I’ve battled with my brain’s inability to mull over a good song before. It’s testimony to a bad song‘s raison d’etre that the exact thing that you hate about it – the dreadful catchy melody – is the one thing that the song-processing bit of your mind latches onto, limpet-like.

Events in the petty soap-opera battle between my subconscious and musically bewildered conscious self have taken an interesting turn – yesterday I had a mixture – a mash-up, if you will – of two songs playing on my internal jukebox. And not any old mash-up, either.

This …

Has summer come or is this just a very warm, pleasant dream? Manchester, home of the grey sky, fine drizzle and more grey sky, has been bathing in glorious sunshine for the past few days. My fair skin has celebrated by turning an appropriately fiesta-hued red, but I don’t care. Sun is such a rarity in this part of the world that I’d be happy if I turned purple (and at this rate, that might just happen).

You might not expect a song called I Wanna Kill to be a summery, shimmering blast of jangly garage rock, but it is. …

There’s probably a point, in minimalist music, where the line between ‘minimal’ and ‘mainly silence with very occasional noise’ gets blurred, bent and fiddled with. At it’s finest, this type of music brings light to your soul and aerates your mind, if that isn’t too flowery a description (it is); at worst, its open-ended nature allows for pretentiousness of the very highest caliber. John Cale has a lot to answer for.

Still, the idea of putting very little noise into a song in an age when bands are dumbly making their songs literally as LOUD as is possible, is …

If you watch On The Waterfront, like I did yesterday, you’ll quickly realise that it’s a rare movie of real brilliance. Marlon Brando, in his handsome, quirky youth, has huge impact during the film – impact that even a non-movie buff like me can see. His characterisation of Terry Malloy seems ‘real’ and convoluted in comparison to the relatively staid movie traditions that dictate the rest of the film’s pace and feel.

As such, Brando straddles the old cinema and a whole new type of cinema within one role, within one movie, and you can see it happening right …

The A New Band A Day Internet Monkey has been hard at work behind the scenes recently. Changes are afoot, and shortly, ANBAD will ‘relaunch’ (i.e. look a bit different, but not too different) with a whole host of ‘new’ and ‘exciting’ ‘features’ to scroll unexcitedly through before clicking on the link to The Onion.

If you are one of the zillions of our lovely email-subscribing readers, have one last look at the old site – it’ll make you feel even more underwhelmed when the new one is whelped, jaundiced and screaming into the internet world. Otherwise hold tight …

Apparently there’s some election taking place at the moment. You’d think the news services would have made more of a fuss about it. I wasn’t sure if thrusting young Turk Obama or wrinkled old veteran McCain would have got my vote if I were eligible, but then i saw this video and my mind was made up instantly. Such is the power of an inspirational, heartfelt piece of music.

Here at A New Band A Day, our political experiences extend as about as far as occasionally listening to Rage Against The Machine for ten minutes, until the never-ending slap-bass …

Williams Syndrome is a brain disorder. Those who have it often display likable symptoms – extraordinary love for music, unusual communication skills and a general happiness, whilst lacking in common sense and predictability. Today’s New Band, Oreaganomics, personify all these things, playing fast, loose and carelessly with all the noise they’ve just realised is at their disposal.

So then Happy Plate is a fairground organ gone bad, wild, disordered and drifting in and out of coherency; the happy-sinister music you’d expect to be playing when the Joker appeared in the 1960′s TV version of Batman. It’s a hip-hop …

There’s a lot to be said for precision and organisation. Streamline your life for mega profit! A tidy home is a tidy mind! De-clutter your surroundings for SUPER ZEN! There’s a reason that Chuck D is such a furious individual, you know – he hasn’t tidied his Rumpus room for years.

Whilst the idea of Chuck D calming down purely because he’s broken out the Dustbuster might be slightly* untrue, there really is as much to be said for disorganisation too. OK, so a desk chock full of papers might cause your plate of toast to fall to the …

There’s a short documentary knocking about the internet about the making of Public Enemy’s astonishing It Takes A Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. In it, one of the Bomb Squad production team explains that when recording the album, they wanted to bring the noise to the fore, to disorientate and shock the audience. “The Noise”, he explained, wasn’t just some half hearted hip-hop shout-out to be “Brought”, like the song Bring the Noise might suggest, but was a whole alluring entity to itself: every single noise coming at you all at once. It’s an interesting concept …

The weekend already! It’s been a weird week on A New Band A Day. Coherency is low on the ANBAD agenda at the best of times, but this week we’ve been all over the shop like Amy Winehouse on DisneyLand Paris’s new ride, Journey to the Centre of Crack Mountain.

We’ve romped between super lo-fi tinkling with Magpied and the sleepy bleeps of oMMM, via the rollicking insanity of the Velvet Orchestra and the jaunty jangles of Buen Chico. So in some ways, Today’s New Band, The Joy Formidable, is a bit like the conclusion at the end …