A New Band A Day!

Seward: Wind-Up Toy Robots

Joe Sparrow — Tue, 15 May 2012 09:43:24 +0000

Having intended to spend my time at The Great Escape in one fashion (ice cream on the delightful beach, beers in the delightful pubs, bands in the delightful venues), I ended up spending it slightly differently: missing all the bands I intended to see, studiously avoiding all cone-holstered gelato desserts, and accidentally DJing at the excellent Recommender-run Blogger Meet Up.

Planning what to do at a music festival is foolish in the extreme, and going with the flow is the only real course of action.

Besides, if I’d followed a plan, I’d never have caught the bewildering, fascinating, confusing Seward, a band who have so little web presence, that I’ve been reduced to posting this incomplete video of the band as proof that they even exist at all.

Instead of describing what a remarkable band Seward actually are, or how they achieve remarkableness, maybe it’s best to describe the moment that their drummer – a man rapt at the array of gentle, subtle noises a drumkit can make – wound up a toy tin robot and let it dance on his snare drum as he continued playing with a string of rusted cowbells.

There are many bands who approach music like Seward. They are all, without exception, shit. They are all indulgent, self-centred, and unkind to their audience.

Seward are the exact opposite: their timing is perfect, their noises are specific and considered, and their purpose may not be defined, but it is rational. The band is lost in the beauty of noise-making, and the path it beats into human consciousness.

Part experience, part music, all brilliant.

MORE: There is no more…

MIDWEEK MIXTAPE // 9th May 2012

Joe Sparrow — Wed, 09 May 2012 10:39:51 +0000

For the next few days, ANBAD is pressing clammy flesh against clammy flesh at The Great Escape, the UK’s premiere new music conference/festival/beano-by-the-sea.

There are more bands than one could possibly hope to see, including ANBAD favourites Mmoths, D/R/U/G/S, Beth Jeans Houghton, and so many more that even Hype Machine had to create a special page to list all the recommended ones.

In tribute, Alex James, cheese connoisseur and official ANBAD pourer of Molten Yellow Love, gets to grips with Dickie Attenborough’s classic movie Brighton Rock.

MIXTAPE:

FIRST! Le Common Diamond are everything you want out of a French pop band: distant, sparse, arch, immediate and yet sharper than a box of tacks. Nice, slow, and with a bizarre groove all of its own.

SECOND! Dead Format has made a song so infectious and grimy, that it has been condemned by the Environmental Health Agency. Quick, get it stuck in your head before it’s hosed down with bleach:

THIRD! Sophie Flynn conjures up the spirit of Helen Love in her spazmoid punk-pop song USI, and we’re all left wondering why it’s taken someone so long to do it.

FOURTH! Are Little Night Terrors aware that this writer, as a child, used to be plagued by night terrors? Where he’d wake up screaming? Because the sekeltons were coming to get him? Do they know that? Do they care?

Kiran Leonard, and The Agonies Of Ageing

Joe Sparrow — Tue, 08 May 2012 10:15:13 +0000

There’s no way to convey this gently, so bluntness will have to do: you’re too old, already.

No really, you are. You feel old. Feel it.

Feel that slight discomfort in your hips? It isn’t a one-off niggle you picked up by walking in new shoes – it won’t go away, ever. And it’s just going to get worse. Really.

My own hideous elderliness was highlighted with ruthless efficiency upon the discovery of Kiran Leonard, a boy from Oldham who is 16, and writes song with a brutal understanding of life, its mysterious ways and how to cram it all into a two minute vaudeville pop song like Dear Lincoln.

Want to hear the best bit? Dear Lincoln is an old song – written when Kiran was 14. He’s now partly disowned it, the embarrassment of mispronouncing Nietzsche’s name in the opening line just too much to bear.

Fourteen. What were you doing when you were that age? I still thought that being able to complete a 180-degree skid on my BMX was an achievement, and that playing Street Fighter 2: Special Champion Edition was a legitimate way to pass a weekend.

By romping through the brilliant, endlessly enjoyable Dear Lincoln with panache, gusto and nuance, Kiran has rekindled all those lingering feelings of inadequacy us mere humans felt at that age.

Console yourself with the knowledge that almost all child geniuses burn out and end up in rehab at some point. And then we can all feel satisfied with our own dreadful, bitter outlook, can’t we?

MORE: kiranleonard.tumblr.com // (Thanks to Aaron Gowman for the tip)

White Collar Boy: The Three R’s

Joe Sparrow — Mon, 07 May 2012 15:40:39 +0000

“We dig repetition”, sang Mark E Smith in The Fall’s Repetition. And then he sang it again, just to make a meta-point.

That point, of course, is that repetition is utterly essential in music, and it’s why the most basic of house music is also the most effective; the brain latching onto quickly looping snippets and wandering to the rhythmic hinterland.

