The endless parade of fascinating, brilliant, and fascinatingly brilliant bands emerging from Finland presents one, deeply important problem.

What about the puns? Where to go with the many easy punning opportunities lined up by each of these pop nuggets?

Sample quandary: does one crowbar ‘I’ve started, so I’ll Finnish,’ or ‘A race to the Finnish’ into today’s review of new noise-slicers KONEV?

You may be fooled into thinking that focussing so determinedly on puns is either facile, futile, or some sort of conflation of the two (so… facitile?) – but then you’d be in the wrong place, sunshine.…

Arrrghh! Couldn’t… resist… today’s… band… because… of… vague… punning…

It’s a sorry state of affairs. I’ll apologise right now. But why even try to put up any defence any more? I’m loud and proud about it now: I just love rubbish puns, and Godzilla Black have a song called Fear of a Flat Planet.

A frankly crummy half-pun, yes, but also one that conjures images of a world made entirely of still-boxed IKEA furniture, with cardboard cut-outs of Chuck D and Terminator X (Flava Flav is already a cardboard cut-out) shouting angrily at all and sundry.

You can tell…

On the face of it, Van Venosta tick all of the boxes needed to appear on ANBAD. Just examine the evidence:

New band? Duh – tick. Protagonists wary of revealing their faces to the camera lest it steals their souls? Uh-huh. Originate from Göteborg, thus satisfying Scandinavian band obsession? Yup. Song titles betray a mutual and ongoing love of weak PUNS? Hell yes.

And so why fight it? They’re pretty much today’s new band by default. It doesn’t mean ANBAD’s quality control has finally, and sadly, shaken its head and dejectedly leapt feet first out of…

>At 11 last night, a hoard of zombies, almost entirely consisting of denim, hair and sweat, were creeping towards me, making a terrible noise. I was scared.

It then became apparent that it was actually the bulk of the crowd who’d just left the huge AC/DC gig in the city centre, and the dreadful groaning was actually a terrace-chant mish-mash of Hells Bells, Givin’ The Dog A Bone and Let Me Put My Love Into You. One group of men – they were all men – had had a particularly great time, were dressed…

>It seems important to hit the ground running in the New Year. Christmas was an inevitable blur of overindulgence and snoozing, without thought of the future or the past. Come the first of January though, and both eyes swivel, panicked and wide, towards the TERRIBLE, INEVITABLE AND RAPIDLY APPROACHING future.

It therefore seems reasonable to have a quick look at the year ahead, and what might snare your attention in it. Predictably, not all of this will be pretty.

Music is all about revivals, whether you like it or not. As a…

>Here’s a horrible truth: the rock ‘n’ roll world is overwhelmingly unfair. Unfairer even than real life, where bad stuff happens randomly to whoever, whenever. In Rock ‘n’ Roll World, the odds are actually stacked against you if your band is one or any of the following:

1. New
2. Inventive
3. Good

This is a bit of a problem. Surely all of those things are what everyone actually wants to hear? And weren’t bands like, duh, The Beatles all of those things and a bit of a success? Well, yes…

>“Simplicity,” said Leonardo da Vinci, “is the ultimate sophistication.” This is a man who invented the helicopter 400 years before it was technically possibly to construct one, so perhaps we should pay heed.

Simplicity is what makes things like the wheel, as well as other more prosaic activities like picking your nose and eating jars of Marshmallow Fluff, so brilliant. Today’s New Band, Mirror! Mirror! are super-simple in many ways. They just want to have the proverbial Good Time, All The Time.

Song Wolfgang Bang has all these things in its favour:…

>Short, sharp shocks. That’s what you need sometimes. Not necessarily like receiving a one-inch punch to the throat from a previously hidden ninja when you pop out to the shop to buy the paper, mind. But an experience or – in particular – noise that shakes you from a slumber or from lethargy, is super-duper for all sorts of reasons. Laziness infects even the most thrusting young soul, and it’d be a huge LIE to say that we don’t all need a wake-up call now and again.

Today’s New Band, Copy Write This, is the aural equivalent of…

>Look, it’s the elephant in the room. Let’s get it out of the way right now: Today’s New Band has the most incredibly pun-tastic name of all time. The name Ice, Sea, Dead People is truly brilliant. Pun-laden names can go horribly wrong – remember Test Icicles, anyone? – but this band have taken the concept, mixed their metaphors and hit it for six. If I’m being honest, they would have been picked as today’s new band on the strength of their name alone, even if they were as limp and insipid as Pete Docherty after a week long camping…