Over the past couple of days, ANBAD has thrown all its possessions, including the incredibly weighty and seemingly less-important-with-each-passing-day CD collection, into a garage and headed over to New York for a few months.

This in itself is exciting for all sorts of reasons; but will chiefly allow plenty of opportunities to fully take advantage of NYC’s thriving, bustling new band scene and showcase plenty of New Yorkian talent.

(We could call it A New (York) Band A Day, or something. I’ll get back to you on that one.)

Anyway, having presented myself with such a unique cultural opportunity, …

Oh Alex James from Blur. Alex, Alex James. From Blur.

You once blew a  million pounds on Champagne. You were once the bassist in the brightest, breeziest Britpop band of all.

Then you made cheese. This is fine. I like cheese. My sister met you, and said you “smelt of cheese from three feet away,” which just enamoured you to her even more.

Now you hang with right-wing dolts at dull music festivals, make processed cheese for a KMART-owned company and write articles praising McDonalds for a Murdoch-owned right-wing tabloid.

Alex James. Pour your cheese. Pour your …

Once again, a mere band name influences ANBAD’s choice of featured artist.

And once again, this ludicrous intuition serves ANBAD well: welcome Wet Nuns, a band whose very nature makes the niggling question, “I wonder if I’ve featured these guys before?” entirely superfluous – as if a name like that would be quickly forgotten.

The one element of Wet Nun‘s persona I couldn’t grasp from their name alone was the type of music they made.

And then I listened, and slapped my forehead: of course they make trashy, gut-busting, lead-heavy grind-blue-rock. It was almost too simple.

 …

Sometimes people ask me “where music is going next.”

These are people labouring under the misapprehension that I, as a music blogger, have my “finger” on the “pulse”, when actually, nothing could be much further from the truth.

Regular readers know that ANBAD is not good at predicting and riding new waves of genrefied interest.

Today’s new band, The Drum, are probably hoisted high on a wave of their own creation however, and so for once maybe ANBAD is near the front of the curve. Or not. You choose.

What is fairly clear to these ears is that …

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Remember last time I asked you to check your pop calendar?

It was just before Christmas, and you’ll fondly remember how we all marvelled at the fact that not only was 2012 close, but how the BRIT Awards 2012 were also agonisingly within our collective grasp.

Well guess what? The UK’s annual musical blowout is now within spitting distance, arriving on February 21st.

Not that you’d want to expectorate anywhere near it of course; what with our aunties’ favourite rambunctious autobiography-shifter – that’s James Corden, of course – hosting an event that promises …

There’s a certain theatricality subliminally associated with rock ‘n’ roll.

We all want the garish outfits, the ludicrous behaviour, the out-there posturing: witness The Darkness‘ unexpected – but entirely understandable -rise to fame a few years ago.

It’s just that most of us now hide that desire under the guise of being ”cool’.

Cool doesn’t want silly hats, or outlandishness, or fun: it wants a bunch of weedy music snobs in leather jackets glaring at us from under their ruffled hair.

Felix Hagan understands that to reject this image of cool is to move out of the pack, and its …

Now that the ANBAD Midweek Mixtape is merely a conduit for another picture of Alex James pouring molten cheese onto something, the pressure is well and truly on.

Sometimes it’s a struggle to find a suitable, current, timely cheese victim. And sometimes, Justin Bieber dresses up like Gary Glitter, and it all seems just a bit too easy. Thanks Justin.

And so, on with the first Mixtape of 2012.

FIRST! Since being named Britain’s Best New Band by, er, ANBAD this time two years ago, Egyptian Hip Hop have been relatively quiet. And now we know why. It’s because …