at least – it’s a band name that …

Just how hard is it to create something that sounds new today? That’s not a rhetorical question, by the way, but – hey – it’s not entirely serious either.

With the weight of 60-odd years of pop music pressing heavily on the shoulders of new bands, it’s no wonder they usually reach into the recent past and replicate the sounds of bands that have gone before them.

The few bands that strive to do that little bit more – the ones who lightly skip past the window of opportunity marked “Oh, Just Make It Sound A Bit Like Mumford And …

Upstarts, hey? They’re everywhere. You know you’re getting older when Policemen and fey Indie bands start looking younger.

Look at this photograph of Dignan Porch. How does that make you feel? Are they your contemporaries, or are you looking at yourself ten, twenty years ago?

What of they sounded like the bands from back then too? What if they sounded like a beautiful, goose-down soft, blissful version of the Jesus and Mary Chain?

Dignan Porch‘s songs are delicate, organic and exquisite, like eggshells, or complex arithmetic, or dust floating in a shaft of light. The Game We Made…

It’s symptomatic of new music’s relentless, dizzying, thoughtless rush for the new that most of the “Best Of 2010″ lists had been and gone by mid-December.

Anyone bold enough to publish a list at a sensible time – like, say, the beginning of 2011, when you can actually look at the previous year as a whole – will witness their work ingloriously flounder in a whirlwind of “Tips For 2011″ lists.

This relentless pace is shortening careers, ignoring slower development and denying breathing room for everyone – bands, writers, gig-goers, everyone. This stupidity won’t change any time soon – …

It takes nerve to write music that departs from the norm. Nerve is needed to fight the ever-present temptation to round off the sharp corners and produce a more generic sound, and to silence the fearful thoughts that such music will never get you on MTV.

Nerve will take you places you never dreamed of, whereas playing to the gallery will lead to to exactly where you expected.

Pompey is an artist who has been making music for a while – so his appearance becomes one of the ‘new-as-in-new-to-ANBAD‘ variety, as opposed to the ‘only-picked-up-a-glockenspiel-for-the-first-time-last-week‘ kind.

Pompey // Bivouac …

Last night I met an old man called Yoshiro.  He’s from Nagasaki. He was 11 when it happened. He can remember the blinding flash of light, the furniture shooting across the room, the white heat.

He survived the A-Bomb, but he spend the following days watching his relatives die of radiation poisoning. He remembers the smell. Then, to support his remaining family, he worked from the age of 15 until he retired, aged 70. He’s had cancer twice. He now learns English from Audrey Hepburn movies. He’s pretty much super-human.

There only reason I relayed that story was to a) …

Wayne Rooney is all over the news again, and I’m bored with his grumpy quasi-teen antics. It’s hard enough to enjoy the sight of 22 millionaires kicking a ball around any more, let alone comprehend the whining of one that he’s not getting paid enough.

The ANBAD Donkey turns back the clock to celebrate His Scally Stroppiness, and this actually brilliant mixtape will remind you of what is important:

FIRST! Love Lake are the kind of band that gives me hope for guitar music, the death/dearth of which has been discussed ad nauseum here on ANBAD. If guitar music …