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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Apparently there's some election taking place at the moment. You'd think the news services would have made more of a fuss about it. I wasn't sure if thrusting young Turk Obama or wrinkled old veteran McCain would have got my vote if I were eligible, but then i saw this video and my mind was made up instantly. Such is the power of an inspirational, heartfelt piece of music.

Here at A New Band A Day, our political experiences extend as about as far as occasionally listening to Rage Against The Machine for ten minutes, until the never-ending slap-bass causes objects to be hopefully thrown towards the 'off' button. The only vote for change we'd really like to endorse is the start of a new world where our old buddies Scouting For Girls would be locked into a room with a hungry tiger as a matter of course.

In this brave new world, Top of The Pops would be back on TV, every night; Jarvis Cocker would be Prime Minister and any band that didn't meet the criteria of 'just don't sound anything like The Kooks' would join Scouting For Girls in the Tiger den. This means that Today's New Band would, thankfully, be saved, and deservedly flourish.

Collapsing Cities are the band that probably hold the record for 'Most mind-numbing trip in a Transit van just to get to rehersals', as they, apparently, live in both London and Aukland. Perhaps they meet in Dubai to discuss which whether to buy some new cymbals or not.

Whatever their travel arrangements, their music doesn't show any signs of weariness - Fear Of Opening My Mouth is a tinny, droning suicide/love song that pauses to declare "If I'm still a telemarketer next year, I think I'll end my life" before zipping off again, all hi-hats and lovely, simple guitar noise. It's a song which feels like it should be accompanied by colour-leeched videos from the early 1980's of children playing in the shadow of horrible high-rise flats. Hope and despair, see?

I could identify the moment I realised that Collapsing Cities were an actually very good band, and it was the point in Or So I Said, just when I was hoping a guitar break would begin and wrench the song off to new exciting places, it did just that - and did it perfectly, too.

So, vote, if you can, or want to, but only vote for something you really believe in. I believe in good music. I voted for Collapsing Cities. Cast your vote here.

Labels: drone, not-quite-NOISE, suicidal tendencies

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Williams Syndrome is a brain disorder. Those who have it often display likable symptoms - extraordinary love for music, unusual communication skills and a general happiness, whilst lacking in common sense and predictability. Today's New Band, Oreaganomics, personify all these things, playing fast, loose and carelessly with all the noise they've just realised is at their disposal.

So then Happy Plate is a fairground organ gone bad, wild, disordered and drifting in and out of coherency; the happy-sinister music you'd expect to be playing when the Joker appeared in the 1960's TV version of Batman. It's a hip-hop skip through a dream where everything is in terrifyingly bright Technicolour, until the buzzy lo-fi guitar ending that's as welcome as it is unexpected. Iceberg shuffles insistently, tramping a rough beat over and over, obliterating and then re-discovering itself again.

Leaping sideways just when you don't expect it, I Feel Fine is as washed-out as Fabio's jeans, albeit with less tightly defined buns and much more substance. It swishes back and forth like a lazy wave humping a beach, sparse and loose.

Oreaganomics give you an idea of what today's music would sound like if all records were still pressed onto wax cylinder. Spasmodic, restless and inventive, they burst with eclectic frenzy, over and over again. Great. Let Oreaganomics melt your mind here!

Labels: deranged, not-quite-NOISE, Pick 'n' Mix

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There's a lot to be said for precision and organisation. Streamline your life for mega profit! A tidy home is a tidy mind! De-clutter your surroundings for SUPER ZEN! There's a reason that Chuck D is such a furious individual, you know - he hasn't tidied his Rumpus room for years.

Whilst the idea of Chuck D calming down purely because he's broken out the Dustbuster might be slightly* untrue, there really is as much to be said for disorganisation too. OK, so a desk chock full of papers might cause your plate of toast to fall to the floor, inevitably butter-side down; but how else would you find out whether you like the taste of floor fluff on your toast or not?

The point is that apparent chaos can have pleasant, unexpected results. Today's New Band don't seem to merely thrive on the unexpected noise that's made as they bash instruments, but have adopted it as an ethos. They're the appropriately named Munch Munch, chomping, as they do, through instruments, sounds and styles, all with fabulous disdain for convention.

The gloriously bonkers-named Endolphins is a twinkling frenzy of invention, clattering, shimmering and splashing all over the place through all of its 3 minutes - and yet there's a lovely melody that occasionally resurfaces when it feels brave enough. Wedding begins in barely-there chaos, all noise and no direction, before suddenly transforming into a super-fun fairground organ-led pop song, and then reinventing itself for a second time in the same song a few minutes later.

