A New Band A Day!

Tristan Burfield – Ambience, Forever

Joe Sparrow — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 07:45:51 +0000

You know, it’s one of my few many weaknesses, but like any weakness, it’s rooted in pleasure, however dubious. People sometimes ask why I feature video-game-style chiptuning artists with such gleeful abandon on ANBAD, and the simple answer is that I can’t help it.

Plenty of listeners don’t get this kind of music – they think it all sounds the same, or that it is too basic and punctuated, or that it is simply reductive. And to an extent, these are the exact reasons why I like music such as Tristram Burfield‘s.

At least that’s what I thought. Tristram is a musical polymath, you see. And while I like his NES-sourced cheep ‘n’ cheerful chiptunes, it was his other songs that I discovered via them that made my hairs prickle uncontrollably.

Tristan Burfield // Do Walls Have Ears?

Do Walls Have Ears? is the sound of an orchestra tuning up, but one that is forever lost in the simple beauty of it’s own loose sound. Droning, ebbing, flowing, arcing through time, songs like these are less about structure, and more about feeling.

Perhaps that’s why I like it so much. The disconnection with standard procedure and the empathy with the confusing realities of emotion is evident in songs like this. In the realms of new music, this is akin to an out-of-body experience.

Do Walls Have Ears? is timeless in every respect – it’s also placeless, faceless and could easily have stretched on for another hour and I would still have listened.

Tristram releases his songs on floppy discs. Take that, vinyl fetishists. Now that‘s retro.

http://tristanburfield.com

MIDWEEK MIXTAPE // 27th July 2010

Joe Sparrow — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 09:33:56 +0000

This week’s news has been fluffed and plumped into a tasty political paella thanks to Wikileak’s genuinely brave and diligent exposure of what has really been happening in Afghanistan.

We asked the boffins at Wikileaks to run their beady eyes over the ANBAD Donkey, the stubbornly airborne totem that has always aroused suspicions here at ANBAD towers.

Some devilishly complicated compu-prying behind the scenes found this shocking evidence [left]. Dubya was behind him all along. Truly astonishing developments.

Sigh. MIXTAPE:

FIRST! Bravestation are easily confusable, at first glance, with UK soft-core sleaze TV channel Babestation. For clarification, there are a lot fewer tits in Bravestation, but just as much of an illicit thrill.

Their music is angular and smooth all at once. Apparently people really like glib parallels drawn between one band and another so: Bravestation are like Arcade Fire getting frisky with Vampire Weekend. Perhaps they are a bit like Babestation after all.

SECOND! Death In Plains are easily confusable, at first glance, with UK genre-hoppers Death In Vegas. For clarification, Death In Plains make music that would be perfect for car adverts. I won’t deny that that sounds like the least appealing recommendation of all time. But think about it: selling cars is all about highlighting dynamism, thrust, sleek lines and grace – all of which is there in DIP’s music.

THIRD! Squarefeet - I’ve featured bands from the outlandishly named Espoo, Uusimaa in Finland before. I’m never going to tire of spelling out just how great Finnish music is, or actually spelling out that location on my keyboard. Squarefeet is a band that are far more electronic than most I feature from that part of the world, but still present is the archetypal Finnish grasp of a brilliant tune. Yum.

FINALLY! Blood Feathers must have the same kind of fun that any band that cranks out this kind of staccato and upbeat rock has. The beauty of this kind of music is that its simplicity allows for Good Old Fashioned Fun, but also allows for bad Old Fashioned Clunky Rawk. Fortunately, Blood Feathers produce the former in spades.

DONE! We’re off to waterboard the ANBAD Donkey.

Lenin Was A Zombie – An Agonising Flurry Of Cuts

Joe Sparrow — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 07:32:24 +0000

Oh come on. Sometimes, a band presents you with an opportunity that makes writing this stuff just too easy. It’s almost embarrassing.

When band provides you with this much ammunition, the exercise becomes not finding things to write about, but an agonising flurry of cuts as the article is snipped down to an acceptable size.

The source of all these trimmed and scattered superlatives? Well, Lenin Was A Zombie, of course. Yep – that’s right. Read it again and scratch your head in wonder that no-one has pulled that name out of the hat before. Perhaps its because anyone owning headwear containing such absurdities would have been committed to secure facilities years ago.

