A New Band A Day!

Honey Wild: Solo

Joe Sparrow — Wed, 22 May 2013 13:07:57 +0000

One of the many interesting experiences that emerges when listening to the new Daft Punk album is the inner turmoil that takes place: a fight between the part of your brain which recoils in revulsion at the 70′s/80′s soft-rock stylings employed, and the part that just wants to get on and enjoy the great songs.

This dichotomy is the genius of the album – and the enjoyment doesn’t immediately reveal itself because if this. It’s also more enjoyable as a result.

I experienced something fairly similar with Honey Wild – which, I suppose, is wholly to their credit.

I have to confess I was not 100% convinced by Honey Wild until the world’s wonkiest guitar solo just after the one-minute mark, at which point it all makes sense. It’s a moment of minor genius; a guitar solo that falls apart as it is played, a guitar line that even ’89-era Happy Mondays would have rejected for being too baggy.

As such, the song immediately elevates itself from good guitar pop to good guitar pop with added curiosities. And all of a sudden Honey Wild are a band to watch. Funny how these things work out.

MORE: wearehoneywild.com

Pagan Moon: Resplendent

Joe Sparrow — Mon, 20 May 2013 16:48:59 +0000

ANBAD, as you know, is committed to bringing you the newest music… from six months ago.

This happens a lot – or rather, every time I have a clear out of my spam folder and find nuggets lurking in there – and this time it was Pagan Moon who had apparently written something innocuous that my over-zealous filters had thrust deep into Spammageddon.

Still, this exercise of sifting through pill-mail and scam-mail is almost always worth it, and Pagan Moon prove to be full of intrigue and teeter on the precipice of absurdity – yet survive through sheer sincerity and forcefulness.

What I like most about this song, aside from the deeply portentous and gappy sound, is the moment when the singer stage-whispers “SNAKE DANCE!” and I buy it as a proposition, wholesale.

Some songs can do all the supposedly wrong things and emerge unscathed and resplendent. Your Swan is one of these songs.

MORE: paganmoon.bandcamp.com

Dalton: Scrappy Lustre

Joe Sparrow — Wed, 15 May 2013 14:31:19 +0000

For a brief, hideous moment, I thought that Dalton were called Dalston, named after the East London hipster enclave, which would have been a sure sign of the End Of Times.

As it turned out, Dalton is actually from another hipster enclave, Brooklyn, but at least they had the good grace not to name themselves Williamsburg.

Even more happily, Dalton makes entirely un-hipster music, too: Breaker is unironic, sun-soaked and glassy.

Breaker is a song with heart and rough edges but a lustre that comes from these very same pushed guitar noises and scrabbly sounds.

There are moments when the strains of dearly-departed Wu Lyf can be heard, although this is what I wish Wu Lyf had sounded a bit more like, with soul and feeling and variety within these songs. Great stuff.

MORE: facebook.com/daltonmusic

FIVE YEARS; WHAT A SURPRISE

Joe Sparrow — Mon, 13 May 2013 17:36:01 +0000

It occurred to me yesterday that I’ve been running ANBAD for exactly five years now.

I’m not sure what to celebrate the most: the fact that I managed to stick to the premise of writing (hyperbole) about a new(-ish) band (almost) every (working) day (except weekends and holidays) or the fact that I haven’t gone clinically insane whilst doing it.

A minor landmark moment like this always induces some soul-searching, or at least simple head-scratching.

And five years is a long time online: Myspace was still the main online music resource, hashtags were a minority interest, and The Hype Machine had only begun to engage its gears in early 2008.

What does blogging about new music for five years mean? What conclusions can one draw?

These, sadly, are the best five things I could come up with:

1) Music blogging is both what you expected (a relentless grind listening to mainly hopeless bands) and what you didn’t (in the music industry, you will meet the nicest, smartest, most interesting people in the world and also the most jaw-droppingly self-interested, conniving, awful people too.)

2) Even though you knew this was true, and secretly hoped that you would be the one to buck the trend, you really will make no money by music blogging. This applies even if you’re really good at writing breathless prose, or are really well connected, or are really good at spotting the next variant of Whatever-Wave.

3) To make the money you didn’t make by blogging, you will end up doing online music PR just like everyone else, even though you secretly hoped that you would be the one to buck the trend.

4) The infinitesimally small number of bloggers that managed to segué into paid music writing careers managed it because they had rich enough parents to pay for their rent whilst they did years of unpaid internships. Get over it,loser, jeeeez.

5) Opportunities come and go; and not really in proportion to how hard you work, so you may as well work less remorselessly hard. The music industry is full of people who fell on their feet and have made a career out of it. Relax and wait until it happens to you. Additionally: forget schmoozing, networking, cock-sucking and brown-nosing. Step out of that particular race, sunshine, cos it’ll not pay off, assuming you value your dwindling sense of self-worth.

(NB: The last point is the only brain-nugget of much use, and as close to homespun wisdom as you’ll ever find on ANBAD.)

Has anything changed in the world of new music blogging since 2008? Not really. Blogging got easier, thanks to the holy trinity of Soundcloud, Bandcamp and numerous WordPress plug-ins.

