It turns out there’s quite a lot of bands named after Douglas Firs. Who would have thought? In the interests of fairness, let us list them all:

• The Douglas Firs - a ‘Jam Funk’ band, influenced by – yikes! – Ben and Jerry’s favourites Phish;
• The Douglas Firs - a contemporary acoustic duo with ‘thought provoking lyrics’ who probably don’t know who Phish is (lucky them);
• The Douglas Fir – tantalisingly singular, and in possession of a song called I Think I Loathe You;
• Douglas Firs – Belgian Ryan Adams-a-likes drop the definite article for a zany twist on

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When I was sent a link to today’s new band, I thought, in my new-band haze, that I’d been sent a speckle of actual gold – the link to the fabled Islet Myspace page.

Islet, for all of you who are clearly uncool, are the ‘underground’ band de jour. So underground that until very recently they had no website, no digitised music, and indeed no online presence at all, leaving enthusiastic fans to do it for them.

It was either a lovely strategy, tilting in the face of convention, or a cynical attention-grabber that worked. I hope …

Just how does a band simply vanish?

Death In Vegas: remember them? Four excellent albums, each largely different to the one prior; each accessible, but uncompromising; arty but not awkward; each tapping into the emotional core of the listener, yet capable of soundtracking a party.

It only took one badly-received album for them to disappear. Well, not quite – it was one badly-received album, some tantalisingly promising but aborted recording sessions with Oasis and the onset of Landfill Indie that cast them into the Great Lost Bands Desert.

Try googling them now – they don’t seem up to much, which …

Imagine the internet – all the insanity, all the zillions of disparate thoughts, all the ridiculous fetishes – condensed into song, and you will have an idea of The Zookeepers. Perhaps they’re among the first bunch of real Internet Bands: shaped not by the content, but its buzzing, ever-altering nature.

The Zookeepers craft a shuffle of too-short songs and spun-out ideas, each a statement of sorts. It’s all held together with love and sticky-tape, and songs like Chicken are blistering examples of exhilarating Pop – albeit Pop that’s been smashed up and reassembled with demented genius.

The Zookeepers – Chicken…

“Unless a person passes through some Great Experience, that person’s life will have been for naught. Such an experience doesn’t have to be explosive or murderous… often a quiet life of loneliness can be its own Great Experience.” – Douglas Coupland, Girlfriend in a Coma

This rule is applicable to bands too. There are legions of bands who were good enough to make it, but for one reason or another, didn’t. I wonder if they still consider their experience a Great one? Or whether the lack of fame and money fundamentally stunted their trip?

These thoughts will cross Twinkranes‘ …

Sometimes there are bands on ANBAD that trample all over convention: ideas like song structure, composition and ooh, I don’t know, sound itself. In truth, these bands are my favourites, regardless of whether the results of their innovation are actually pleasant to listen to or not. It’s the daring and disregard for conventional wisdom that’s the thrill more than the listening experience itself.

For this divisive reason, I try to keep these bands to a minimum, in an attempt to avoid driving readers away in droves, but I allow myself the occasional moment of self-indulgence when it’s clear that a …

Mystery is a vital component in a musician’s armoury. The less that is revealed to eager rock journalists, the more teenage fans fill in the gaps with wild imagination, mentally spiralling the band to mystical levels.

In which case, Today’s New Band, Golau Glau, must be ranked higher than The Beatles in the minds of their fans. They are reticent in the extreme. This is the email I received from them:

“”Golau Glau” are two of our favourite words that go well together. We like Wales and cats, and whales but not Cats.”

And that was it. It …

One of the real joys of running A New Band A Day is finding a band or artist right at the embryonic stage, where the qualities that seep out of their songs are nothing more compolicated than raw talent, hope and amateurism. Those three attributes are, together, a thrilling proposition – and just as likely to result in disapppointment as much as novel pleasure.

Today’s New Band , March on Moscow, is ‘boxfresh’, as a sneaker-fetishist might say, but has a spark, a barb – something indescribable, triggering the desire to listen again, more intently. At the time of review, …

I woke up this morning with a sore head and a note with a code-number on it, written in my handwriting. I was in a room I didn’t recognise and, looking out of the window, in a part of town I didn’t know.

As the memories of the previous night’s celebration with some Spanish Barcelona-supporting friends slowly returned, I pulled on my clothes, realised the code was needed to get through the security gate out of the apartment block, and tried to figure out how to reach ANBAD Towers.

Taking a wild directional gamble, I travelled across the city on …

The second gig I ever went to was to see Manic Street Preachers in 1996. They were just post-Richey, pre-Big Time and were noisier, angrier and more intelligent than anyone I had ever met growing up in Stoke on Trent. I pushed to the very front and spent a happy hour crushed against glum, milk-white girls wearing kohl and leopard print.

The Manics’ primary attraction is their wilful perverseness; actively encouraging people to dislike them, releasing hit-and-miss albums that confuse the unsuspecting. They have veered, in deliberate disorientating fashion, from smooth rock to grating punk to electro-flop and back and …