Of Steve Jobs’ many achievements, perhaps his most successful product, the iPod, also harboured his most unhelpful unhelpful: the driving-down of musical attention spans to a fraction of what they once were.

Why listen to a whole album when you can just skip to the single? And why listen to the verse when it’s simple to spool ahead to the chorus? It’s just to easy to skip from highlight to highlight; all peaks and no troughs.

So how would a teenager brought up on this tid-bit mentality cope with a song like Asahiyama by Menagerie - a song that never …

Today, we assess the benefits of poking fingers into many pies.

Most new bands only make it onto ANBAD once – today Olugbenga pushes his luck with a third appearance. Intriguingly, he’s achieved this new band multi-faceted hat-trick with the Holy Trinity of the modern artist: as band member, remixer, and individual artist.

So while his previous, ANBAD-endorsed band Akira are now defunct, his remix of Golden Age by ANBAD Band Of 2010 Youthless still stands as a shining example of the craft. And now he is creating his own fluently dizzy pop-nuggets.

Listen to Like An Angel With No …

Liam Gallagher’s new, hilariously-named, band – Beady Eye, indeed – released their first song amidst much hullabaloo yesterday, and for once I actually enjoyed getting swept along in the excitement.

Having now heard the tediously named ‘Bring The Light’, I can confidently claim that even his most fervent, mouth-breathing fans wouldn’t have expected the resulting cross between Saturday Night’s Alright (For Fighting) by Elton John and one of Primal Scream’s most shonky low-point Stones knock-offs.

Note to Liam: your band has a combined 60-odd years experience being rock stars. This just won’t do. Lovely production, though.

Rapids! have …

Bands have been freed by technology and the level of sonic creativity is now evolving at a bewildering pace. This much is clear. Witness the myriad genre-splinters that emerge almost weekly – their presence is driven by idle laptop tinkering just as much as a deliberate determination to define a new sound.

Even the most trad-rock We Do What We Do And If Anyone Else Likes It That’s A Bonus band are tempted to fiddle with their demos a bit if it’s been recorded in Fruity Loops.

Val-d’Isere are not the first band to take all of this touchpad-dithering to …

Collectives, eh? They’re the new everything.

As usual, blame the internet and its free-thinking ways. I don’t know how the progressive thoughts of a few neo-hippy geeks sits with you, but if collaboration and sharing are the results, then pass me the sick bucket. Everything was better when a few wise cigar-chomping sages controlled the destiny of the hungry many.

Only kidding, of course. This kind of operation is so vastly superior to what went before, its almost silly.

Working as a collective must be just simply easier – whether your collaboration is musical or organisational, the grinding weight is …

Writing about new bands is the fun bit. Wading through acres of PR email bluster to get to the bands is the hard part.

PR emails are a necessary evil – without them I’d have a lot more spare time in my life and would certainly have heard many fewer dreadful Evanescance sound-a-likes that hopeful/stupid PRs think I’ll some how find fascinating.

And yet I would also have missed out on a a raft of thrilling new artists. Thrilling new artists like Li Daiguo, who, on the strength of the PR blurb, ought to have been a truly hellish prospect. …

Good old Liam Gallagher. He never lets us down. It was always pretty obvious that behind the mad-fer-it hoolie swagger there was a fruitcake mind. One who will still be prancing around on stage when he’s 70. One who is capable of reforming Oasis as Beady Eye.

1908, though, knocks Liam’s barminess into a cocked hat. 1908 is beyond nuts, beyond any definition of ‘normal’.

Take Music For Harold To Eat Houses By. No, please. It’s frantically, skin-crawlingly, eye-scratchingly INSANE. If you plugged a 3.5 mm jack into Jeffrey Dahmer’s head, and recorded the results – …

Someone told me that Rizzle Kicks are students at the BRIT School of Performing Arts. This strikes me as extremely odd.

The BRIT School is an industry crud-factory that whelps out ‘new talent’, who then get record deals suspiciously quickly, suspiciously win carefully orchestrated ‘Next Big Thing‘ online polls and then suspiciously win BRIT Awards.

This approach  might sell records, but it also means we have to put up with the likes of muddy-voiced warbler Adele, the mind-shreddingly annoying Kate Nash and The Singer From The Kooks Who Thinks He’s Cool.

So what in the blue blazes are …

Comparing one band with another is a mindless, but pretty much necessary, evil.

As a hack keyboard-basher, I try to avoid it as much as I can, but sometimes you’re left with no other option: how else to describe bande du jour The XX as anything other than ‘drab Zero Seven copyists‘?*

So when I heard Evan Voytas described as ‘the American M83′ by both those who have read his PR company’s press release and those who haven’t, my interest was piqued and repulsed at the same time. This is usually a good sign.

The ingredients are there in …

All music recycles the past – it has to in order to generate new ideas, just like any other art form. But it’s safe to say that, within the realms of guitar music at least, this retrospective thievery has become the ends and not the means.

‘So what?’, you might say. But when bands steal ideas, attitudes or sounds from the past and fail to add their own splash of colour to the mix, then we’re all being short-changed, and the bands become, essentially, tribute acts.

And if I want tribute act, I’ll brave the onslaught of weak puns …