The number of indelibly average new artists grew exponentially due to the ubiquity of the laptop musician, whose music has never existed outside of the digital domain.

Perhaps the biggest change has been the slow creep towards the new standard blog model: the devastatingly tedious Race-To-Be-First.

Just as the 1990′s UK men’s mags began as irreverent, blokey ephemera and slowly mutated into skin-catalogues of boobs and bums at the expense of words and thoughts, so a large proportion of music blogs now just want to be First.

Check out a post on one of these blogs, and you’ll find a Soundcloud link to the latest release from Buzz Band X and a few slung-out accompanying mind-burps, all rushed online as soon as the writer read about it on whichever cool blog they read.

It’s not that blogging was better in the past, by the way. It’s just that it was less often seen as a necessary stepping stone to a later career writing Listicles for whichever website is copying BuzzFeed that week.

Consider this new status quo as the music blogging equivalent of Reganomics: the precious buzz slowly trickles down from the top, and eventually we all get more buzz-rich – but the people who most vocally praise the system get more buzz more quickly.

Finally, here’s Jerry’s Final Music Blog Thought: (almost) everyone music blogging is scared. (Almost) everyone is motivated by fear that their tiny foot-hold in the music world will crumble and vanish at any moment, and that hard-won social cachet will vanish faster than a Record Store Day limited edition glitter-vinyl EP on Ebay.

So, stop worrying and learn to love the buzz-bomb – at its most vital, music blogging is still the fingers rummaging around the grassroots – and there are more, better blogs than ever, spooling more wonderful, inventive, smart, creative, reactive, wild, obtuse music than ever before. I’m just happy that I had the chance to join in.

Here’s to the next five years! Just imagine the giant steps Chillwave will have taken by 2018!

Whistlejacket: Demonstrative

Joe Sparrow — Thu, 09 May 2013 16:07:00 +0000

Do bands really record demos any more?

While the pop world still demands that each song is shone to a brilliant glint with super-slick studio polish, many small bands are finding that they can record their songs for a pittance in the garage and still get it out to their audience, and even on the radio if they can keep it simple.

Whistlejacket are at pains to point out that Shimmer is a demo (so much so that they popped 10 pairs of {curly brackets} around the song title), which makes me think that maybe they have huge, money-splashing plans for the final version.

(Or maybe not.)

Perhaps my point is that even demos sound good when the song is good enough. It’s the old “the Beatles sounded good recorded on four-track and played on an AM radio” argument played out once more.

I always worry when I hear a demo that I really like that whatever it is that is intrinsic to the song’s winning nature will be lost in the “real” version. So much of what makes a song enjoyable are those intangible, organic episodes that often crop up in demos.

And Shimmer is a song of many merits – it’s a dominating, dense and drifting song, with cloudy vocals that sound buried deep and pushed to the fore simultaneously. Fingers crossed.

MORE: facebook.com

Sturle Dagsland: Alien Nightclubs

Joe Sparrow — Tue, 07 May 2013 17:28:40 +0000

It’s not often that my jaded ears prick up at a song simply because it’s so downright unusual, but today I’m skipping the preamble and getting right to the chase, because Sturle Dagsland did just that.

The last time this happened, it was Seward who reached through my lugs into my brain, tickled the Parahippocampal gyrus, and ended up as ANBAD’s band of 2012.

And what was so unusual about Seward – their unique application of sound and language into music – is also the devastatingly enthralling trait in Sturle Dagsland’s terrifyingly brief Mokèlé-mbèmbé.

Well. Here’s a unique song.

It begins with a scream and ends with a flurry of sweet, rich noise. In between, over the course of a minute and a half, dish after dish of aural delicacies are placed unceremoniously onto this particular feasting table.

It’s rare to find a song that sounds so different, so unusual and so appealing all at once. It occurred to me at one point that this might be what poking your head into an alien nightclub sounds like.

Is all of Sturle Dagsland‘s music like this? No. It couldn’t possibly be. But this is brilliant and enthralling.

MORE: facebook.com/sturledagsland

Los Porcos: A Change Of Heart Doesn’t Hurt Nobody

Joe Sparrow — Thu, 02 May 2013 17:29:36 +0000

Today: changes of heart.

Interesting tweets pinged forth recently from the estimable Ryan Schreiber, the founder/editor of the monstrously influential Pitchfork.

In these tweets, he expressed his change of heart over a slightly damning review of Daft Punk‘s Discovery that he wrote back in 2001.

He gave the album a very average score of 6.4, and criticised, amongst other things the repetitive nature of the lyrics and the fact that no-one had asked for a house-prog-rock hybrid, but now we had one anyway.

And now, this is how he feels about the LP:

ryanpitchfork
I mean, there were times I was wildly off-base with my reviews, but Discovery is the only rating I can no longer find some way to justify.
02/05/2013 04:31

ryanpitchfork
A week later it was one of my favorite records of the year. And a month later, it was one of my favorite records of the decade.
02/05/2013 04:32

ryanpitchfork
And now it’s one of my favorite albums of all time. Like I probably won’t hear many albums in my life that I like more than that one.
02/05/2013 04:32

I respect Ryan endlessly for what he has achieved with Pitchfork (and he’s a lovely guy, to boot). But it’s fascinating that my experience of Discovery is *exactly* opposite to his: I adored it in 2001, and now look upon it coolly, with something approaching distain.