Then consider that the band in question is from Russia, where surely such declarations are tantamount to writing your own jail term, and try to figure out how they have survived this long – long enough to write songs as brilliantly nerve jangling as theirs are.

All this, of course before we even consider their magnum opus, their meisterwerk, their home-run-knockout-punch-twenty-yard-volley of a hit, I Got A Monkey Head.

Lenin Was A Zombie // I Got A Monkey Head

In all honesty, the review could feasibly end right here, allowing writer and readers alike to sit down, winded, and to absorb the insanity of the words, the locomotive brilliance of the song, and the hopeless task of marrying such disparate concepts.

‘I got a monkey head and everyone is laughing at me,’ muses the singer, choosing to focus on what is almost definitely the least of his worries.

Monkey head-graft or not, any band who can crank out stupendously fun dance music, and overload the listener with beats, noise and bizarre imagery gets my full, undivided attention. Wait – imagine if Lenin was a zombie – I smell an odd-couple sitcom…

soundcloud.com/leninwasazombie

Bern And The Brights – A Telepathic Influx Of Cheer

Joe Sparrow — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 08:10:21 +0000

You wait, you hope, and then it appears. Sometimes it feels as though there’s a gap – a hollow – an absence – and waiting for the jigsaw piece to fall back into place is the hardest part.

Bern and The Brights were there when I needed them most. Isn’t it strange how music can do that? How did they know?

The whys, wheres and hows are unimportant – I needed that certain lift, a deft yank from the fug billowing around my mind. Right on cue, Bern and The Brights sidled up, slipped a dainty arm around my shoulders and hugged tight.

The song was Sleepless Aristotle, silky but trembling, and its gentle caress did the trick all right. It glistens with early-morning vim; energised, happy but wistful.

Bern and The Brights // Sleepless Aristotle

Bern and The Brights describe themselves as Danceable Romantic Nerd Rock, but don’t let that put you off. They have a singer with a voice of scuffed antique silk, and musicians who can keep it simple and, most importantly, keep it affecting.

Some songs have the ability to lift crowds to their feet, and others lift spirits when ambition is faltering. Perhaps Sleepless Aristotle can only do it for me. Maybe it’ll perform the same trick for you too.

www.myspace.com/bgroove

INTERVIEW // Islet – Out There, Somewhere

Joe Sparrow — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 07:30:25 +0000

Islet are a new band. That much is obvious. Less obvious is the route they took before emergence, which is suddenly, strangely radical. And they don’t even know they’re doing it.

I know you’re out there
I know you’re gone
You can’t say that’s fair
Can’t you be wrong?

-Dinosaur Jr., Out There, 1993

Islet are a band who have done it differently without even trying, and the story is not so much a breath of fresh air as a huge, Mistral-sized gust of clean, sweet change.

There was a time when the act of discovering a new band was thus: after hearing a snatch of a song on a late-night radio show, and assuming you were lucky enough to hear the DJ announce their name afterwards, you would spend the following weeks scouring the NME, Melody Maker and fanzines for more.

More information was the desired booty – words, pictures, gossip, anything. A gig review if you were lucky. Glueing oneself to the same radio show, finger poised over the REC button on the tape deck, hoping the DJ would play it again. Such behaviour seems archaic now, but this, remember, was the norm only just over a decade ago.

Now recognise this new route: band records song, band uploads song to Myspace, Bandcamp and Soundcloud, band blogs about the minutiae of their nascent musical lives, band immediately gets all the information you could ever need out there, the public consume ravenously.

This sounds perfect. It is not. Once you’re out there, mystique dies. Putting it all out there is too easy, too neat, too perfect. It’s even easier than total obscurity: after a while, someone will put it all out there for you. Craving information with such bludgeoning hunger ensures that something important – an emotional connection maybe – is lost.

Psychologists bemoan the impact that readily available pornography has had on teenage boys – their initial contact with sex is of the type that they will never see in real life. Real sex will always be tainted with lingering disappointment.

Like the teenage boy disappointed by a virginal girl’s stubborn reluctance to engage in sexual theatricality, witness the fans who dump a band after one album and move on, gobbling up more and more of the temptingly shiny and new.

If a fan knows everything about a band from the start, we all lose that something. The bands, the fans, labels, everyone. Islet gave nothing away.

