It seems important to hit the ground running in the New Year. Christmas was an inevitable blur of overindulgence and snoozing, without thought of the future or the past. Come the first of January though, and both eyes swivel, panicked and wide, towards the TERRIBLE, INEVITABLE AND RAPIDLY APPROACHING future.

It therefore seems reasonable to have a quick look at the year ahead, and what might snare your attention in it. Predictably, not all of this will be pretty.

Music is all about revivals, whether you like it or not. As a quick example of what might happen in the next 12 months, here's two people who might benefit from this unlovable trend:

2009 might be the year when we find a group of people brave enough to rekindle The KLF's art/noise/stadium house/chaos regime again, and if Pop Incorporated start dumping dead sheep around London, we'll know it worked. Or maybe it'll be the year when too-cool-for-school ironic-facial hair supremo Master Shortie 'goes mainstream', as if his slick late-08's-with-a-slant pop sound wasn't aimed there all along. Who knows.

For us at A New Band A Day, though, the news that ANBAD darlings Art Brut are recording an album with Black Francis from The Pixies sent us into spasms of joy, incredulity and OMGOMGOMGOMG. This surely is the musical meeting of minds that will Win Big, as The Kids say. Time will indeed tell.

To keep our feverish minds distracted whilst we wait for the Best Album Ever, we'll be featuring a great new band, every day, as usual. So dubious congratulations to The Covergirls, who are the first New Band of 2009!

Yet another band unearthed from the rich seam in the Glasgow Great Bands Pit, The Covergirls' songs are musical ADHD - in turns scuzzy, twinkly and robotic. Songs like Catch The Tiger and La Casilla de la Muerte stomp aggressively just as unexpectedly as they tiptoe melodically, as if the band's kid sister has crept into the studio and is cheekily flicking the Fuzz/Clean switch on the guitar amps at random.

Riffs, clobbered drums and sweetly cooed vocals all meet in the middle, hoping to reconcile, but just end up having a spectacularly colourful and enjoyable brawl. As a consequence, songs like Say It Don't Spray It features one of the most violently choppy riffs heard for ages, and the band thrashes around to keep up.

Then, finally, in an attempt to lever more praise from us Pun-Lovers at ANBAD (but probably not), they even bung in a corker of a song title in the form of Slouching Digger Paper Waggon. The Covergirls are a jolting, fun and thrillingly noisy start top the year. Got cobwebs? Blow them away here!

Labels: deranged, glasgow, PUNS

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Here's a horrible truth: the rock 'n' roll world is overwhelmingly unfair. Unfairer even than real life, where bad stuff happens randomly to whoever, whenever. In Rock 'n' Roll World, the odds are actually stacked against you if your band is one or any of the following:

1. New
2. Inventive
3. Good

This is a bit of a problem. Surely all of those things are what everyone actually wants to hear? And weren't bands like, duh, The Beatles all of those things and a bit of a success? Well, yes and yes. BUT - here's the trump card: Scouting For Girls. Not only are they a band utterly devoid of imagination, talent or likability, but they are also hugely successful.

They have sold over half a million copies of their execrable debut album. I have been clinging onto a vain hope that this figure is so inflated because an eccentric millionaire, driven crazy by the gut-wrenching inanity of the omnipresent She's So Lovely, has been buying every copy available to prevent the general public from ever having to listen to it. But I think this might not be the case.

What is so galling about Scouting For Girls' success is that, at heart, they are a simple Indie band that plays simple Indie tunes - much like the wonderful Popguns did in the late 80's. But guess which band sold a bazillion copies of their album, and which one sold half a dozen?

Celebrate the good bands, while you can, is the moral of this story. One of these good bands is Today's New Band. Weird Gear have taken the soundtrack from a low budget early-80's sci-fi TV show and made it into music that is both enjoyable and danceable. This alone is some achievement, especially if you've ever sat through an early-80's BBC sci-fi show.

While the title of Hamm Ond Cheese is almost too pun-tastic for words, it bubbles enthusiastically along, pulsing forwards with all the electro lo-fi nerdishness you'd expect of a band that have excitedly drawn up, in mind-boggling detail, a list of every single piece of electronic gubbins they used to create the sounds.

This is all part of Weird Gear's charm - electro-instrumental nerds are still outsiders in the four-square guitar-drums-bass-singer world of Rock 'n' Indie. Songs like Moulange, synth-o-tronic and sweeping, are so out of place with music today that they travel full circle and become vital in their opposition to the norm. Cobble together a Dalek out of toilet rolls and papier maché and travel back in time with Weird Gear here!