It also made me think a bit about judgement.

I resisted Los Porcos for so long simply because, a) they are Wu Lyf minus the singer who huffed off, and, b) that’s it.

The Hipster Hullaballoo surrounding Wu Lyf was so intensely tiresome, I simply couldn’t bring myself to click “play” on the Los Porcos songs with titles like Jesus Luvs U Baby. I was hugely wrong. I feel remorse. This review is my Ryan Schreiber Tweet Moment.

Dear Los Porcos: an apology is due.

Jesus Luvs U Baby is simply excellent. It’s everything I wanted Wu Lyf’s music to be (but wasn’t). It’s gentle, thoughtful, arch, funky, lilting, dazzling, non-ironic, non-knowing, non-meta-post-whatever. It’s weirdly honest and joyful, and Prince-like in the best possible way.

Brilliant stuff. And sorry, again.

MORE: soundcloud.com/losporcos

NB: Huge thanks to Jon The Beef for convincing me to listen to Los Porcos. I owe you one (or, as Los Porcos would say, I O Yu 1).

Aliment: Redressing The Balance

Joe Sparrow — Wed, 01 May 2013 12:37:41 +0000

Thought #1: Isn’t it funny how little Spanish music translates to the UK and beyond?

It’s not as if Spain doesn’t have lots of creative people (it has lots and lots and lots) or that its musical tastes are too esoteric for wider consumption (Enrique Iglesias, anyone?). I can’t fathom it, and even my attempts to redress the balance (Catalonian band Seward were ANBAD’s band of 2012) reflect my confusion.

Thought #2: “Ailment” is a remarkably good name for a garage rock band, isn’t it? **EDIT – I then realised their name is actually “Aliment” – which translates as ‘food’ from Catalan. It’s still a good garage name.**

And yes, they are a Spanish band. And yes, they ought to be better known outside of Spain. (On this front, they are usefully playing some UK gigs later this month).

There are no clichés in the world of garage rock, and as such, Ailment, balance their yin and yang before one buzzy note has been struck.

Holy Slap is vehemently punchy, crunchy and throw-up-your-lunch-y. You’ll not care that these four chords have been played a million times before: any kind of enthusiasm of this sort, in a perfect two-minute bundle, is too infectious to be put down.

As a side issue, I have no idea what a “holy slap” is, and it’s probably better to keep it that way.

MORE: aliment.bandcamp.com

Forest: Good Things

Joe Sparrow — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 17:10:44 +0000

2013 was supposed to be (a carefully co-ordinated) Year That Guitar Music Came Back. But clearly no-one really wanted that, and with surprise new material from Daft Punk, Bowie, Suede and Boards of Canada, it’s turning out to be The Year Of Enormous Comebacks instead.

Well, good. Guitar music never went away, at least not in the UK, where the guitar is still an assumed default.

As such, any pre-meditated comeback would have just ploughed a load of actual, hard-working bands who just happen to use guitars back into the rock ‘n’ roll hayfield.

Oh, hey there, Forest – what a good time for you to pop into this tortured metaphor!

Forest are one of those bands.

No, not just one of those bands I described above, but one of those bands: one that exist for what one could hesitantly call the “right” reasons – which is to say that songs like Good People feels like a song from a band who have picked up guitars because they feel right, and not because they look good to pose with.

These feelings may well be nonsense, of course, but what else do we have in the murky world of rock ‘n’ roll other than feelings? Anyway, Forest‘s guitars buzz like – ha! – a chainsaw; the vocals buzz a fair bit too, and I can only imagine that their fans buzz around in front of the stage too. They’re a buzzy kind of band.

Good things happen to good people. And Good People is one of those good things.

MORE: soundcloud.com/forestuk

BAYWAVES: Smoke and Murder

Joe Sparrow — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 10:00:49 +0000

NEWSFLASH FROM 2007: Gosh, isn’t Luke Haines’ book about Britpop really, really good?

The Auteurs frontman’s book is essential reading for anyone who loves pop music, or enjoys shaking their head at the demented stupidity of Britpop, or just anyone who loves luxuriously written, bilious memoirs.

Anyway, just buy it. There is no way any human being with a pulse and a set of pop-lovin’ ears could possibly regret it.

And the bonus is that, by the sheer persuasiveness of the author, you’ll believe that he really was a genius, and you’ll re-investigate The Auteurs’ LPs – and you’ll probably agree with him, too. Funny how an album as terrifically outré as New Wave or After Murder Park slips from one’s mind.

But I digress. Actually, no, I don’t – talking of outré pop music, here’s Baywaves, and their slow-motion smoke-machine pop:

The grumbling synth that chirrups up about a third of the way in made me feel weirdly happy. Figures is a song of creeping confusion. It’s a sweetened four-square guitar pop song, and yet I can’t recognise much of what it happening within it. I was left tremulous and jittery by the end of it. Great stuff.

MORE: soundcloud.com/baywaves