Until their website was launched a month ago, Islet have existed in rumour, tip-offs and gossip alone. Their music wasn’t online. The band wasn’t online. The music only existed on the stage. If you wanted more, it had to be from fan sites, from excited reviews, from camera-phone videos.

I wanted to speak to Islet about their strange introduction to the public, and how it felt to be most well known for what they haven’t done rather than what they have.

And yet Islet, apparently, are unaware of all of this. When I spoke to Isleteer Mark, he was – understandably – more concerned with the pile of old merchandise that the Super Furry Animals had given him in a Cardiff recording studio just moments before. I tore him away from the Furry sun-visors:

ANBAD: Islet seem to, for once, have been overtaken by hype on the internet, rather than cultivating it yourselves. You’re one of the few bands who may have been surprised by the online reaction. How does this feel? Did it catch you unaware?

Mark: I don’t really know where the online reaction is to be honest. We’re always more interested in how people react in the real world, at a gig than in the realms of The Internet. It’s a shame that the word ‘hoopla’ isn’t used instead of hype, it’s more fun.

Was your ‘internet silence’ a very deliberate ploy – a rejection of the taken-as-read idea of an all-important online presence – or laziness, or a land-grab at a new gimmick, or was it just something that you didn’t see value in at that time?

To begin with we just started a band and when we had enough material and felt like it, we started doing gigs. We thought that we might as well wait until we have recordings before we make a website – so that’s what we did. People got a bit carried away with it, we’ve never proclaimed ourselves to be anti internet, I’m on the internet now, I was on the internet then and we all regularly utilise its many facilities.

New Music Strategist Andrew Dubber took a shine to you and set up your fanpage – how did you feel about that? Did you think it was – not a ploy so much – but as much of a demonstration of his own new band promo ethos (the Posterous account, selling the fan T-shirts, etc) as his genuinely enthusiastic appreciation of you?

We found it quite funny at the time, mainly because he and his friend Ben set it up straight after a gig in Swansea, of all places. You will have to ask them about their genuine enthusiastic appreciation of us. Mine and Bunters’ (also in Islet) older brother Lee hilariously bought us both a T-shirt from the fanpage, I’m yet to wear it.

The no-mp3, no-download, no-Myspace way of operating found an enthusiastic fan base. I really like that idea of a band having an air of mystery – is that part of the reasoning? Do you like that too? Do new bands who give everything to their fans from day one lose something special?

I think yes to all of the questions. At the moment we don’t feel the need to constantly tell the world where we are, what films we have watched and what we had for breakfast. Though who knows, one day we might feel that urge. The ‘no Myspace’ thing has got out of hand – to me it’s like caring whether or not we eat at McDonald’s. I do think that people in general give too much away about themselves on the internet, not just bands.

Is it becoming OK for bands to want to have success and money? For a long time, rock was very deliberately anti-corporate, anti-big business – whereas even young bands are now eager to sign deals that would have been entirely gauche just a few years ago.

I think it’s always OK for bands to want ‘success’. I think it’d be very difficult to start a band and not want any form of success, it depends how you measure it. We felt very successful when we finished our first song and got our first gig. We haven’t licensed any tracks as yet [for use in advertising] but we’ve not been asked to. We have no rules, we just deal with things as they come.

And that was it. The band are tired of discussing the hows and the whys – they just want their music to do the talking. This is clearly a tough task to undertake in such stubbornly chattering times.

Yet they determinedly persist in protecting their reputation. When Islet first got in touch with me, it was to politely but firmly refute a claim I’d made – a rumour I’d heard rubbishing their DIY ethos.

Islet’s anachronism makes life hard. Blab everything, and their fun dissolves; keep their lips nipped tight and idiots like me propagate bitter rumours because I’ve got nothing else to go on. When it comes to controlling their self-image, it turns out that they are damned if they do, and damned if they don’t; they’re even damned if they try neither, or both.

In the end, all this will pass, and it’ll be what remains – the songs – that will be left out there, surrounded by the debris, and they are what will count. It’s always the songs. And Islet’s songs aren’t an anachronism at all – they’re more daring, more exhilarating and more uncannily new than any other band’s for a very long time.

I know a few women who are Burlesque dancers. Their chosen sport is the art of the tease – not quite giving the whooping crowd what they want, but giving them enough to want more, more, more. And every time they return to dance, the crowds get bigger.

