I still don’t understand the reasoning behind wilful rock anonymity. Far be it from me to dribble my mindless opinions into the ears of nascent rock stars, but isn’t the point of strapping on a guitar and recording a racket to be noticed?

OK, there have been a few occasions where shoving the music front and centre and carefully managing the photographs that appear has worked, creating the desired mystery and drama.

But by its very nature, this can only work for one band at any given time, and right now, it’s Wu Lyf (them again) that have got a …

Yesterday I was interviewed for BBC Introducing Manchester. Live interviews are fun – talking about yourself  is always a pleasant ego-massage – but one question left my mouth flopping hopelessly for answers.

“How do you make sure you don’t write about the same things every day?” is a fair enough question, and after a few agonising seconds of dead air I had to admit that there may be an element of  similarity between posts.

By which, of course, I mean that every post is fundamentally identical: 250 words of enthusiastic jabbering about new music. It’s only the bands that …

There were a host of interesting people to meet at Unconvention Factory, and not all of them were roly-poly unlikely pop stars having plaster of Paris smeared all over their face.

Manchester has a vacuum. It’s this: strangely, there is no high-profile online hub to give coherency to Manchester’s burgeoning new music scene.

This oversight has been spotted, and, as with all newly discovered niches, is in the process of being quickly filled with as many bad ideas as good ideas.

One of the people I slurred towards at the end of the night was Toby. He had a video …

Looking back now, the early 90s Grunge period seems something of an anomaly. Who would have thought that a cluster of hard-edged, anti-commercialists like Nirvana, Mudhoney and Dinosaur Jr. would actually make it, let alone make it big?

But make it big they did, and as a reward, the sludge-rock bands that they opened the door for first overtook them, and then consigned them to history.

It’s a shame that the influence of Dinosaur Jr. et al is not felt more widely, but it’s not, and I think it’s entirely unfair (and, QED, entirely reasonable) to blame Nickleback …

Band names: a relentless blizzard of terrible monikers that often get obscured, either by their musical talent, or lack thereof. I mean, the Arctic Monkeys? Oh, please. If they were a Landfill Indie band, they’d be laughed both onto and off the stage.

So, if naming yourself after mythical polar simians is just A-OK, then why not huge, nondescript exhibition centres? Perhaps then, the NEC will just bow to the inevitable, and get together a novelty tour with bands called the MEN and the NIA.

The NEC - It’s Right

It’s Right is a blind, Neanderthal …

A thrill coursed through the plush, yet tastful, environs of the ANBAD HQ yesterday, as news arrived of Tom Robinson, BBC 6Music DJ, naming ANBAD as his Website of the Week. As you can expect, much whooping and jigging with delight followed. So if today’s post is buried beneath a thick, gloopy layer of smugness, please accept my apologies.

Tom knows what he’s talking about, though, and shares ANBAD’s belief that finding truly new bands is most usefully achieved by specifically ignoring the hype, as opposed to blindly absorbing it.

So hopefully he’ll like Hyacinth Girl, a new Mancunian band …

You can tell a lot from a name, rightly or wrongly. It’s a very human response – there’s a reason that the man who devastated half the world in the 1930s and 40s changed his name. Even desperately poor Germans couldn’t take Adolf Schicklgruber seriously.

And so what type of music do you think Thunder Buffalo make? Ten points for those of you who correctly guessed ‘grimy rock’, but minus ten points for those of you who thought that predictable song titles like Be-Bop Sing-A-Long means that their songs are dull good ol’ boy rawk.

Thunder Buffalo - Be-Bop Sing-A-Long…

A New Year, a new agenda. So here’s the first new band of the new year – and they’re a band with an agenda, though they’d never admit to it. White Fang‘s songs, their image, their approach to music – it could all be paraphrased in a single, 20-foot-high flaming Hollywood-hills sign spelling out the word ‘WHATEVER’.

Crunchy back-to-basics Garage Rock collides with irrational hatred in Portland Sucks, a song so replete with juddering chords that the raw brilliance of the song itself may be lost to the delicate, the nervous, or residents of Portland.

White Fang – …

Norway: a country of intense natural beauty, endless sunshine and the highest standards of living in the world. No wonder that I Was A King make music that’s so happy the songs themselves are fit to burst, right?

Well, kind of. I get the feeling that I Was A King are a little… well, bored of all the good times, and are trying out this whole ‘miserable’ thing, you know – to see what it’s like. Naturally they partly fail, but that’s no bad thing, resulting, as it does, in songs that throb with bliss and only tinged with sadness.…

When I typed Today’s New Band’s name into Google, one of the search results was a question on Answers.com from an anonymous poster – “Can a bear’s tail break when frozen?” If the internet has proven anything, it’s that humanity’s capacity for mindlessness can always find a new, stupider low.

Assuming if you’re not kept awake at night by this kind of idiotic query, you’ll love Frozen Bears. Even if you are now pondering the brittle nature of massive mammals’ tails, try to distract your mind momentarily from such tribulations with Frozen Bears’ garage-psyche-crunch-rock punch to the face …