Having just experienced my first Superbowl, I can exclusively confirm exactly three important facts about the performer of this year’s half-time show, the weirdly pillow-faced Madonna.

Firstly, her music still leaves me as cold as a polar bear’s lollipop: a career that no amount of tedious forced controversy can redeem.

Secondly, her composition is now 70% sinew, 20% gristle and a remarkable 10% human; and thirdly, when your biggest gig in years is upstaged by not only a bored-looking MIA but also a man bouncing up and down on a rope, it might be time to consider finally giving …

For better or worse, I discover most of my new bands via the internet, not live gigs.

A lot of people would tell you that this is counter-intuitive, but then a lot of people also buy Nickleback records, so feel free to treat their remarks with as much or little contempt as you like.

However, I’ll never deny that lurking around in the recesses of a murky venue is a great way to discover ace new bands. (It’s also a great way to watch, as I did recently, a terminally average band spend 45 minutes setting up two synthesizers before playing …

A curtailed Midweek Mixtape this week, due to the fact that living out of a rucksack is not conducive to the Peak Music Bloggery™ that we have all come to expect/long for on ANBAD.

So, this week features less poking fun at Blur bassists, and more moving quickly on to the new bands.

Oh, OK then, there’s still room for a picture of Alex James looking foolish.

MIXTAPE:

FIRST! You’d kind-of hope Hernia were a gut-bustin’ Sludge/Doom Metal band, and when Welcome To The Empire begins with a sample of, er, Hitler, you’d be forgiven for thinking you were in …

Remember when electronic musicians had overwhelmingly simple artist names?

Plaid, AFX, LFO: all of them kept it simple, stupid. Now exhausted of the mono-syllabic monikers, artists are having to dig deeper.

This doesn’t mean that Holobeams and Broken Machines have  bad name, it’s just that we all know that if they’d existed in 1994, they would have been callewd simply Beam.

No matter: songs like Ground Frost (or to give it its mid-90′s name, Frost) will slip quietly and effortlessly into your collection of skitteringly rigid, pumellingly soft dance music however you choose to order your CD rack.…

As birthdays begin to whistle by, and the realisation that you’ll soon be halfway through slowly dawns, people begin to say inappropriate things to you, as if shifting their own mortality-panic onto someone else is either beneficial or kind.

And yet, continue they do, pointing out how a lot of people are younger than us these days, and have you noticed how the Younger Generation are inferior to us in some ill-defined way.

None of this is true: The Kids, as we already know, Are Alright. And the kid du jour, Dream Koala, is a 17 year-old French man-boy called Yndi.…

Well. It’s taken me a week to pull my brain out of a jet-lag fug, but finally I’ve managed to find a Brooklyn-based band, and semi-justify my presence in New York.

OK, so Happy Lives were pretty much the very first local band I stumbled upon, but I’m going to chalk this one up to serendipity.

That’s because Happy Lives are a great band (aren’t they all?), replete with songs filled with the kind of sounds that reach out of the speaker and shake you warmly by the throat.

Slacks and Slippers is crunchier than a fresh tower of …

It’s my birthday today, and I’m going to have to dream up a whole new excuse to explain away my age.

Though, as Einstein would tell you, having recently completed a trans-Atlantic flight, I am, in effect, slightly younger than I would have been if I’d stayed in the UK.

This may be a hard concept to fully grasp, so Blur’s Alex James demonstrates the molten fluidity of time in the only way he knows.

MIXTAPE:

FIRST! Le Parody is at pains to explain that her music is not a parody, it just looks that way because of the …

Not to harp on about band names again or anything, but hasn’t Olly Gale done himself a favour by releasing music under the moniker Blue Boats as opposed to the name on his driver’s license?

I mean, not that there’s anything wrong with the name his parents chose, but – and I don’t wish to be mean, Olly – it’s more befitting of someone doing something more normal with their life than recording songs drenched in echo, lust and wonder.

A song like The Fear has all these characteristics, and more: it is the sound of a long, slow, calming sigh …

Over the past couple of days, ANBAD has thrown all its possessions, including the incredibly weighty and seemingly less-important-with-each-passing-day CD collection, into a garage and headed over to New York for a few months.

This in itself is exciting for all sorts of reasons; but will chiefly allow plenty of opportunities to fully take advantage of NYC’s thriving, bustling new band scene and showcase plenty of New Yorkian talent.

(We could call it A New (York) Band A Day, or something. I’ll get back to you on that one.)

Anyway, having presented myself with such a unique cultural opportunity, …

Oh Alex James from Blur. Alex, Alex James. From Blur.

You once blew a  million pounds on Champagne. You were once the bassist in the brightest, breeziest Britpop band of all.

Then you made cheese. This is fine. I like cheese. My sister met you, and said you “smelt of cheese from three feet away,” which just enamoured you to her even more.

Now you hang with right-wing dolts at dull music festivals, make processed cheese for a KMART-owned company and write articles praising McDonalds for a Murdoch-owned right-wing tabloid.

Alex James. Pour your cheese. Pour your …