>Today’s New Band – Castrovalva

>I remember stumbling out of a nightclub once at 3am, to be greeted by a crowd of several hundred people, all looking up to the night sky. In those situations, it is impossible not to involuntarily crank your own neck upward too. The moon was surrounded by a large, perfect, circle.

The ring stayed there and we stood, rooted, for a long time, to see what would happen. Nothing did, apart from a renewed sense of wonder at the confusing beauty of the world, a realisation that we are just tiny, insignificant specks of nothing in a vast, uncaring universe, and the usual onset of 3am munchies.

Today’s New Band, Castrovalva, have surely also pondered on the unfathomable nature of infinity. Their music is overwhelmed with menace, chaos and dread, and we are just passengers, swept along or aside as the wild sound deems necessary.

My Father Bleeds History screeches into life, then delivers a slab of heavy, unforgiving noise, interrupted by electronic howls. The effect of all these layers of noise is not a grating head-shred, but bleeds into soft, white, enjoyable noise.

Triceratops clatters in the true sense of the word; a slew of sloppy destroyed drums and outrageously distorted instruments. Making music in this way must be almost illegally enjoyable.

Music like Castrovalva’s is to be enjoyed in any way you like; dumb noise blast, careful deconstruction of rock normality, whatever. There are no rights or wrongs. Castrovalva are the eight-track cassette for a certain-death trip to the edge of a black hole. Listen here!

>Today’s New Band – Male Bonding

>Some bands, as we know, make records that are documentation of their live shows, and others perform live shows that are attempts at recreating their records. Neither is inferior – just an indicator of the band’s core ethos. So are Today’s New Band better live or on record?

That might depend on your idea of ‘better’, of course. Male Bonding make records that are a delicate balance between generic thrash (headbanging live gigs) and obtuse guitar weirdness (chin-stroking live gigs), and in doing so, create music that lives in its own space that is better than both.

Pumpkin shoots a dart to the centre of the male desire for rowdy singing, with a bludgeoning chorus that’s a cross between a football crowd celebrating a goal and cute 60’s surf-pop, all drowned in the white noise of a battle between guitar and cymbals.

Years Not Long is a headlong rush into similar territory; raw, powerful and jumpy sounds are caressed by lyricism that’s both gentle in intent and brutal in execution.

Male Bonding have an appropriate name. They love noise, energy and VICTORY. Their songs are just that. They don’t need to be anything else. Great. Listen here!

>Today’s New Band – Drumcorps PLUS! Rolf Harris!

Annoying people is easy, even when you don’t try. I recently received a Stylophone for my birthday, and even in my most concerted moments, when I’d stopped making ‘Weeeeee-ooooo-eeeee’ noises like an over-excited six-year-old, the awful piercing noises resulted in threats of violence.

The stylophone has had a surprisingly distinguished history in rock music, as long as you ignore the determined efforts of Rolf Harris. David ‘D-Bo’ Bowie used it, as did Pulp, Kraftwerk and Orbital, all charmed by the Stylophone’s whiny, basic, electronic whistling. It’s slightly disappointing for us mere mortals that, when placed in expert hands, something as basic as a 1960’s ‘pocket’ organ can be used to make actually great songs, as opposed to mindless buzzing.

Today’s New Band, Drumcorps (geddit!?), are an unabashedly end-of-the-week act. Not for Aaron Spectre (for it is he) is the delicacy and subtlety of a novelty instrument like the Stylophone.

His philosophy is, “If it don’t clank, don’t record it,” and so his songs are inevitably noisy, disturbing affairs that are what hell would look and sound like if the devil designed it on a Commodore 64 in breaks between jamming with Atari Teenage Riot. Down is a spastic, grunting shove in the back from a sinister stranger, thrashing and screaming fear like a cornered animal. Thin Retro God batters your ears into weeping submission with guitars that sound like awful machines, vocals that sound like a voicemail from Thor and drums that sound like your heartbeat after being directly injected with adrenalin.

