NB: Since publishing this post, Julian and I have conversed via email. Julian's actually a good guy whose frustration with the music industry's reluctance to give bands time to develop got the better of him, and I was just the person he vented his spleen to on the spur of the moment.

I don't blame him for his frustration - I share it - so happily, him and I have the same basic ideas and views on music, and all is well. However, the core points of the post remain important, so I'm keeping it up, though with this caveat.


Excitingly, I got my first hate e-mail the other day. It was from a man called Julian Deane, who apparently runs a company called Raygun Music Management. He manages a few decent bands. Julian said that 'most of the bands on ANBAD are shite' and that 'any idiot can post a Myspace address every day'.

Hate mail is rewarding in so many ways - it means that something I've done has riled someone enough to actually spend time letting me know how they feel. Hate mail has as much impact as the praising emails that I get, in that it further confirmed that ANBAD is on the right track - by aiming not to please all of the people all of the time.

I'll happily admit that not all the bands on ANBAD are as 'good' as the others, but only if you define 'good' by, say, the likelihood that lots and lots of people will like them, which in some people's eyes also translates into 'potential for record sales'.

ANBAD isn't about taking part in some sort of dick-swinging contest, desperately trying to find the next big band before anyone else. There are loads of websites doing that. We just want to find bands which sound like something we haven't heard before. That's the only criteria, really. If a band does go on to bigger things, just like early ANBAD alumi Dinosaur Pile-Up appears to be doing, we’re more than happy.

With all that in mind, maybe you'll like Today's New Band, or maybe you won't. Hopefully, you'll think that We Fly Ships sound like something that you haven't entirely heard before. We Fly Ships are perfect week-ending material, half relaxing and half bangin', just like all good weekends should be.

Sometimes they manage both of these opposing feelings in the space of one song - World in Reverse spends the first, loopy, misty minute threatening to explode, and then transforms into something big, fuzzy and enveloping. Listen to it and try to resist being groped by its tempting grooves and luxurious melody. You'll wish that you could be listening to it a lot louder in the same way that Orbital's albums are never quite as earth-shattering as their live, loud counterparts.

The Bears Are Dead is, frankly, a wonderful mixture of warm synth washes, clattering drums and manic dog-barking. Yes, it's verging on the boundaries of sanity, but that's usually a good thing. It sounds like an early Spiritualized song remixed by Adrian Sherwood which is then remixed again by, oooh, Mr Oizo.

We Fly Ships are as warm, loving and intimidating as getting a hug off someone who's E'd up to the eyeballs. Snuggle up to them here - maybe you'll be enraged enough to write me a stroppy email. And then read ANBAD - The eBook and work yourself into a frenzy of righteous anger.

Labels: About, instruMENTAL, Pick 'n' Mix, Tight beats

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The A New Band A Day Internet Monkey has been hard at work behind the scenes recently. Changes are afoot, and shortly, ANBAD will 'relaunch' (i.e. look a bit different, but not too different) with a whole host of 'new' and 'exciting' 'features' to scroll unexcitedly through before clicking on the link to The Onion.

If you are one of the zillions of our lovely email-subscribing readers, have one last look at the old site - it'll make you feel even more underwhelmed when the new one is whelped, jaundiced and screaming into the internet world. Otherwise hold tight and prepare for wide-ranging, skyscraping* change!

People don't like change, as a rule. In ANBAD's case, change was deemed necessary because the website looks a bit like it was cobbled together by a computer-illiterate colour-blind idiot with a mild obsession with vinyl-munching robots. In music, band after band claw onto what they know and daren't change a thing. As anyone who has attended a business seminar and is well versed in corporate bullshit will know - sharks have to keep moving, or they die. If we extrapolate this information to the music world, this makes Oasis a dead Hammer-Head.

We hold the most admiration for bands who, at the very least, try something new. So here's Death Of Concorde, Today's New Band, trying something new. The fruity-sounding Bath Partners is a jittering delight, lush and sparse all at once. Old Hammond organs swoosh about, deforming and collapsing into new sounds as and when needed. Communism is a song title that sounds like it ought to be on Side Two of David Bowie's Low, but wouldn't fit, what with it being a mentalist, mechanoid monster of a song, sampling both heavy metal riff-o-rama and fairground organs.