Islet have unwittingly joined their leggy troupe; sequins, corsets and pasties switched for guitars, raw musical talent and a gut faith in human nature, desire and curiosity. Every time they play a gig, a little more of them is out there. But only a little. And yet the crowds keep getting bigger.

isletislet.com

Calories – Note: Review Contains No Dreadful Food Energy Value Analogies. Sorry.

Joe Sparrow — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 07:30:51 +0000

Sometimes I wonder why bands even bother.

I look at my bulging inbox, filled with suggestions of new bands, and I wonder this, because it’s almost impossible to conceive how any band can be heard through the white noise of ten thousand new, hungry bands all playing their buzz-saw guitars at once.

And then a band comes along that makes me realise: “Ah – that’s why.” The thought pings into my subconscious as one band peeks stridently through the weeds like a stubborn dandelion.

Bands do it because the rewards are so great – the feeling that you and your friends are on the cusp of something new, something pleasurable to all and sundry is like nothing else on earth.

Calories have discovered this, have grabbed it lustily, and on the strength of songs like FFWD are running away with it.

“The old days were better…” they muse, yelpily, and I find myself both agreeing and disagreeing before realising that I’m right either way.

Calories // FFWD NB: withdrawn at PR’s request

FFWD is a rollicking romp of lung-bursting, tongue-twisting proportions. More is crammed into the first verse and chorus than Oasis managed in two albums.

The bassline is so bouncy that whoever drew the short straw of playing it must now be suffering from exotically-named illnesses like Carpel Tunnel Syndrome or Vibration White Finger.

As far as ridiculously enjoyable songs go, FFWD can be ranked alongside all of your guilty-pleasure songs that you might not tell others about for fear of embarrassment. Except Calories are so good that you’ll want to share them with everyone. That’s why they do it.

www.myspace.com/caloriesband

MIDWEEK MIXTAPE // 21st July 2010

Joe Sparrow — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 07:35:58 +0000

Hey, look: it’s Mercury Music Prize again, and this year the Über-cool scenester panel have selected a particularly wan and underwhelming final 10.

This isn’t the first time that the Mercury panel have made huge, lumbering mistakes: witness the hilarious dilly-dallying around facts on their own website, when summing up the 1994 award, where M People were awarded the prize over Parklife, His N Hers and Music For The Jilted Generation.

Today, the ANBAD Donkey serves as the Trusty Scales Of Justice, demonstrating the ratio of Good Nominees to Bad Ones.

Note: Each band on this mixtape will be marked with a percentage rating relating to their worthiness of Mercury Nomination compared to Corinne Bailey Rae.

FIRST! Bear Driver (200% more worthy of nomination) Bear Driver make songs that are gentler than the touch of a hidden cobweb, yet just as difficult to ignore.

A Thousand Samurais is deft, wafer-light and gorgeous. That said, can you imagine glueing a little steering wheel on top of a big Kodiak Bear’s head, mounting its shoulders and trying to drive it like a clown car? Hilarious gore.

SECOND! Crooked Mountain, Crooked Sea (150%) are clanky, crunchy and noisy, and yet their musical dynamic is such that the listener isn’t overwhelmed with NOISE, as is so often the case with bands like them. CMCS shake you angrily by the lapels, but then will feed you Flumps afterwards. How kind.

THIRD! Thee Ludds (178%) are morons. No, really. They think so too. Their song, I’m A Moron, is quite explicit on this count. The song, unsurprisingly, is rough around the edges and pretty… direct. But this is endearing, isn’t it sweetheart? That’s right, give mummy the scissors. Play with the soft toys. Don’t eat the sand.

FINALLY! Larsen B (190%) are named after an ice shelf. Their music is a lot more warm. The Gold Cup is so warm and cosy that I was almost lulled to sleep whilst listening to… zzzzzz… Mmmmm. Lovely.

DONE! Yep, done.

Mafia Lights – Rock.

Joe Sparrow — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 09:35:10 +0000

Is there a new wave – OK, bad choice of words – a new glut of rock bands emerging?

Rock has been persona non grata for a while now. It has a straightforwardness, simple parameters and predisposition towards sound, not image. It has not been cool enough to fulfil the dreams for a generation of kids for whom tightness of their jeans and catch-up faux-reminiscence of an ill-defined period of hedonism is the primary focus.

So by ‘rock’, I mean, simple, perhaps. Bands that spend equally little time between fussing over hair and wondering whether one quasi-ironic keyboard sound is more real than another.

