>Today’s New Band – Slagsmålsklubben – Bestival Themed Week!

>And next in our “Bands From Bestival” week…

Humour, apparently, is largely incompatible with the majority of bands. There are some exceptions – Aphex Twin seems to be largely playing it for laughs these days, and Hot Chip know how to have fun (and GASP! even dare to show it when they’re on stage) – but it’s hard to imagine po-facers like our old Über-serious chums Razorlight popping a ‘Ringo Track’ onto one of their albums. Given the choice between playing a song that suggests frivolous fun and inserting something spiky into his urethra, Jonny Borrell would not waste time in reaching for the Rawl-Plug. ‘Happy’ is, like, for the un-cool people, maaaan.

That must make Today’s New Band, Slagsmålsklubben, super-un-cool, because their music is as much fun as bellyflopping into a swimming pool full of thick yellow custard. Hopefully, songs as smile-forcingly unpretentious as Sponsored By Destiny, which splashes synths, drums and twinkly beats around with wild abandon, will make them enough money to buy enough tins of Bird’s to make this dream a sweet, sweet reality.

Malmo Beach Night Party is almost too bonkers to be released on record. It’s a manic collision of kids’ TV themes, the music played over the credits of an 80’s video game and a marimba gone crazy. If the Joker listened to music when he made his breakfast each morning, it’d be this. So happy and non-threatening that you start to look over your shoulder, just in case.

So here’s to Slagsmålsklubben, un-cool, un-caring and un-hinged. More fun than 10 bouncy castles. Listen to their borderline mentalism here!

>Today’s New Band – Soft Toy Emergency

>Firstly, please accept A.N.B.A.D.’s huge, sloppy kisses, wilted flowers and drunken apologies for their being no Band of the Day yesterday. It’s never happened before, and it won’t happen again, I promise. In fact, the litany of problems and unforeseen issues that stopped anything being posted was so ridiculously unlikely, It can’t happen again.

As way of further apology, we’ve managed to rustle up a Band Of The Day that is worth the wait. One part electronic mayhem, one part crazy yelping and a billion parts awesomeness, Soft Toy Emergency are the band to reach up your trouser leg, grab you by the balls and then drag you to the dancefloor – and you’d thank them for it.

Colourful, buzzing and twitching, MIX ME is driven by the squelchiest riff you’ve ever heard, and jerks itself around like a hyperactive kid at the school disco.

On I KNO U WANT IT, they channel the bizarro-spirit of the B-52’s and squish it into the shape of an electro-pop HIT. Managing to pull off the tricky challenge of producing a sound that is now and stylish but without any of the awful too-cool-for-school posturing that usually drowns the sound in idiocy.

Soft Toy Emergency sound like they are having the most loosely controlled fun of all time and it sounds a like a blast of monster proportions. You’ll want to put on technicolour spandex and frug yourself stupid, and then post a video of yourself doing it on Youtube – because you just WON’T CARE. Listen to their acey-tunes here!

>Mammoth Life – Today’s New Band

>I have a friend who runs a sweetshop, called Kandy Pop, in Manchester. She spends all day selling all the best sweets from your childhood – Dolly Mixtures, Fried Eggs, Flying Saucers – that kind of thing. It’s the cutest, most sugary place on the planet, and to compound the outright sweetness of the experience, she plays cute punky music all day long. If you manage to leave the shop without looking or feeling like you’ve been dunked in sucrose, then you, sir, are a stronger man than I.

So then – what about cuteness in music: as yummy and sweet as the pinkest, softest frosting on the world’s sugariest cupcake, or as cloying and syrupy as the pinkest, softest frosting frosting on the sugariest cupcake? Today’s New Band will polarise your opinion, because, frankly, they are as cute as a box full of buttons.

Mammoth Life are from Kansas in the USA. Their music isn’t cute in a Japanese J-Pop way, or in a Bis way, but in a wholesome, twinkling, harmonising way that’s a bit of a delight. Their song To Suffer For Passion is terminally bright and happy, the vocals droning and intertwining around what sounds a bit like what would happen if mandolins and violins were birds courting in mating season. It’s quite close to being a twee-er Shiny Happy People, with a driving twang, a snappy hook and a melody that bounces around like a child on a spacehopper.

Bicycle Rider is even more fun – honking horns and ringing bells, buzzing and flitting from here to there, enjoying the feeling of luxuriating in happiness. Mammoth Life aren’t just sugar-fiends on a mission to uplift though – there’s a hint of melancholy if you listen hard enough, but why would you want to do that? Just grab a toffee apple and remember how much fun it was to just have fun. Listen to their great songs here!

>The Seedy Seeds – Today’s New Band

>A New Band A Day is, apparently, indulging in Americanophilia at the moment. Over half of last week’s super-duper new bands were from the USA (scroll down for more, pop-pickers!), and guess what – today there’s another one cluttering up your ears with sweet sounds. An astute reader can draw a few conclusions from this.

Firstly, that A.N.B.A.D. band choices are entirely arbitrary and dependant on the whim of an easily bored writer, desperately looking for new things to listen to, whilst quietly sobbing. Secondly, A.N.B.A.D.‘s geographic knowledge is severely limited – last time a single continent was ‘explored’ for music, it became the needlessly localised and gimmick-y “Northern European Road Trip” , whereas I couldn’t identify Cincinnati on a map if a gun was held to my head and/or groin.

Huge apologies, then, to Today’s New Band, The Seedy Seeds, who, predictably, are from Cincinnati. They’re not content with writing unusually catchy bites of poppy indie, but even have the brass neck to squeeze a Kazoo solo into the joyous The Little Patton. Its zappy keyboard riff is so charming that the big broad chorus that follows it is a huge, lovely surprise. Earned Average Dance America, proudly flaunting its obtuse name, is a great him-her lyric over the hybrid banjo/Bontempi keyboard/accordion melody you’ve always been waiting for.

The Seedy Seeds are a great band, make no mistake. Their songs are cuter than Brad ‘n’ Angelina’s twins and similarly simple and compact. Listen to their super songs here!