Drumcorps make music that turns most of us into genre tourists – you’d like to go and have a listen now and again, but you wouldn’t want to get stuck in a room with dedicated fans, for fear of losing teeth or limbs in an inevitable mosh. But the music is a wild eye-opener and considerable relief from the safe, bland indie that unfortunately blights our lives. Re-boot your mind here!

Next week on ANBAD – aside from all the delightful new bands, there’ll be a new installment of What Happened Next? where we take a look at the bands that graduated from the ANBAD School of Dubious Distinction to the real world of SUCCESS!

>Today’s New Band – Gum Takes Tooth

>This time of year usually requires an anti-spring clean. Whereas in April, the compulsion is to ditch armfuls of superfluous crud – novelty Christmas presents whose batteries have finally run out, crockery that is so chipped you keep gashing your hand every time you carelessly hold them, etc. – as of now, it’s the time to feather the nest in readiness for winter. Sweep the rubbish back into your life and luxuriate in the organised chaos of clutter.

Perhaps this is a rule that could be readily applied aurally too. Summertime is all about a combination of relaxing songs to listen to in the sun and abhorrently catchy Eurohits, but now we’re plunging into the dark depths of Autumn/Winter, maybe we need a new (old) broom to sweep back in the grime.

Step forward, then, Today’s New Band, Gum Takes Tooth, two bizarro noisemakers from London.
Lofty Thatch begins at a BAZILLION miles an hour and keeps it foot pressed to the floor, laughing maniacally at all the puny earthlings bouncing off the windshield. Imagine building your own Monster Truck out of scrap tanks, oil drums, spaceships and bazookas, and then driving the whole thing through the set of Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome – your resultant noise (and probably the peril you’d create) would sound similar to this.

Another of their noise-scapades, Grommet Saga, is the sound that only you can hear inside your head when a particularly drunken dentist is making exploratory drilling into your molars. Except it’s a slightly more bloody experience.

Gum Takes Tooth: deliberately obtuse. The sound of the your immediate, unnerving future: listen here.

>Insecticide Lobotomy – Today’s New Band

>When I recently went to see My Bloody Valentine, the general consensus as we staggered out of the venue, wiping the blood from our ears, was that it was entirely unlike any other gig we’d ever been to. There was no moshing, no singing along and no middle-aged men standing near the back ‘appreciating’ the band, just a room full of shell-shocked gawpers struggling to comprehend the savage softness of the noise that was comically blowing their hair backwards and flapping their collars around.

The other universally agreed point was that the experience of having carefully constructed white noise smash your ears into submission was actually intensely calming, and we left in a strangely Zen-like state which was only later voided by cut-price rum at the Star and Garter. Still, we were left in no doubt of the powerful enjoyment to be had from ridiculous noise. Thus, push cotton wool into your ears now and prepare to be overwhelmed by Today’s New Band, Insecticide Lobotomy.

The sounds Josh from Insecticide Lobotomy makes are, in effect, just noise – but put together with such care and precision that it’s ridiculously enjoyable. Rotor Disc is the sound of you being locked inside a steel drum and then someone using a blunt circular saw to buzz you out. Toxic Waste Drum grinds, growls and hisses and Late Night Practice is deeply dark and intimidating.

The only realistic course of action you can take listening to the music is to just let go and allow it to wash all over you – a tsunami of spasmodically repetitive high- and low-end fuzz boring into your brain and removing all thoughts except acknowledgement of the noise itself. It’s a great, cathartic sluicing-out of of all other music from your mind, and whilst it’s a tough listen at times, you’ll miss it the second the sounds stop. Lovely, soft/hard, confusing stuff. Listen to it all here!

>ANBAD = The KISS OF DEATH – Today’s New Band – Everything We Say Is Fact

>THE GREAT NEW BAND CULL CONTINUES!

What is it with bands splitting up so soon? It’s painful to see them cut down before they’ve even had a chance to be in their prime. Look at the past examples on A..N.B.A.D. – the wonderful The Royal We recorded a lone, brilliant, EP and then got all grumpy and split up and then, on Monday, the super Held By Hands imploded, leaving us with just a few, lovely, sad tracks to remember them by.

