It's a truncated post today on A New Band A Day, due to the A.N.B.A.D. 'editorial team' travelling all over the place on a well-deserved* break, which will hopefully involve multiple BBQs on a beach. Though, as the aforementioned beach is on the north coast of Wales, it's more likely to be a weekend of staying inside to avoid the rain, drinking warm cans of lager whilst gazing longingly at the beach outside, and dying a bit inside.

So, cutting to the chase and letting the proverbial dog see the proverbial rabbit, perhaps Today's New Band, Eyes, are just the thing needed to have on in the background whilst all the raining and non-barbecuing is taking place. Well, no, they're not. Listening to Kim and Jessie by M83 over and over again would be the right thing to do. Eyes are far too fantastically sinister for that.

Whether lurching from sleaze-o-funk on The Time Between The Time, or making your skin crawl by sampling the sound of scissors snipping, or just recording a song as crazily-named as Tunnel of Hair, Eyes are uneasy, creepy but always fascinating. Listen to their troubled noise here!

A.N.B.A.D. will be back refreshed** as usual on Monday!

*but surprisingly exhausting
**hungover

Labels: human-computer hybrid, maggots, SATAN

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The only printed magazine I bother reading is Viz. It's a comic ostensibly aimed at adults featuring solely puerile humour. One of its characters, Ravey Davey Gravy, features it's 'hero' in all manner of mundane situations - testing doorbells, walking past bleeping burglar alarms - and finding enough Rinsin' Choonage in the sounds have Have It Large. If there is a point to all this idiocy (and this is stretching it) it is that humans love repetitive noise. It's been well documented in less toilet humour-inclined publications.

Today's New band, Gilda Bliss, is aware of the power of the same sounds coming at you again and again and again. The music isn't anything that would get Davey's motor running - their aren't anywhere near enough BPMs to encourage the breaking out of whistles and glo-sticks - but it is a powerful force used to create spookily evocative aural pleasure. Fnarrr, fnarrr. (Damn you, Viz.)

Dead Dog Dad has a similar Zen-by-noisy-repetition effect to My Bloody Valentine's infamous 'holocaust' ending to their live shows, except this time, you can simply turn it down when it gets too much, instead of holding your hands over your ears and weeping for 25 minutes. Dead Dog Dad phases in and out, over and over, like a sound-wave experiment you might have done in Physics at school. Like any repetitive noise, initial curiosity is followed by weariness, which is then followed by a zoned-out feeling of security.

It's this feeling that Gilda Bliss seems use his music to have a good rummage around in, with other sound-slabs, Small Imperfectly Formed and The Mistake also rolling out of the speakers like an audio fog. You won't be dancing, but you will be feeling overwhelming feelings of calm, or creeping horror., or both. Great. Listen to Gilda Bliss' repeato-noise here!

Labels: NOISE, repeat after me, SATAN

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***See below for the EXCITING CONCLUSION of GLIB COMPARISON WEEK - the gimmick that wouldn't die***

So, we're finally at the end of a great week on A New Band A Day, and to round it off, here's a band that will extinguish any lingering lethargy from your withered, useless bodies. That is unless you are a footballer's wife, in which case looking withered and being useless is all part of the job description, along with painting your skin with creosote and wearing the vilest, gaudiest clothes that frankly, have probably been invented as a joke by a blind tailor who lights his cigars with your £50 notes. Actually, if any footballer's wives are actually mentally capable of reading this, please let me know so I can contact the Guinness Book Of Records.

So, you've already probably noticed that Today's New Band is called AIDS Wolf. That's right, AIDS Wolf. Just slosh it around your mouth slowly, then suck some bubbles of air through it and really savour the name. AIDS Wolf. AIDS Wolf. I could just keep repeating the name over and over again for the rest of this post and, frankly, it would be enough. However, let's be fair - their music is ace. If you like fuzzing noises, half-terrified screaming and what may be the sound of a drummer being murdered as he's still playing, you'll love AIDS Wolf. If you're not sure whether you love those things or not, you must listen to their song Bethlehem Embargo Crystal immediately so that you can form a considered opinion. Then listen to Letter to Al Johnson, and wallow in the sound of the noise that The Terminator probably heard as he was lowered into the molten metal at the end of Terminator 2: Judgement Day.

Fry your brain, repeatedly, and listen to their noise-mentalism at their MySpace page!

TODAY'S (FINAL) GLIB COMPARISON: Bunnies playing in a field made of delicious soft fudge, cutely nudging bubbles of champagne to each other. Not really, they sound like a Wolf with freaking AIDS, for God's sake.

Labels: Glib comparisons week, NOISE, SATAN

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Subtlety - like most things in life - can be both a virtue and a pest. It's generally considered to be A Good Thing, but then also consider that Jazz is generally considered to epitomise musical subtlety, and as Tony Wilson said, "Jazz is the last refuge of the untalented". So then, good on Today's New Band, The Velvet Orchestra, who haven't just eschewed subtlety, so much as beating it to death with blunt instruments, and even when it was dead, just kept on going.

It's temping to think that The Velvet Orchestra took a step back from events, pondered and then emerged with the considered opinion that if you're going to go mental in a room with a bunch of friends, you may as well do it with noisy instruments. This is probably the correct observation, as their songs buzz with manic energy, the band throwing everything at the song just to see what comes out at the other end.

What does come out of the other end are songs like The Creator, which may be the elevator music they play as you descend to Hell. The song jerks around wildly, thrashing with excitement and horror, and you, the innocent listener, can only hang on for the ride. In Wolves Crave Horrible Tongues, The Velvet Orchestra tread the same risky path of all-in bonkers noise-making, but again, happily, they pull it off.

Like when painting, knowing when to stop is one of the hard parts of making music, and they know when not to push harder when the temptation must be great, ensuring their songs are just on the right side of overwhelming. Great. Hear their songs right here!

Labels: a bazillion miles an hour, not-quite-NOISE, SATAN

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Oh, Satan. You and your infatuation with the world of music. Where would we be without you? Drowning in Cliff Richards and Country & Western Hell, that's where. Except it wouldn't be Hell, because there would be no Satan. Ah, the complexities of serious theological debate.

Speaking of which, Today's New Band, Eyes and Teeth, has been engaging in a furious conversation with a devout Christian on his Myspace page. This appears to be partly fuelled by the apparently devilish nature of his music - have a listen here. Whether Eyes and Teeth actually buys wholeheartedly into Satanism, or that it's just that he enjoys baiting religious-types, isn't really the point - reading the concerned and righteous indignation of the Christians who post on his page whilst listening to the Satanic music is a enjoyably ironic experience.

Eyes and Teeth's music is enjoyably dense, layered with sampled speech, manipulated swooping sound and, in the case of the song Seduction, interspersed with samples of the Rolling Stones, David "D-Bo" Bowie and NERD. Germany and Gun To Your Head allow you to have an echo-drenched electro devil-strut through songs Satan would play in his pimped out low-rider, assuming he has one (and let's face it, he probably does).

The sounds are allowed to echo around in the hell-chambers and, out pops a 'sonic sculpture' as opposed to a song. Awkwardly snooty descriptions aside, listening to this song made me realise that in some respects, the songs are pitching in the same direction as Boards Of Canada on their brilliant Geogaddi album - slightly mesmeric, partly Satanic, partly subliminal message brain-confusers.

Fun, satisfying and a guaranteed* one-way ticket to Hell!

*the word 'guarantee' is not used here in its usual meaning.

Labels: SATAN, subliminal messages, theology

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