>Today’s New Band – The Complete Adventurer

>How do you like to end your week? In a rush of activity, clearing your desk/mind before the weekend? Or do you choose to take it easy on yourself from lunchtime onwards? Those Friday afternoons are a great bit of reflection time, and whilst a nostalgic glance backwards is a pleasant indulgence at the best of times, on a Friday, when winding down is the name of the game, it seems to fit that much better.

If you can identify with that, then Today’s New Band might be just right for you, for now. I suppose in some ways, the fun of listening to The Complete Adventurer‘s songs like How Much Does a Polar Bear Weigh is nearly 50% nostalgia. Not that they sound old-fashioned – it’s just that, as a band, their ethos seems to have rushed in from another time. It might be the Pavement-y nature of the half-spoken lyrics, or the enjoyment derived from the knowledge that a guitar can make big, bowel-loosening crunchy noises, and not just the tight jangle that is de riguer, but whatever it is they’re doing, it seems worlds away from the norm.

The Complete Adventurer are pleasingly different because they have had the audacity to look a bit beyond Blondie and U2 when deciding their influences. The Meat And The Milk That Raised It, is, like its title suggests, pretty feral, the expansive guitars and thrashing drums battling with shouty vocals for attention, and yet attaining just the right balance.

If that description makes The Complete Adventurer sound like some awful thrash or two-bit punk band, I apologise. They aren’t. They’re strangely controlled, engaging and dynamic, but coupled with the need for shouty insanity. This is a good thing, right? Right. Listen to them 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!

>My Amiga – Today’s New Band

>When I was a young ‘un, before I bought a guitar and sat in my bedroom mangling Smiths songs and wondering if I could convince my parents to let me paint my bedroom walls black, i used to while hours away playing on my Sinclair ZX Spectrum. It had sticky rubber keys, 48k of memory and the games took five minutes to load off a C90 tape. It was my nerd-baby though, and I’m still proud that I completed Magicland Dizzy without losing a life. These halcyon days were tarnished a bit though, when my friend Dan got a Commodore Amiga for Christmas – a computer which made the Spectrum appear weak and feeble in comparison (which, of course, it was).

The Amiga was ace. I presume Today’s New Band, My Amiga, harbour similarly nostalgic feelings about unwieldy, grey early-90’s computers. They’re from Liverpool and have that seemingly genetic Liverpudlian way with treble-tastic rock melodies. My Amiga are what the Famous Five would sound like if they formed a band on their days off from drinking lashings of Ginger Beer and solving suspiciously family-friendly crimes.

That is to say, My Amiga sound young and sprightly enough to make the inevitable A&R men at their gigs feel like fuddy-duddies with try-hard haircuts. Though to be fair, they’re like that anyway. Thank Heavens for Little Victories is a surprisingly deft and floaty throwaway pop tinkle, with a shouty bit to prove that they’re actually of drinking age. Untitled is a brisk and jangly pop fizz which explodes frenetically with youth, the sonic equivalent of a child trying to build the tallest lower of Lego possible, and then laughing manically when it falls over.

My Amiga are as fun as drawing the curtains on a sunny day and playing Sensible Soccer until teatime. Though you probably won’t get wrist ache from the joystick. Unless you really like them. If you known what I mean. Listen to their songs here!

>IT’S GLIB COMPARISON WEEK ALL WEEK! – Today’s New Band – William

>After the RIP-ROARING SUCCESS of the lazy comparisons undertaken whilst reviewing last Thursday’s Band Of The Day, Monster Island, I took a long, deliberate ponder during the 25-minute ‘Holocaust’ brain-destroyer section at the end of the My Bloody Valentine gig on Saturday. Just before their mind-bogglingly loud replication of the sound of 20 jet planes all taking off at once, then crashing one by one into a volcano caused my soul to leak out of my ears, it occurred to me to continue this easy reviewing style for one week only, and brand it Glib Comparison Week. So expect this week’s dazzlingly good array of new bands to be wholeheartedly sullied by an increasingly stupid method of review.

Moronic, bowel-looseningly-loud-noise-induced decisions aside, this week’s first New Band Of The Day is really rather special. They’re from London – but isn’t everyone? – and are called William. Like James, The Smiths, and, er, The Johnsons out of Antony and the Johnsons, they’re following in the noble tradition of having a band name that’s also a person’s name. It’s a mystery as to which William they’re named after, though I’d hazard a guess that it’s more likely to be this one than the tabloid-friendly Prince. William, frankly, sound great, with punchy melodies and half-yelped, half-casually drawled lyrics. South of the Border is urgent and a bit weary at the same time, and Five Minute Wonder is even better, picking up pace as it rattles along, churning guitars not able to mask a lackadaisical cry of “I spend too much time on my own…You do too? Well, alright.”

Their songs are a huge stride ahead of the mundane identikit rock that’s polluting CD players worldwide at the moment. Listen to their great songs here, and catch them live in the next month – but only after you’ve been overwhelmed by the half-baked lump of lazy reviewing below:

TODAY’S GLIB COMPARISON: “A bit like the Pixies slowdancing suggestively with the White Stripes as Art Brut play non-po-faced Jam covers.”

>Today’s New Band – DANANANANAYKROYD! A Glaswegian Triple Bill!

>Wowsers – today’s band has it all. That is, all that makes us excited and tingly here at A New Band A Day. Firstly, today’s band is the third in the Fabulous Glasgow Triple Bill, hot on the heels of the wonderful ERRORS and super Q Without U. And then, secondly, and almost more groin-pulsingly exciting, is the Super Fantastico Name that they have – pretty much a prerequisite for getting on ANBAD, such are our soaring levels of idiocy.

So then, here’s today’s New Band – DANANANANAYKROYD! Let their name roll over your tongue a few times, because it’s a whole truck-load of lot of fun to say it out loud. In many ways, it’s the perfect band name, appealing to those who like mildly novelty names (like us) and people who like dressing up as the Blues Brothers at any given fancy dress party. It may appeal to other people too, but we don’t have that wide a variety of friends, so we aren’t in a position to judge.

Anyway, DANANANANAYKROYD‘s music is great. Considering they’re from Glasgow, where, by the sound of it, crafting great pop songs is taught in Infant School, this is no great surprise. They yell, grind and crunch their way through a bunch of swift and sneaky songs – check out British Knights (MC Hammer’s trainer of choice, fact fans) for a burst of super, howl-at-Button-Moon rock. Cleaning Each Other follows a pleasingly similar path of yell-blast loud guitars-thrash drums, and yet keeps the all-important melody churning through it all.

Glasgow 3 Rest of World 0. Check out their Myspace page here!

>Today’s New Band – The Brownies

The world of rock is mainly cock-centric – guys singing about them snaring weak-kneed women and then strutting off towards the next conquest. Actually, that’s how it used to be, in the days when the codpieced, moronically-coiffured Whitesnake, WASP et al thrusted their collective groin towards us unfortunate listeners. Today, though, the majority of indie bands that pollute the charts are so busy pouting and imagining they’re in Skins that they’re incapable of waggling their hips at the girls in the front row.

So today’s great new band – The Brownies – are here to pick up that slack. Sophie, Stevie and Maxie leer out from behind the band’s bouncy, buzzy noise with a sexual predatoriness that is fun, confident and, for a very welcome change, female. “Not every girl wants to be surrounded by naked ladies – Naked, naked men for me!” they yelp on Vaseline Kid.

Listen to their bunch of great songs on their MySpace page: http://www.myspace.com/thebrownies and then lock up your sons, for their own safety.

And look: I went through the whole post without mentioning them being from Norwich and making a glib connnection with Alan Partridge.