Labels: human-computer hybrid, PUNS, synth-o-tronic

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"Simplicity," said Leonardo da Vinci, "is the ultimate sophistication." This is a man who invented the helicopter 400 years before it was technically possibly to construct one, so perhaps we should pay heed.

Simplicity is what makes things like the wheel, as well as other more prosaic activities like picking your nose and eating jars of Marshmallow Fluff, so brilliant. Today's New Band, Mirror! Mirror! are super-simple in many ways. They just want to have the proverbial Good Time, All The Time.

Song Wolfgang Bang has all these things in its favour:

1. Wonderful, A-Grade, pun-tastic title;
2. A great disco-tastic beat that drives the song along like a joyrider who's just popped on his Bonkers! CD (mixed by Hixxy, natch)
3. More Cowbell!
4. It is lyrically WISE - "On the subject of vegetables, do you get your five-a-day? Do you rubber up? Protect yourself from AIDS?" - these are lessons we could all learn from.

Don't Mind If I Do doesn't mind at all, and crashes out at you, before grabbing you by the ears and shaking you until you submit to Mirror! Mirror!'s uncompromising, uncomplicated regime of Dance! Dance! Until You Submit!

Mirror! Mirror! are simple souls who use complex music and befuddled lyrics to do simple things. Mirror! Mirror!: da Vinci's favourite band. Probably. Listen here!

Labels: have a good time all the time, PUNS, simple sounds

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Short, sharp shocks. That's what you need sometimes. Not necessarily like receiving a one-inch punch to the throat from a previously hidden ninja when you pop out to the shop to buy the paper, mind. But an experience or - in particular - noise that shakes you from a slumber or from lethargy, is super-duper for all sorts of reasons. Laziness infects even the most thrusting young soul, and it'd be a huge LIE to say that we don't all need a wake-up call now and again.

Today's New Band, Copy Write This, is the aural equivalent of someone pinching your nose when you're asleep, except pleasurable. Dubiously pun-tastic name aside, and whilst their songs are thin on the ground, the ones they do have are mental smelling salts. Pulling a title from the School of Bleeding Obvious Song Names, Twitching and Salivating is as rabid and jumpy as suggested, using all the build-up-and-drop tricks in the book to create a rumbling face-smasher of a tune. Thumping crudely yet delicately along, it'd be a stone-hearted person who wouldn't get drawn in to it's bombastic thrills.

Copy Write This' other song, Brain Food, samples an oft-visited source of vocal idiocy, everyone's favourite brain-dead mouth-breather, George W. Bush. On paper, this seems like a cheap and easy target - who hasn't heard a million jibes at Dubya by now - but the song is actually a nicely abrupt stapling-together of his most cretinous moments, with an equally nice pulsating grumbly bass-heavy carpet beneath it.

So, a great chance to hear a really new work-in-progress musician, whose early stuff turns out to be a blustering rampage through a cauldron of clanking noise. Great. Listen here and wake yourself up!

Labels: chunky, deranged, PUNS

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Look, it's the elephant in the room. Let's get it out of the way right now: Today's New Band has the most incredibly pun-tastic name of all time. The name Ice, Sea, Dead People is truly brilliant. Pun-laden names can go horribly wrong - remember Test Icicles, anyone? - but this band have taken the concept, mixed their metaphors and hit it for six. If I'm being honest, they would have been picked as today's new band on the strength of their name alone, even if they were as limp and insipid as Pete Docherty after a week long camping trip with Amy Winehouse in somewhere as irresponsibly named as, oooh, here.

Whilst Ice, Sea, Dead People may conjure up images of weatherbeaten, salty old sailors singing mournful shanties, the music they play is almost the exact opposite. If you asked them to sing a sea shanty, it would probably be played at a bazillion miles an hour and feature the word 'shanty' yelped all over it. That's pretty much how their great, mentalist, song Hence Elvis pans out, the sound of three fabulously crazy punk songs in one. My Twin Brother's a Brother sounds like they've just realised that being in Ice, Sea, Dead People is the most fun in the world - and let's face it, it probably is.

Listen for yourself on their MySpace page, and marvel at the joyful way the songs rush off in front of you like a firework. You'll be making the stereotypical "Oooooh" noises as the songs explode, spraying multicoloured sherbet everywhere, and, like a firework display, you'll wish that they just went on forever. Ace. Great artwork on the background of the MySpace page too...

Labels: a bazillion miles an hour, PUNS, sherbet

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