ANBAD provides a patchy service at the best of times, and yet often when the going gets tough (or at least, less regular than the “A Day” part of the blog’s title indicates), I find that I end up picking the most obtuse music of all.

(That said, that method worked wonders in January, resulting in perhaps the best month of music on ANBAD ever)

So, in the interest of balance, stillness and zen, maybe it’s time to reset the Oddball-Music-Meter back to zero and clear out the Ludicrous Japanese Juke House Sluices.

And how better than some …

January was a RED HOT month for new bands, and this little lot represent the best of a great bunch – including, in Painted Zeros – a band I went a bit mental about.

Listen and boggle as the superlatives pour from my flapping lips:

A New Band A Day’s Best New Bands Of January 2013 by Joesparrow on Mixcloud

Ah, the joys of freelance life.

Being your own boss, calling your own shots, weeping into your own pillow as you wonder how you’ll pay the rent – the perks are endless.

Being a musician must be the ultimate freelance job. Just crafting vibes all day, as and when you like, and watching the money roll right in. Right? Right!?

Well, it can’t be all bad, as Ki Oni is at pains to point out his main perk of “self-directed workflow” – and it involves sitting in his smalls.

“I still play in a few bands but nothing beats walking …

Like many observers, ANBAD has long noted the shift towards ever-complex pop music from solo artists.

Being a soloist takes the desire to produce intricate music, then magnifies and massages it to tesseract-proportions of delicacy and contortionism.

Not having a drummer constantly on your case about the lack of room in the song for a tom-tom fill allows ideas to ferment beyond usual parameters, I suppose.

New Palace Talkies, despite the pluralised name, is a solo project, that, excitingly, expands to an eight-piece when the live brass section performs.

Yep. Live brass. You’re interested now, right?

Indeed, what’s overwhlemingly intriguing about Who …

I was positive I had featured Arc Rev One before. 100% positive. Put-your-mortgage-on-it positive.

Then I remembered I was getting confused with Arc Vel. I suspect we are beginning to reach a critical mass of band names.

I also remembered I don’t have a mortgage to gamble. Lucky, really.

Equally fortunate was the fact that, whilst I was pondering this, I let Arc Rev One‘s sELectric Shiva spool on a bit, because the bassline that begins at around the 30s mark is supremely grubby.

Despite a glitchy start,  sELectric Shiva mutates into a nicely-paced dance throbber. And …

Quick, what do you think of – what sounds play in your febrile mind – when you think of Brooklyn bands?

I’m probably thinking of the same sounds as you – something a bit echoey, a bit “reverb-drenched”; something with vibes. You know, a bit dreamy. Maybe you can see the artists too, and maybe they’re wearing clothes that ought to really be on the corpse of your long-dead grandma.

A couple of things are unusual about all this: the fact that these crass generalisations are often close to the truth, and how much these things actually matter. They …

Are Tel Aviv actually from Tel Aviv?

These are the burning questions that characterise ANBAD’s thinking when introduced to a new band; before much more important questions like, ‘do they sound good?’ and ‘just what do their haircuts look like?’

Judge all you like.

Regardless, Tel Aviv do have something. I struggled for a while to put my finger on it. Then it hit me.

I know the exact moment the song tripped over that thin line into “hmmm, interesting” territory.It was at the 1m45s point, where some background studio chatter was left, low, in the mix. I love …

It’s Monday morning.

If, like me, you accidentally (and expensively) drank your body weight  in 15-year old whisky, eschewing sleep, personal dignity and common sense in the process, you’ll want something soothing, calming and zen to listen to.

Something like a nice Mumford and Sons B-side, if B-sides even existed any more; or the latest bobble-hat-and-ironic moustache generic chillwave ‘release’.

Or how about some intensely machinated Russian minimal techno?

Yes, TrinyTECH produces the latter, and it feels perfectly right for whatever you’re doing right now on a Monday morning.

Maybe Clear Your Nose only scratches my particular itch for dumb …

No, that’s not a typo up there on the headline. It’s not an auto-generated spam post title either.

It’s actually kind of a tacit admission that I’m slowly grinding any remaining ANBAD audience away with a slightly obsessive fascination with Japanese underground music.

I keep trying to love the Brooklyn bands with the smooth, smooth, ‘dreampop’ sounds, the neon bobble hats and cans of hand-temperature PBR… and I keep getting drawn back to Japanese neo-Juke-hip-hop.

Hey, at least you’re getting a new band today, right?

So while you’re considering that it’s now patently clear that ANBAD is increasingly poorly-named, also …

As ANBAD’s regular reader (Hi, dad!) knows, the careful and complex high-falutin’ submission guidelines for new bands are almost always trumped by one quick bypass clause: a band with an intriguing bandname generally will be given the most leeway.

Thus, you’ll begin to understand how Soapy Jefferson made it through ANBAD’s artfully arranged hoops and hurdles and made it onto the blog.

And here’s the result of all my pondering:

POP QUIZ!

Does “Soapy Jefferson” sound more like:

1. The nickname of a particularly grimy tramp?
2. A playground prank used alongside the Wet Willy and the Chinese Burn?
3. An eye-wateringly unpleasant, and possibly pungent, sexual act?

…