White Collar Boy, like many music makers overwhelmed with the vast, unending choice of sounds and instruments laid out before them, have latched onto this repetitive simplicity as his musical lifeboat.

They have produced, in Long Walk Home, a song that grabs hold with dusty, squirming fingers, and won’t let go.

Deft production aside, Long Walk Home reeks of a songmaker who longs for a return to the heady cut and thrust of the late 80′s dance scene, where one sound or noise could be looped ad infinitum (or to the capacity of a 12″ single, whichever was shorter) and crowds would lap it up, deranged and happy.

Excellent, addictive, repetitive. And repetitive.

MORE: soundcloud.com/white-collar-boy

Aeirs TV: A Cult Above

Joe Sparrow — Thu, 03 May 2012 09:00:11 +0000

Some artists must accept from their very inception that they will never have a number one record. I like those bands.

Some artists must also accept that they will never exceed ‘cult status’ – that quasi-mythical state where everyone cool says they like your music, but rarely actually buys it. I like those bands even more.

Now, I’m not guaranteeing that Aeirs TV will garner cult status.

I’m not even guaranteeing that his astonishingly dense, blunt, pulsing techno would cause people to memorise song titles and casually drop them into chin-stroking pub conversations.

I merely hope this will be the case, because Lies is bloody brilliant.

I’m fully aware that a steely static throb is not most people’s idea of a smash hit, but this is not music for those people, as we’ve already established. Instead, this is techno for the awkward people; the people who prefer to find the beauty in the muck, or enjoy the sound of wind whistling past their ears.

Beacuse that’s what Lies is, really – the act of extracting rhythm, repetition and – yes – groove from a slim selection of radio buzz, electrical humming and insistent, warped cries. A rare delight for some, and pure pain for others – just as it should be.

MORE: aeirs-tv.bandcamp.com

MIDWEEK MIXTAPE // 2nd May 2012

Joe Sparrow — Wed, 02 May 2012 15:51:18 +0000

As ANBAD continues its plunge into the dizzying depths of John Peel’s record collection, one is reminded that Alex James was once a member of a band who were deemed brilliant enough to actually record a John Peel session at Peel Acres itself.

Blur’s musical output never hinted of days to come when certain band members would be reduced to flogging ASDA cheese – in effect, pouring molten cheese-shame onto the great John Peel himself.

Sigh. At least they both look happy about it.

Mixtape:

FIRST! Red Cosmos may have made one of the most wilfully obtuse, uncool and angular records of the year in St Alban’s Colour Explosion, which begins with Byrds-y psyche, re-routes via folky noodling, and finishes in a throbbing choral swirl-house.

Anarchic, and so crazy it really shouldn’t work, but wholeheartedly does. Great.

SECOND! Sirens, Camp Stag‘s new single, is one of those quiet-loud songs that suddenly mutates into a middle eight that you think you already know, but, apparently, don’t. Now that’s a good sign.

THIRD! Hot from the “meant to write about this in January” pile are Violas, a Cardiff band with so much energy, curious noises must come to them fully formed. Their songs are fun, pop riddles. Wish I’d written about them when I meant to:

FOURTH! Andrew Butler has made the kind of star-struck, star-crossed, lush ‘n’ quiet folk music that most guitar pluckers dream of making, but never get close to. Lovely:

Hillary and the Democrats: Peeling Back The Years

Joe Sparrow — Tue, 01 May 2012 12:49:36 +0000

Occasionally unforeseen events pricks your inflated sense of self-worth, and today’s covert prickle arrived in the form of John Peel’s LP archive being released onto an unsuspecting internet.

Anyone with even the vaguest interest in new music will get lost for hours in Peel’s virtual shelving units, and doing so serves as a reminder of the great man’s obsessive dedication to discovering, hoarding and sharing new music in a pre-music blog, pre-Pitchfork, pre-Hype Machine era.

For a long time, John Peel was new music discovery. Now we are all at it, with varying degrees of success – but he was the first, and almost inarguably the best, and an inspiration to anyone who loves music.

Even now, my brass-tacks question when choosing a band to put on ANBAD is “but would John Peel have played them?” Of course, I can only guess if he would’ve played Hillary and the Democrats‘ EP of songs about Sweden, but Let’s Play Kubb! is so outrageously pleasure-inducing, I can think of no reason to assume he wouldn’t.

Let’s leave the clichés about Liverpudlian bands being as equally choice purveyors of jangle-pop tunes as the Swedish to one side for the moment, and simply enjoy a band who are – and I mean this in the most wholly encouraging terms – a throwback.

Hillary and the Democrats aren’t a bunch of poseurs – they’re playing good music for the right reasons: to have fun, to share pleasure and with an ethic that prioritises making the best music possible. What more would anyone want? Excellent.