So it appears that A New Band A Day has the reverse Midas touch – this is the second time this week that a band has split up just days before they are featured. And it’s only Wednesday. Perhaps we should have Bon Jovi or The Kooks on here on Thursday and Friday, and see if they do the decent thing. Therefore, take this opportunity to have a peek into the coffin of Today’s New (Dead) Band, Everything We Say Is Fact. They slipped into a musi-coma last week, and the machine was switched off shortly after. From the sounds of their FRANTIC, mentalist music though, they lived life to the full, and must have been dragged to Noise Rock Heaven kicking and screaming, because, well, that’s pretty much how their breathless songs sound.

Of all the weather patterns that get me a bit grouchy, windy days are up there with fine drizzle, but on Ewsif Hates Blustery Weather, Everything We Say Is Fact demonstrate that they REALLY hate it. Guitars grind and howl whilst the drums get punctured from the ANIMAL! ANIMAL! ANIMAL!-style treatment they receive, and, just to makes sure everyone is aware of their message, there’s about 3 or four false endings. Their other songs, like Noah Won’t Let Me On The Ark, are all approached with the same forehead-stoving enthusiasm.

You could approximate Everything We Say Is Fact‘s sound and impact at home if you put all of your pots, pans and cutlery in a bin, then climbed in yourself and rolled it all down a hill. But much easier than that is to just listen to their songs, right here, right now.

>Today’s New Band – GILDA BLISS

>The only printed magazine I bother reading is Viz. It’s a comic ostensibly aimed at adults featuring solely puerile humour. One of its characters, Ravey Davey Gravy, features it’s ‘hero’ in all manner of mundane situations – testing doorbells, walking past bleeping burglar alarms – and finding enough Rinsin’ Choonage in the sounds have Have It Large. If there is a point to all this idiocy (and this is stretching it) it is that humans love repetitive noise. It’s been well documented in less toilet humour-inclined publications.

Today’s New band, Gilda Bliss, is aware of the power of the same sounds coming at you again and again and again. The music isn’t anything that would get Davey’s motor running – their aren’t anywhere near enough BPMs to encourage the breaking out of whistles and glo-sticks – but it is a powerful force used to create spookily evocative aural pleasure. Fnarrr, fnarrr. (Damn you, Viz.)

Dead Dog Dad has a similar Zen-by-noisy-repetition effect to My Bloody Valentine’s infamous ‘holocaust’ ending to their live shows, except this time, you can simply turn it down when it gets too much, instead of holding your hands over your ears and weeping for 25 minutes. Dead Dog Dad phases in and out, over and over, like a sound-wave experiment you might have done in Physics at school. Like any repetitive noise, initial curiosity is followed by weariness, which is then followed by a zoned-out feeling of security.

It’s this feeling that Gilda Bliss seems use his music to have a good rummage around in, with other sound-slabs, Small Imperfectly Formed and The Mistake also rolling out of the speakers like an audio fog. You won’t be dancing, but you will be feeling overwhelming feelings of calm, or creeping horror., or both. Great. Listen to Gilda Bliss’ repeato-noise here!

>Today’s New Band – Microwave Window

>Jesus Christ Monkey Balls, the process of choosing Today’s New Band was akin to pulling teeth. No, actually, it was worse – physical pain is only temporary, but the mental scars from today will never fade, and will lurk in the corner of my addled mind to taunt me again just when I least expect it. It was a classic example of one of those moments when you just can’t decide what CD to put on, and end up spending half an hour staring mutely at your shelves of CDs, reading the names and mentally writing them off as ‘not quite right for now’, whilst a pool of dribble from your limp jaw starts to moisten your socks.

In the end, just when I was about to start knawing on my fists with frustration, I found the band I wanted, having skipped over any number of lovely Swedish jangly guitar bands and stereotypical French BANGIN’ CHOON merchants.

On most days those bands would have had me farting with glee, but today, the desire for a deliberately obtuse, brain-spazz noise-spewer crept up my trouser leg and grabbed me by the balls. As such, after the painful ordeal of searching for the right noise to satiate this idiot desire, one band stood out like a WAG in Lidl.