Simple can be good too. You just need to be bold enough to pull it off.

Here are Mafia Lights. Their four-square, unambiguous rock approach might not sit so comfortably alongside a lot of the bands on ANBAD, but a song like BJM displays the basic essence of Good Rock: simple pleasures pleasuring simply.

BJM is a good song; lacking in pretence, overflowing with urgency, not caring either way. Mafia Lights don’t shy from verse-chorus-verse, they embrace this simple template as a method of expression.

And if all that sounds just too complex, too cerebral for Rock, well, perhaps it is. But Rock is pop music’s forgotten cousin, who has locked himself away in his bedroom for a long time, and is only now finally emerging, blinking, confident again. Life is going to get better for all of us.

www.myspace.com/mafialights

Post Post – Mobius Strips Of Delicious, Pillowy Bliss

Joe Sparrow — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 09:42:25 +0000

Seeing The Coral on Saturday night was a revelatory experience for me. Not the band so much – they were as warm and fulfilling as expected, a bit like getting into a bathtub filled with your favourite winter soup. No, the revelation was that it was my first – and possibly my last – all-seater gig.

I’ll say this for The Lowry in Salford Quays: the acoustics are outrageously good. The room is full of strangely-suspended baffles and oddly-angled appendages, and has clearly been designed by computer to make every spot in there the perfect listening space.

The downside is that there is no room for deviation from the plan, so everyone has to remain seated at all times.

A seated gig is a weird thing to behold, especially from my viewpoint, high up in the gods: hundreds of people, fighting against their cushioned velveteen restraints, twitching and jerking at the music, clearly wishing they were standing and dancing.

There are bands for whom a sitting gig would suit, but The Coral are not one of them. Maybe Philadelphia’s Post Post, sharp, ethereal and lithe, could pull off such an event. Certainly I was lulled into a quasi-snooze-like state with their hypnotically soft sounds, which gently loop into Mobius Strips of delicious, pillowy bliss.

Post Post // Architects

I’m not sure if the band’s name draws from some hazy insight into their influences – are they post-post-rock? – and frankly, I don’t care. Architects yearns, aches and urges, and we listeners latch on and follow suit, filling in the gaps, aligning emotions and losing thoughts by gazing into the middle distance.

Post Post have achieved the rarest of feats: an actual emotional attachment to their audience. And if that audience were penned into rows of seats before them, they might never leave of their own volition. Blissful and hypnotic.

Thanks, as always, to Peter at the always-excellent Crushing Krisis blog.

The Spills; and Email Template Tips For Great Success!

Joe Sparrow — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 09:45:50 +0000

In a recent online discussion with a new music consultant called Hagop, we discussed the best ways for new bands to get in touch with mp3 bloggers like me.

My first piece of advice was “tape bottle of gin to promo LP sleeve”, but this, and “include naked photos” was removed from the final broadcast, the editing of which made us both sound like intelligent, rational human beings. I know the truth.

Where was I? Oh yes – the point we stumbled up on was that of the emails sent to request a listen of their songs, those which read like the following, against all the odds, often pointed towards the best bands:

from: The Band’s Drummer
to: joe@anewbandaday.com
date: 11 July 2010 01:02
subject: My band, yeah?

Hi ANBAD

Check us out: www.myspace.com/mygenericband

Dave (drummer)

And so it was that when The Spills got in touch, their email template was virtually identical to the one above. This simple act rattled me with the zesty zing of anticipatory thrills, and thankfully these were not misplaced.

There are a thousand bands born every year that sound a bit like The Spills, but very few that elevate these bands above the average, the mediocre or away from well-trodden rock roads.

A Botched Goodbye does nothing drastically different to the bands that became The Spills’ starting points – Pavement, happily, being one – and yet novelty lurks.

The hardest decisions a band needs to make are the ones that consciously move them away from bands that have been there before them. A lot of bands don’t make them at all, end up sounding just like the rest, and their hard work gets lost in a generic rock fog.

The Spills sound familiar and different. This means that any seasoned rock fan will slip in and settle comfortably with their songs, and yet there are enough rough edges, unexpected quirks and sonic curve-balls to bring a smile to those ears tainted by cynicism.

Good rock is hard to get right. The Spills can do it.

www.myspace.com/bumthespills

Photography by Daniel Easton