Here’s a life lesson or two – coming back to a stereotypically grey and drippy Manchester after spending 5 days dozing in assorted Madrileno plazas is a bit of a shock to a now cosily red-wine-’n’-chorizo-addled system. But just as shocking was the ear-shredding, wholeheartedly MOR music to be heard everywhere, in a city that I thought too vibrant, alive and vibrant (again) for this kind of aural horror.

I daren’t go into too much detail, but if you want to spend a week bombarded with 15-year old Mike and The Mechanics songs that you were only to glad …

Who doesn’t like to see themselves as an idealist? I’d like to think that A New Band A Day features a wide, measured, variety of bands; a bit of Hip-Hop here, some Bassline there, the odd Atmospheric Sludge Metal group now and then. In fact, a quick pootle through the annals of ANBAD reveals that I’ve mainly featured indie guitar bands.

These bands are my hard-wired staring point. The first gig I went to see was Suede, the first single I bought as a pimply teen was Kung Fu by Ash, and the first album I illegally copied …

When it was announced, I thought The Verve headlining Glastonbury Festival was a bit of a weak move – The Verve have been split and silent for years now; Richard Ashcroft’s solo output has been the sub-MOR equivalent of dipping your head into a stagnant duck-pond; surely they’re doing one more comeback for tax reasons, etc.

Watching their headline set on TV, I realised that, fortunately, I was super-wrong. Instead of the expected clunky phoning-in of their 90′s hits, they were all the things they used to be, and more. Epic songs about love and loss from a band that …

One of the really hard things to resist when reviewing bands is to draw comparisons between them and other, more established, bands. On one hand, it gives the reader an instant point of reference, but on the other, it does neither party any favours. No band sounds exactly like another (apart from Razorlight, who seem to have cribbed the Boomtown Rats’ sound wholesale). But when a band comes along that sounds like a combination of three great bands – let’s say, The Fall, Pavement and The Pixies - wouldn’t it just be more stupid not to mention the fact?…

What is it to be called ‘Indie’ today? Everyone’s Indie now, bastardising this once hard-earned tag and using it as a selling point as if it was another adjective in an estate agent’s brochure. The Kooks are now probably associated most closely with ‘Indie Rock’ in many people’s minds, and that tells a whole sob-worthy story in itself.

So describing a band as having a 90′s-Indie-feel could seem like a criticism, but in the case of today’s new band, The Last Army, it’s a re-affirmation of how indie music once was. As an output of music, The Last Army has …