MORE: hillaryandthedemocrats.bandcamp.com

Theoish: Whale Music

Joe Sparrow — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 11:10:30 +0000

There’s a thin line between the music found on, say, your average Boards Of Canada track, and those CDs of calming Whale Song music you can buy at petrol stations.

Maybe it’s worth noting that I say this as an enormous fan of Boards of Canada – albeit one who is puzzled by the possibility that music of that ilk works on a fundamentally different level to your bog-standard buzzy guitar-pop song.

There is nothing to prove that Theoish is a whale, but - intriguingly - nothing saying that he isn’t, and so we must remain in taxonomic limbo whilst enjoying the slovenly charms of his down-tempo music.

Roobios is so brazenly calm, it’s almost a shock when the delicate and persistant drums begin: and then the song threatens to break out into something a lot more frenetic.

It doesn’t of course, and that’s exactly how it should be – a carefully waxing and waning musical hinterland of soft sounds, organic wobbles and plush bass pulses. Lovely, sleepy, calm.

MORE: soundcloud.com/theoish

DREΛMS: Pre/Post Eras

Joe Sparrow — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 12:07:37 +0000

Has Dubstep become a good joke yet?

I mean, the gag about ‘waiting for the drop’ is shoehorned wryly into every other conversation I have about music at the moment, but it’s not so much of a joke as submissive recognition of Dubstep’s current all-pervasiveness.

Still, I’m all for artists, as DREΛMS has, to label their music “pre-Dubstep”, in a frankly devious attempt to erase the present and fork off a new future where the words WUB WUB WUB are even more meaningless than they are right now.

Of course, the cynical question is to ask, “so is Don’t Care Bout Her” yesterday’s music? Well, maybe, or maybe not.

But frankly, that question should be banished too: wherever you pin it onto life’s timeline, DREΛMS’ music is a rush through foggy, billowing wisps of obtuse noise, slow groove and vibed-out vocals.

I sometimes try to imagine songs without certain constituent parts, and wonder what they’d sound like. I can’t picture Don’t Care Bout Her with anything added or taken away. This is a good thing.

MORE: drrrreams.tumblr.com

Midweek Mouthpiece: Guitar Heroes, RIP?

Joe Sparrow — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 10:34:25 +0000

A week or so ago, whilst feeling fruity, I posted this deliberately provocative statement on the ANBAD Twitter feed:

I mean, really, most people’s attraction to new guitar-based bands is purely based on a romantic attachment to bands of the past. (Discuss) — Joe Sparrow (@ANewBandADay) April 11, 2012

And in many ways, of course, I don’t believe this for a moment. For, as Dave Greenwald from the endlessly excellent Rawkblog noted almost immediately:

@ANewBandADay Or more likely to the sounds of the electric guitar as uniquely pleasing. — David Greenwald (@daverawkblog) April 11, 2012

He’s possibly/probably right – but a part of me still wonders: if this really is so, why do so many de rigeur bands insist on drowning their guitars in so much reverb?

(OK – so it’s just a phase the bands are going through: but I recently spoke to a glum sound mixer, who, after years of learning how to tease the best sound possible from any band on stage in front of him, is now routinely asked to “just turn the reverb right up”.)

I mean, honestly, no-one would mind too much if the bulk of these new bands sounded jangly and fun, like – oh, I don’t know – early-80′s REM.

Style over substance will win over even the most cynical listener who is too scared to listen to anything but peer-approved flavour-of-the-month bands. And, as the brilliant Videotapes by Blouse proves, there is room for both the sound everyone desires and hit songs.

But Blouse, sadly, are in the minority – sometimes I feel overwhelmed by bands who sound agonisingly generic, but greased up with a slick of cool from a fashionable Pro Tools filter. That bands are choosing, en masse, to pick up guitars for reasons other than wanting to slog away and create the best pop songs they possibly can is curious.

Maybe it’s social. In the UK, one (in)famous, and possibly un-scientific, statistic is often bandied about: that the majority of UK chart successes are now written by privately educated kids from privileged backgrounds. Bands like Keane, Coldplay, and Mumford and Sons do little to dispel the idea that the nice, wealthy white boy has taken over.

It’s hard to see, for instance, how Oasis could fit in now.

So have guitars become the uncool option? The choice of the wealthy playing at being rock stars?

I’m not sure, but put it this way: if you want to listen to the really exciting, really new and really, er, real sound of The Kids who struggle to get their voices heard, you won’t turn to a guitar band.

Instead, you’d listen to any of the genuinely thrilling bedroom-produced music made today: a creeping, flooding, ever-mutating, ever-innovating groundswell of head-spinningly innovative music whelped from hooky software on creaking laptops. If you want a vision of the future, imagine a MacBook Pro stamping on the human face, forever.

However, the point is still somewhat moot: for those who need guitars, who long for new guitar music, who must have that six-stringed shimmer in their lives, the pickings are slim – and they’ll still keep searching through the dregs, looking for one final hit. Should we feel sad?