It sounds like Death of Concorde are eager to squeeze the wrong shaped blocks into the wrong holes, and manage to do it too, without their sounds becoming either a mess or contrived. Concorde Museum shimmers, wanes and echoes like a tape recording of an orchestra put through a guitar chorus effect pedal, always just on the right side of becoming all-out white noise. Melodic and dense, it's a soundscaping delight, pushing textures here and there excitedly.

So, as you hold your breathe excitedly for the ALL! NEW! ANBAD!, why not tune in and space out with Death of Concorde, and ease your passage into oxygen-starved unconsciousness...

*actually quite minor

Labels: instruMENTAL, mechanical, not-quite-NOISE

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We started yesterday with a quotation, and that shaped up pretty well, so here's another one: "The goodness of the true pun is in the direct ratio of its intolerability." That one was from Edgar Allen Poe, and it makes us think our writing has some associated respectability when really, it doesn't. In all honesty, we still haven't totally figured out what he's trying to say. But anyway, - PUNS! - we can't get enough of 'em at A New Band A Day.

So, inevitably, it's Another Day, Another World-Class Pun. Today's New Band is - wait for it - Awesome Wells. His music is soft, strong and long, like Andrex toilet paper, except you wouldn't want to wipe any part of your body on this - it's too good.

The Highs and Lows of... is an eight-minute long magnus opus, that starts with chanting rounds, clapping, brass and a military drumbeat and then decides that, having started with such a rich and varied sound palette, everything else may as well be thrown into the pot as well. Strings, glockenspiels, accordions and samples of big bands then all make a fleeting appearance. On paper, this sounds like a recipe for overblown, rock-star-experimenting-with -new-solo-material- type disaster, but Awesome Wells clearly has a deft touch and all the sounds are massaged gently into something that is not only coherent, but hypnotically soothing.

After that, how many people would then have the audacity to cover the Theme From Twin Peaks? To anyone who has spent hours drawn in my David Lynch's masterpiece of TV weirdness, the song has such strongly defined emotions stitched to it that this too seems like a bold step too far, but Awesome Wells gets away with it in style. Removing it almost completely from its' origins and yet retaining every haunting nuance is some achievement in itself, but to then pull it away even further into new, fascinating places, as the five-minute weird-out at the end does is evidence of a special talent.

If you combined mid-90's Tortoise with the entire BBC Sound Effects Library, you may come close to approximating Awesome Wells' sound. But you wouldn't come anywhere near to his precise, caring control - the sounds ebb, flow and weave together to the point where any lingering doubts are assuaged by the gleefulness of the sonic journey you've just taken. Make yourself feel underwhelmed by your comparative lack of talent here!

Labels: actual brilliance, instruMENTAL, Pick 'n' Mix

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Jazz, as we all know, and have touched upon before on A New Band A Day, is the last refuge of the untalented. Maybe it's a bit like golf and opera, in that the thought of partaking in it becomes more tempting as you get older. The element of Jazz which is enticing, I suppose, is the free-form, deliberate, structurally-deformed part. This idea has been applied to rock by a whole load of bands, who, for their efforts, were then horribly lumbered with the tag of 'Post-Rock'.

Today's New Band, Chrik, aren't post-rock, but do share an ethos with Mogwai et al. Their music though, is less wide-open and grand, and more youthful, energetic and sprightly; just like in their song Ben Nevis - an enjoyable zoom through changing landscapes, never becoming truly wearisome - much like a stroll around the mountain* itself.

Their songs wander without meandering aimlessly - some feat considering the sheer volume of tedious crud of the same ilk out there. Clicksticks or Stickclicks is a genuinely lovely, slow-burning, tinkling song that loops around itself like a happy Boa Constrictor.

Jazz for The Youth Of Today? Maybe, but then Chrik are entirely enjoyable, which is an immediate improvement. Listen to them here!

And incidentally, yes, the name 'Chrik' is a portmanteau of the two names of band members, Chris and Rik. POP FACT.

*it's just a big hill, let's face it

COMING NEXT WEEK: A New Band A Day's 100th band! Stay tuned for Centenary Celebrations!

Labels: instruMENTAL, loopy, tinkling

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