Hail! The Planes arrive on ANBAD with an almost pitch-perfect set-up: not only were they recommended by a previous (and very good indeed) band, Trwbador, but they also have a great! big! exclamation! mark! in the middle of their band name.

Regular readers will know that the latter, in particular, really does count for something.

All hail!, then, a band who have made a folk song which transcends its six-minute limitations and unfolds – it really does seem to unfold – into a broad, chiffon-thin, kaleidoscopic swirl of colour and life.

The song flips between fluttering flimsiness and stout, …

If Jessie J is the Sound Of 2011, should the rest of new music give up now?

The BBC’s yearly predictive polling of ‘tastemakers’ is increasingly states the bleeding obvious: naming an already hyped, industry-sponsored, stage-school-whelped, lung-bustin’, tabloid-shockin’, Lady Gaga-lite singer as the most likely success story of the coming year is no huge stretch of their collective imaginations.

Whilst not wishing to feed the flames of hyperbole with the oxygen of publicity any further, it’s worth highlighting the sad incestuous nature of Jessie J’s inexorable rise: as a Brit School attendee, she has had the concerted weight of …

Cardiff is a fundamentally strange place. A capitol city with a small-town mindset. Beautiful buildings side-by-side with deeply ugly, crumbling counterparts. Money sluicing into some areas, and cruelly meandering away from others.

No, there’s nothing too unusual about these circumstances. But Cardiff’s small size magnifies these effects, and it’s the first I mentioned that has the greatest impact. It’s an important place, and yet for many, it’s simply their local town, where they pop into on Saturday to buy sausages. Mmm, sausages.

Anyway – the result is a music scene that is dynamic, fractured and outward-looking, and yet marked with …

Caveats, caveats.

Tips from readers are always more than welcome, especially when they are accompanied by such semi-praise as, ‘I think one of his songs is great, but I’m not sure. And the rest – well, I’m not sure about those either.’

Thanks, anonymous reader. Nail those colours to the mast, why don’t you?

Well, with recommendations like that, what more encouragement to listen is needed? Tom Williams and The Boat were the lucky recipients of such unbridled encouragement, though I imagine they won’t be hurt by such undistinguished praise. I’ll get to that later.

Tom Williams and the …

As usual, the internet is to blame.

Already complicit in the murder – or at least the involuntary manslaughter – of the record shop, the music press and the CD, another important part of rock ‘n’ roll has found itself at peril: the rock legend.

Freeing all that lovely information from its shackles into the public domain has an almot infinite number of positive aspects, but it has also blown a raft of wonderful myths to pieces.

Now we know that of course The Beatles didn’t smoke a joint in  Buckingham Palace, that obviously Keith Richards just made up that …

Constantly searching for new bands leaves you strangely myopic.

Tunnel vision develops insidiously and subtly, until one day you realise that the only bands who will spark your synapses any more are the most obscure, defiant and truly gauche; the bands for whom melody is a dispensable luxury and strange noise-making is all that counts.

These bands are all well and good – and in fact, they might well be my favourites – but focussing on one small niche of anything is a crime against balance. Too much of anything is a bad thing. (With the exception of peanut butter …

Sifting through new bands is ultimately a pleasant task, though inherently flawed – everyone has experienced expressing dislike for a specific band only to later find that actually they’re rather good. So it was with Lissie, whom I initially dismissed as another lightweight country-folk-esque crooner.

Now of course, I feel foolish, as I mistook the simplicity of her genuinely heartfelt and utterly charming songs for an absence of substance.

My apologies for such callous cynicism are soundtracked by such delightful songs as Little Lovin’, that begins as a quaint love song and morphs unceremoniously into a foot-stomping paean to …

Happy Mondays (of course) had a guitarist who was, variably, called ‘Moose’ or ‘Cowhead’, and Shaun Ryder himself would sometimes only answer to the moniker ‘X’. The Offspring have Noodles. 60′s band Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Titch had… well, never mind.

Bands, and their select members-club nature, are a breeding ground for mildly stupid in-joke behaviour. Part endearing trait, part eye-rolling japery, this knack for appellative nonsense is part and parcel of rock ‘n’ roll, whether us punters, with mere human names, like it or not. Even The Beatles had a Ringo.

Today’s New Artist, Beth Jeans Houghton…

There have been a few songs that, on the first hearing, the sudden realisation that what I was listening to was so good, so head-spinningly wonderful, so new, that I’ve stopped whatever I’m doing just to listen, in a happy music-coma. Off the top of my head, five of the songs that have lead to this are:

Temptation by New Order
Common People by Pulp
Bigmouth Strikes Again by The Smiths
I Love You ‘Cause I Have To by Dogs Die in Hot Cars
Leg End In His Own Boots by Ned’s Atomic Dustbin

OK, the last one’s a …

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