One of the problems of constantly searching for new bands to feature on A New Band A Day is that, having heard all the great new stuff out there, all the music on my iPod is left sounding stale and old. I'll frequently spend 10 minutes spooling through all the bands on it, only managing to think of reasons not to listen to them. Why listen to an old Mansun album when you could be playing the new bunch of craziness from Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs?

Well, as I reminded myself yesterday when my iPod picked it on shuffle, because it's great, and that's why you bought it in the first place, you sieve-memoried-idiot. Mansun's vaguely stupidly-titled Attack of the Grey Lantern is a wonderfully overblown, pompous rock epic, nestling somewhere between daft camp and deft rock heroics, I rediscovered.

Today's New Band is a bit of a change from the norm. Sincerely, Iris is a folky singer/songwriter who sticks out from the usual ANBAD fare of buzzy guitar crazies and bleepy weirdos like a pork chop in the rabbi's pocket, in the determinedly offensive words of my old Art teacher, Mr Baker.

If I'm being honest, his type of music is the kind that I'd usually skip over. The whole male voice/acoustic guitar thing usually dredges up horrible memories of Damien Rice, which is tantamount to torture, or at least a waterboarding-type 'interrogative technique', in my eyes. Deja Vu, though, is such a rambling, shuffling and urgent song that my preconceptions were rightly swept aside. Also, it's got Spanish Horns on it, for crap's sake. I love Spanish Horns.

Boys, Girls and Fools is the kind of plaintive love song which appeals to the tiny fraction of my heart which isn't black and withered, and maybe this is the lesson for today. Even if you're avowedly against something, there's always an exception that finds a gap and pierces home. However much I wanted one of the songs to suddenly explode into Primal Scream's Accelerator, ultimately, I'm glad it didn't.

So change is as good as a rest. Listen here, and keep listening even if it's not usually your thing. You might surprise yourself. Talking of change, that Irish guy, O'Bama, won too. Good on him.

Labels: polarising, simple sounds, singalong

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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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Categorisation - one of the many concepts that send the more humourless rock star into paroxysms of righteous anger - "We don't want to be pigeon-holed, maaan," they cry, whilst continuing to grind out a single style of music for the whole of their careers. Most record shops, though, bravely risk the wrath of these tortured rock 'n' roll artists, and go ahead and categorise CDs willy-nilly.

This is done mainly out of kindness, to make it all very easy for those of us who are not mouthbreathing morons to steer clear of the Best Mum in the World...Ever! CDs in the 'Cds For Cretins' section. Often though, even the most astute of the shop owners will struggle to categorise the bands that are so wilfully obtuse that you will often find a resulting 'Just Noise!!!!!!' section, usually just after the 'Experimental Bolivian Dub' niche.

This is probably where you'd find Today's New Band, Hntrhntr - a band whose love of breakneck schizo freak-out noise-mageddon is only matched by their hatred of vowels. The truly lovely thing about this kind of music is that is entirely polarises opinion - no-one 'kind of' likes it. You'll either find the short, frankly bonkers, songs on their MySpace page such as brth and ptchbtch to be ZOMG!!! AWESOME!!! or ZOMG!!! WTF!!!, with little room for intellectual maneuver. brth sounds like what you'd hear if you were mummified in custard whilst being beaten to death with spanners, and cmblst is what it would sound like if you suddenly fell into a space-time wormhole and found youself 4 miles above Jupiter, descending rapidly through sulphur clouds.

They're headpoundingly brilliant, blasting your ears with sounds from your worst/best nightmares - and you'll decide whether that's a good thing or a bad thing within about 10 seconds.

Labels: deranged, NOISE, polarising

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