Cities shape bands. Listen to Manchester's Happy Mondays, and the influence of a city dragging itself up from dereliction on a cloud of E-fuelled excitement is clear. The La's jangly indie sea-shanties have Liverpool's mucky fingerprints all over them. The Clash were born from both the racial tension and collaboration of late 70's London.

Today's New Band are another child of their home city. The King Blues are a rare example of a band that aren't happy to grind out the same-old songs, but are actually trying to fuse their individual, disparate influences into something new. The mating of punk and reggae has happened before, of course, but that doesn't make The King Blues any less interesting.

On Let's Hang the Landlord they dream of a better life by considering the, er, tried and proven technique of lynching your landlord. "Let's have the landlord from the top of the stairs - we'll live like millionaires," they sing, whilst still celebrating having the time of their lives in their squalor.

The King Blues are an indication of what might have happened if Manchester's The Young Offender's Institute had kept building on their early promise - a mix of testosterone-fuelled boisterousness and a pile-up of sounds that could only really come from a large, multi-cultural city like London.

Aspirational and in tune with their audience, The King Blues are a band from right now, for right now. So listen to their songs here - right now!

Labels: chorus-mageddon, London, Pick 'n' Mix

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Mixing things together is one of those childlike pleasures that never leaves us as we're drawn, inexorably, towards adulthood. Presented with a table of food, what child doesn't think, "I wonder what happens if I stir that gravy into that ketchup/mashed potatoes/custard and then taste it?" It seems like only a whole load of good can come from dedicated investigating like this. The truth is somewhat harder to swallow, literally and metophorically, and surely the real reason for the glut of knuckle-chewingly idiotic 'mash-ups' that polluted the internet a while ago.

In the non-gravy laden world of rock 'n' roll, what happens when two rock asteroids collide? Again, mixed results inevitably ensue. For every wonderful Fairytale of New York, there's a brain-auto-euthanasia-ing Ebony and Ivory. These collaborations should be approached with extreme caution, or dodged altogether, just in case.

Today's New Band, Glam Chops, is a meeting of, amongst others, Eddie Argos and David Devant from the lovely Art Brut and the delicious David Devant and His Spirit Wife. Surely nothing can go wrong?

Well, no, nothing can go wrong. Yes, it's Glam Rock, and no, it's not changed that much since the 70's - but that's only a good thing. Glam Chops lovingly revisit the past, but unlike Marty McFly, don't muck around with it. Don't Be Glum Be Glam is just pure, mindless fun - the best kind of all. HUGE guitars, HUGER choruses and chant-along verses VAST enough to climb on and lever the earth out of orbit.

In The Lord Is A Man of War, Glam Chops, frankly, push the basic tenets of glam to it's mentalist conclusions, with a monster reverb-spazzed guitar solo and guitars so crunchy that they've probably been constructed purely from Tortilla Chips.

More fun than hot oil wrestling, more catchy than the airborn Ebola virus from Outbreak and more out of sync with today's po-faced haircut-rock posturing than Kenny Rogers, Glam Chops are here to change the world. Imagine a platform boot stamping on a human face - forever. Then imagine the face is Johnny Borrell's. Or just listen to their brilliant songs here.

Labels: actual brilliance, art brut, chorus-mageddon

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If you were to draw up a list of all the necessary things to make an acers band, it'd probably be surprisingly light on ingredients. The list might read along the lines of: great choruses, satisfying chord changes, Keep-It-Simple,-Stupid Lyrics and a working knowledge of what makes the audience decide to get sweaty and excitable - a list that's temptingly short and sweet. It's probably this innate simplicity that is the reason for hairy teenagers everywhere to ask for a £69.99 Argos guitar for Christmas in the first place.

The truth is though, that, like unicycling whilst juggling flaming chainsaws, combining all of these things is a lot easier said than done. It's also why we have to settle for bands like the Kooks et al whilst we wait for the really good bands - who can alchemically squeeze all the simple stuff into their songs - to come along. So, tip your hat, then, to Today's New Band, The Gravity Crisis, who might just have got it all right.

What's most exciting about their un-self-consciously fun, catchy songs is that just when you think they might start to wander dangerously close to convention, or repetition, or conservativeness, they veer off in a burst of fuzzy guitar happiness, tails wagging and tongues lolling. Japan is HUGE and crunchy, Animator has all the whoa-oah choruses you'll ever need and Medicine has howly, simple guitar lines that you'll spontaneously hum when you're pouring your cereal next week. The Gravity Crisis are the indie dictionary definition of early promise. Fingers crossed!

Listen to their bounce-a-delic songs here - it's like the feeling of meeting an old friend you've not seen for ages.

And Finally...

A Brief Overview of 2000 Trees Festival -

1. Mud
2. Rain
3. Cider
4. Hayfever
5. "Gong Showers"
   
6. Lovely People
7. Sunshine that comes too late
   
8. Best band of the weekend - Art Brut. Like, durrrr.

Labels: camping, chorus-mageddon, singalong

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A New Band A Day is in a tent for the next few days, idiotically camping in a tent in deepest darkest Cheltenham to go to the lovely 2000Trees Festival. And guess what? It's going to rain non-flipping stop. I feel a small knot of dread building in my stomach. A knot which is accompanied by images of sitting in the ANBAD tent playing UNO for three days. Such feelings should probably be steeped in music that's a bit melancholy.

