Some bands, as we know, make records that are documentation of their live shows, and others perform live shows that are attempts at recreating their records. Neither is inferior – just an indicator of the band’s core ethos. So are Today’s New Band better live or on record?

That might depend on your idea of ‘better’, of course. Male Bonding make records that are a delicate balance between generic thrash (headbanging live gigs) and obtuse guitar weirdness (chin-stroking live gigs), and in doing so, create music that lives in its own space that is better than both.

Pumpkin shoots a …

There’s more to great songs than verse-chorus-verse-chorus-chorus, you know, but not much more. That thin line that separates a drab band and a great band is usually located not in the construction, but the execution.

Good songwriters don’t simply know how to move a dull pub-rock song to thrilling innovation – their songs would end up there whether they liked it or not. It’s in their blood. Perhaps Mat Riviere is one of this lucky few.

From his name, you’d think Mat Riviere ought to be crooning from a small, glittery stage, in a shiny suit, on a cruiseboat, in …

“I AM A COP, SHUT UP!” So grunts The Knife‘s The Cop, a song which brutalises your ears with wonky noise and threats of violence. This is a not-too-unusual representation of our devoted lawmen and women in pop ‘n’ rock.

Cops tend to get a universally bad rap. Speaking of which, this negativity reached its most aggressive nadir with NWA’s Fuck Tha Police, which at the very least leaves no room for ambiguity in their philosophical standpoint.

Despite their name Today’s New Band, Cop On The Edge, don’t appear to have any particular beef with your local …

I’m reading Generation X by Douglas Coupland. I’m at the right age and frame of mind to being doing so: late twenties and almost wholly disenfranchised. The book popularised the titular terminology for the end-of-80′s-early-90′s generation of youth, and I’m finding it hard to read without thinking of check flannel shirts, nihilism and Nirvana.

Thinking of the music and those times now – when MTV was still a bit rough around the edges – mirroring the music – and comparing them with the media-savvy, always-on, always-aware, always-ready times of now will inevitably lead to you conclude that we were living …

Cities shape bands. Listen to Manchester’s Happy Mondays, and the influence of a city dragging itself up from dereliction on a cloud of E-fuelled excitement is clear. The La’s jangly indie sea-shanties have Liverpool’s mucky fingerprints all over them. The Clash were born from both the racial tension and collaboration of late 70′s London.

Today’s New Band are another child of their home city. The King Blues are a rare example of a band that aren’t happy to grind out the same-old songs, but are actually trying to fuse their individual, disparate influences into something new. The mating of punk …

Mixing things together is one of those childlike pleasures that never leaves us as we’re drawn, inexorably, towards adulthood. Presented with a table of food, what child doesn’t think, “I wonder what happens if I stir that gravy into that ketchup/mashed potatoes/custard and then taste it?” It seems like only a whole load of good can come from dedicated investigating like this. The truth is somewhat harder to swallow, literally and metophorically, and surely the real reason for the glut of knuckle-chewingly idiotic ‘mash-ups’ that polluted the internet a while ago.

In the non-gravy laden world of rock ‘n’ roll, …

If you were to draw up a list of all the necessary things to make an acers band, it’d probably be surprisingly light on ingredients. The list might read along the lines of: great choruses, satisfying chord changes, Keep-It-Simple,-Stupid Lyrics and a working knowledge of what makes the audience decide to get sweaty and excitable – a list that’s temptingly short and sweet. It’s probably this innate simplicity that is the reason for hairy teenagers everywhere to ask for a £69.99 Argos guitar for Christmas in the first place.

The truth is though, that, like unicycling whilst juggling flaming chainsaws, …

A New Band A Day is in a tent for the next few days, idiotically camping in a tent in deepest darkest Cheltenham to go to the lovely 2000Trees Festival. And guess what? It’s going to rain non-flipping stop. I feel a small knot of dread building in my stomach. A knot which is accompanied by images of sitting in the ANBAD tent playing UNO for three days. Such feelings should probably be steeped in music that’s a bit melancholy.

Today’s New Band fit this bill perfectly. The Ondt and The Gracehopper are Danish, and make songs that …

I watched a BBC4 documentary about Britpop the other day. It’ll be on Youtube if you look for it. There’s loads of documentaries about Britpop, possibly because it was such a recent popular period in music, and possibly because it’s all very simple to explain: UK bands get bored by grunge, look back to the 60′s, make great songs, get coke bloat and collapse in on themselves.

However, it ended with One Very Important Thought: that trailblazing Britpop wonders like Suede, Blur and Pulp ultimately didn’t affect music much at all – the bands that traded in inane, emotion-lite …

Sometimes, it’s easy to dismiss bands for just sounding like…a band. You know – twangly guitars, drums and nice harmonies. Since the majority of bands are tyring to sound like they’ve just stepped out of the DeLorean from 1981, it’s easy to forget that not everyone wants to sound like Wire. Nothing’s wrong with that in itself, but there’s some sort of pure pleasure to be had from shunning your peers and going back to jangly basics.

Hence: Today’s New Band, Buen Chico. That kind-of means ‘good guy’ in Spanish – not that it’s particularly important – but we …