Thus, Today’s New Band is the wonderful Microwave Windows. They have no songs, as such. What they do have is mind-fisting noise that is possibly sucked from the skies of a planet in a different solar system at the precise moment that their local sun decides to explode. Microwave Windows say that they use, “the Multimode Delay Line Distribution System (MDLDS) to generate 600 MW pulses for the accelerator by storing RF power from multiple klystrons and switching that power to the appropriate accelerator sections”. This may or may not be nonsense, but when you’ve heard the sounds on their Myspace page, it’ll sound all too plausible. Or your thought processes will be too garbled to know if it is or not. Listen to their logic-destroying noise now, and then listen to a song you know and love. It’ll sound sparkling, chiming and new. Microwave Windows are an enema for the mind. Awesome.

>Today’s New Band – AIDS Wolf

>***See below for the EXCITING CONCLUSION of GLIB COMPARISON WEEK – the gimmick that wouldn’t die***

So, we’re finally at the end of a great week on A New Band A Day, and to round it off, here’s a band that will extinguish any lingering lethargy from your withered, useless bodies. That is unless you are a footballer’s wife, in which case looking withered and being useless is all part of the job description, along with painting your skin with creosote and wearing the vilest, gaudiest clothes that frankly, have probably been invented as a joke by a blind tailor who lights his cigars with your £50 notes. Actually, if any footballer’s wives are actually mentally capable of reading this, please let me know so I can contact the Guinness Book Of Records.

So, you’ve already probably noticed that Today’s New Band is called AIDS Wolf. That’s right, AIDS Wolf. Just slosh it around your mouth slowly, then suck some bubbles of air through it and really savour the name. AIDS Wolf. AIDS Wolf. I could just keep repeating the name over and over again for the rest of this post and, frankly, it would be enough. However, let’s be fair – their music is ace. If you like fuzzing noises, half-terrified screaming and what may be the sound of a drummer being murdered as he’s still playing, you’ll love AIDS Wolf. If you’re not sure whether you love those things or not, you must listen to their song Bethlehem Embargo Crystal immediately so that you can form a considered opinion. Then listen to Letter to Al Johnson, and wallow in the sound of the noise that The Terminator probably heard as he was lowered into the molten metal at the end of Terminator 2: Judgement Day.

Fry your brain, repeatedly, and listen to their noise-mentalism at their MySpace page!

TODAY’S (FINAL) GLIB COMPARISON: Bunnies playing in a field made of delicious soft fudge, cutely nudging bubbles of champagne to each other. Not really, they sound like a Wolf with freaking AIDS, for God’s sake.

>Today’s New Band – Kayaka

>Last night, the A New Band A Day “gang” went to see Public Enemy at Manchester Academy, who played the whole of It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back from beginning to end. It was a truly brilliant gig: angry, brutal, and winningly political, obviously, but the actual important stuff – the songs – were astonishing to hear live. Poundingly brilliant, funky and loud – the crowd went berserk as they rolled out great song after great song. Chuck D veered between delivering his brilliant lyrical polemic and talking, insistently and sincerely, about his political views, that I was left with the feeling that the world needs Public Enemy today more than it ever has before.

I was also left with a splitting headache and (hopefully) temporary tinnitus that manifested itself this morning and hasn’t quite gone away yet. Coincidentally, Today’s New Band, Kayaka, sounds like the inside of my head, yet better. Kayaka makes noise, unapologetically and insistently, but noise that, in terms of construction at least, is vaguely reminiscent of that other band who will be gigging old material soon, My Bloody Valentine.

Muggy Hair is tinny, mechanical and driven by a beast of a beat. Gusty Gadget Lucky Joe is a bouncing bomb in a room full of drums and tinfoil, but it’s important to note that Kayaka aren’t just making noise because they’ve found new buttons to press on their computer – there’s structure and a waft of melody under all that brain-spazzing screeching. If nothing else, Kayaka’s songs will shake you out of any Monday morning lethargy. And remind you of the dubious joys of that post-gig feeling.

Listen to their noise-mentalism here!