Today's New Band fit this bill perfectly. The Ondt and The Gracehopper are Danish, and make songs that are, believe it or not, upliftingly gloomy. Somehow they combine downtrodden hopelessness with big, fuzzy guitars and create a fantastic sound that's not sad enough to make you reach for the Valium, but not uplifting enough to warrant rubbing Vick's Vapo-rub on your chest and rush off to a Scooter concert. Perhaps they're Zen in band form.

Whatever they are, they're definitely ace - as songs Demon Drive and Year of the Dog testify. They can make a chorus soar beautifully for miles, whilst remaining determinedly glum - a feat in itself. Listen to their music at their Myspace page - www.myspace.com/theondtandthegracehoper - for a gulp of their relaxing despondency.

So, remember, we're under canvas, sobbing, hoping the rain will stop, for a couple of days now. BUT BUT BUT! There'll still be lots of lovely stuff happening on A New Band A Day, so tune in and think of us as we spend a weekend wallowing in grime.

Labels: chorus-mageddon, Danish, slightly mournful

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I watched a BBC4 documentary about Britpop the other day. It'll be on Youtube if you look for it. There's loads of documentaries about Britpop, possibly because it was such a recent popular period in music, and possibly because it's all very simple to explain: UK bands get bored by grunge, look back to the 60's, make great songs, get coke bloat and collapse in on themselves.

However, it ended with One Very Important Thought: that trailblazing Britpop wonders like Suede, Blur and Pulp ultimately didn't affect music much at all - the bands that traded in inane, emotion-lite songs with huge, soft choruses, like Oasis and the Verve have spawned the similar big bands of today - I'm waggling my finger at you, Coldplay and Snow Patrol.

The point is that the early 90's were a fertile time for actually new, interesting music, before giving way back to cruddy average music. And so when I listened to Today's New Band, Sweden's Envelopes, I immediately thought of the early 90's. Possibly because their fabulous song Sister In Love somehow straddles the late 80's and early 90's, whilst luckily missing Shoegaze altogether - no mean feat. "Is your sister in love?" chants the chorus, joyously pinging from person to person in the party, kissing each on the cheek.

The chorus is so much fun, they don't waste much time on verses and get there as soon as possible, and Freejazz, similarly, is a big, fun-tastic romp through a delirous chorus. Party even is as cheeky enough to interpolate some of Bonnie Tyler's Total Eclipse of the Heart, and guess what - it works. Brilliant. If only all music could stop and deviate from here. Listen to their great songs right here!

Labels: 80's/90's, actual brilliance, chorus-mageddon

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Sometimes, it's easy to dismiss bands for just sounding like...a band. You know - twangly guitars, drums and nice harmonies. Since the majority of bands are tyring to sound like they've just stepped out of the DeLorean from 1981, it's easy to forget that not everyone wants to sound like Wire. Nothing's wrong with that in itself, but there's some sort of pure pleasure to be had from shunning your peers and going back to jangly basics.

Hence: Today's New Band, Buen Chico. That kind-of means 'good guy' in Spanish - not that it's particularly important - but we like the idea of providing Edutainment here at A New Band A Day. Buen Chico are Good Indie, in that they aren't twee, but are a bit cute; they have a basic sonic template, but without being derivative. Giving Your Gifts is a great example of this - a simple, breezy singalong that would get any indie disco dancing around its ironically nostalgic handbag.

Gold From Lead, if anything, is even more jaunty, and veers into the 'lovely' territory during the chorus, the point where wistful and happy meet, twirling around each other like sugar-demented kids at a wedding. Hooray! Listen to them here, right now!

**PS - Apologies for the lateness of yesterday's post - technical issues. Stupid internets.**

Labels: chorus-mageddon, Indie, Jaunty

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A New Band A Day Towers has been a bit of a biohazard zone this week. First there was the tinnitus, which was followed by similarly excruciating Public-Enemy-induced pulled calf muscle, and then most of Thursday was spent at home nursing a cold, thus enjoying plenty of hot baths, lemony drinks and hours browsing through back issues of Playboy. If that list of ailments sounds frankly pathetic, that's because it is. Clearly, I'm not fit to face the real world and meet it head on. I need to buff up and GET MANLY.

If you think that this talk of fitness and gymwork is all building towards a tenuous link to Today's New Band, you'd be stupefyingly, depressingly right. And so, to continue ignorantly in this vein, Today's New Band, The Muscle Club, surely never would whinge about minor illnesses like that. Not that they're so rock-hard that they don't feel pain, but by the sounds of songs like I've Never Read Anything and Alright OK You Win, they're just too busy joyfully joining in in huge, shoutalong choruses to even tell if they're ill or not.

The songs build from the get-go, as if the whole purpose of their existence is to be a springboard for the big chorus, which then pounds the listener into submission the fun way, until refraining from singing along isn't even an option anymore. If you like putting your arms around people and howling along to choruses in nightclubs, this band is for you. Actually, with those parameters in mind you may well also be an Oasis fan, in which case, The Muscle Club are definitely for you - it's time to leave 1994 behind now.

Listen to their songs at their Myspace page (and download their demo FOR FREE!) here!

Labels: buff, chorus-mageddon, singalong

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