Gloriously deranged, Munch Munch are flailing, crazily, sticking thumbs into pies here, there and everywhere and yet managing to pull out a plum each time. Welcome back, insanity. Embrace it wholeheartedly here!

*wholeheartedly

Labels: creative overload, not-quite-NOISE, wandering minds

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There's a short documentary knocking about the internet about the making of Public Enemy's astonishing It Takes A Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. In it, one of the Bomb Squad production team explains that when recording the album, they wanted to bring the noise to the fore, to disorientate and shock the audience. "The Noise", he explained, wasn't just some half hearted hip-hop shout-out to be "Brought", like the song Bring the Noise might suggest, but was a whole alluring entity to itself: every single noise coming at you all at once. It's an interesting concept that neatly sums up Public Enemy's uncompromising bombast.

The funny thing about noise is that what one person considers beautiful another will find execrable. This almost fully explains the bewildering nature of the enduring popularity of The Kooks, but not quite. Sometimes noise production doesn't connect on the usual musical level, but in a way that engages another part of the brain. Today's New Band, Kontakte, make music like this.
Two And A Half Thousand Miles is obscenely spacious, and is probably the music you'd hear if you lay dying in the middle of the Mojave Desert. Ghosts of Electricity drifts by calmly, interrupted now and then by a sinister hiss - punctuating the song with some sort of urgency. The remix, by Electric Loop Orchestra is as good, if not better, picking up the slack and bashing you about the head, phasing frantically and creating a song through a twin enjoyment of melody and mind-warping effects.

Disorientation then re-orientation. Familiarisation, then enforced bewilderment. This isn't always music, shifting from discernible melody to heaving fuzz with ease. It is, however, definitely worth a listen.

Labels: not-quite-NOISE, polarising, wandering minds

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The weekend already! It's been a weird week on A New Band A Day. Coherency is low on the ANBAD agenda at the best of times, but this week we've been all over the shop like Amy Winehouse on DisneyLand Paris's new ride, Journey to the Centre of Crack Mountain.

We've romped between super lo-fi tinkling with Magpied and the sleepy bleeps of oMMM, via the rollicking insanity of the Velvet Orchestra and the jaunty jangles of Buen Chico. So in some ways, Today's New Band, The Joy Formidable, is a bit like the conclusion at the end of a high-school essay, albeit an essay that begins, "What is a New Band? The dictionary definition of a New Band is...".

That is to say, The Joy Formidable are tinkling, sleepy, rollicking and jangly all at once. This is a Very Good Thing, and can be plainly heard for yourself on their track Cradle, a driving pounder of a song, which, with its "Woo-woo-woo" male/female vocals, sounds, frankly, a bit like what My Bloody Valentine would sound like without quite so many layers of fuzz. Austere punches its way forward bluntly but delicately, leaving you sure of their intent - to RAWK, but in a measured way, slightly reminiscent of Yeah Yeah Yeahs in 'noise' mode.

I usually wouldn't compare bands to others - it's mainly unhelpful - but look, I've just done it twice. Maybe it's because The Joy Formidable are really good, maybe it's because I'm feeling lazy. I hope it's the former. Even more thrillingly, all their songs are FREE! to download at their MySpace page, and their's even a remix by old friend of ANBAD, Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs! What more could you ask for, really? Listen to their great stuff NOW, here!

Labels: not-quite-NOISE, sleepy, unsigned

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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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Life is cyclical. Just as day follows night, high tide follows low tide and a spell in jail follows Pete Docherty's latest proclamations of sobriety, after yesterday's Tinnitus-induced/-replicating NOISE-fest from Kayaka, it was inevitable that Today's New Band would be a less thrash-tastic affair all round. As my Public Enemy-based tinnitus fades slowly into the background and telephones become helpfully audible again, the choice of music that my throbbing ears can cope with is still severely limited.

However, choosing non-ear-threatening music is to wander through a minefield of awful sounds. Soft 'n' smooth jazz-moron Kenny G would be sonically inoffensive, yet could cause Death By Bland. So what is needed is a band that is exciting enough to be enjoyable but one that doesn't utilise powertools as their main instruments.

Step forward Today's New Band, Heartbeeps. Perhaps the best description for their sound would be 'Not-Quite-Noise-Rock' - there is a lovely drone-iness to their music, which is a happy marriage of super lo-fi and super-melodic. Glacial Valleys is probably their best song, clunkily lo-fi, vaguely Beta Band-ish, whilst Tramwajs is a symphony on toy instruments, nicely strained vocals and a male voice choir singing through paper cups. Heartbeeps sound homemade and unfocused, but in the very best kind of way, like a child's telescope made out of toilet rolls.

Listen to their songs at their MySpace page here!

Labels: lo-fi, not-quite-NOISE, toy instruments

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