A New Band A Day 2008-2018

Welcome to ANBAD, which celebrated ten years online in April 2018, and is now “resting.” (I’m still jabbering on about music on my radio show and discussing new bands like, oh, I dunno, The Chats, on Twitter.)

However, ANBAD also has over 1200 posts featuring about 1500 artists. Most are buried deeeeep in the blog, rarely seen by human eyes. This seemed a bit unfair, so I randomised the posts and the ones you see below are yanked arbitrarily from the archive for you to explore.

As with anything this old on the internet, some music plugins, hyperlinks, images, formatting – and, frankly, the writing itself – is broken. But even I will begrudgingly admit that randomly looking at ten years of once-new bands is a fascinating glimpse into a very specific time capsule.

I’m as surprised as anyone that this ridiculous and utterly niche music blog has stumbled around online for a decade, surviving all of my attempts to break it, render it defunct, or let it wither on the vine. So scroll down and read on – and maybe you’ll find some long-forgotten band from 2009 that you’ll love.

You Need The BRIT Awards. The BRIT Awards Need You. You do the math.

**This is a Sponsored Post**

Whoah. It’s almost Christmas. No really, it is. Check the calendar. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

See? Crazy isn’t it. And just when the season of moderate goodwill has swept by, do you know what’ll whip around just as fast? The Brit Awards.

Yep, the massive UK music jamboree, habitually sponsored by MasterCard, will zoom back into all of our lives, and bombard us with the usual flurry of award-scattering, tales of drunken behaviour, and endless reminiscances of that time when Jarvis Cocker waved his bottom towards Michael Jackson.

If you dare, cast your mind back to last year when musical luminaries like small-town haulage-company sound-a-likes Mumford and Sons clashed on stage with hip-hop wünderkind Tiny ‘Tony’ Tempah, roly-poly songstress Adele and everyone’s favourite rambunctious redhead, Rhiannah.

Well, trash that memory right now, because The BRITS 2012 is going to be at least a thousand times more exciting – and Mastercard holders can make sure they’re there at the giant musical event to end all gaint musical events by buying BRIT Awards 2012 tickets right now – months before anyone else!

Tot up the glut of goodness that’ll be taking place: not only will you be snuggled comfortably in London’s most fabulous music venue, the O2, but you’ll have laugh-a-minute funnyman James Corden pumping comedic gas in your direction in between announcing every single amazing pop act.

Moreover, and possibly most amazingly, Sir Peter Blake is designing the statue. (NB: Peter Blake is not related to James Blake – but just imagine how good the album artwork would be if they were). And who’s going to be clutching these tastefully-designed awards? Probably not Wu Lyf, but who knows?

Mastercard holders don’t only have the chace to book these tickets straight away – their Priceless Cities service means that you’ll be able to slip straight into the Big Smoke like a local and take full advantage of Europe’s most idiosyncratic city.

So what are you waiting for? Let’s face it – there’ll be no better way to spend your Feburary next year.

Viral video by ebuzzing

Pompey: Nervous Brilliance

It takes nerve to write music that departs from the norm. Nerve is needed to fight the ever-present temptation to round off the sharp corners and produce a more generic sound, and to silence the fearful thoughts that such music will never get you on MTV.

Nerve will take you places you never dreamed of, whereas playing to the gallery will lead to to exactly where you expected.

Pompey is an artist who has been making music for a while – so his appearance becomes one of the ‘new-as-in-new-to-ANBAD‘ variety, as opposed to the ‘only-picked-up-a-glockenspiel-for-the-first-time-last-week‘ kind.

Pompey // Bivouac Sack

None of this controversial machination will matter a jot when you’ve heard Bivouac Sack, a song so kaleidoscopically beauiful and hypnotic, that the song sows the seeds of it’s own sonic destruction half way through, lest the listening audience slips unwittingly into an inert state of comfort.

It takes a true artist to create a song so multi-layered, so loopily and beautifully colourful and so lilting that time itself drags, stupified. It takes a bold artist to then consider this not progressive enough, and to chuck a big clump of fractured, devious noise-pollution into the middle to jolt the audience awake and allow the song to move on.

Pompey‘s are the kind of songs which connect with me so directly, it feels like cheating to write about him in such glowing terms. Such is life. Pompey’s songs feel urgent, necessary and yet totally calming. Excellent.

Download the full-fat version of the excellent Bivouac Sack here

>Today’s New Band – Dom Coyote PLUS! BANG! AND THE DIRT IS GONE!

>If you’re one of ANBAD‘s many non-UK readers, you may not have experienced the mysterious joys of premiere surface-cleaning product Cillit Bang, and it’s bizarrely seductive Lord, Master and Prophet, the perma-yelling Barry Scott. If you’re none the wiser, initiate yourself into the strangely alluring world of Barry here – and then consider this: without the unusual SEMI-THREATENING SPEAKING-IN-CAPITAL-LETTERS tactic deployed by the quasi-benevolent Barry, Cillit Bang would just be another product on the shelves. Barry has bellowed down the opposition and now Cillit Bang sits amongst the homecare Gods.

Like any product now, music is branded and sold to us like bathroom cleaner. Like Cillit Bang, some bands need a huge advertising pushes to really ram themselves home in the public consciousness. This practice is usually the preserve of average bands who otherwise wouldn’t really justify the money the record company has desperately thrown at them – hello Keane, Pigeon Detectives and our old buddies The Kooks.

Today’s New Band won’t need a gimmick, shouty and rictus-grinning or otherwise. Dom Coyote‘s name is pleasingly Pun-tabulous, and gains the usual ANBAD bonus marks reserved for such occasions, but it doesn’t need to be capitalised upon, because it’s his gently aggressive music that will poke you in the eye and ruffle your hair.

Dom Coyote’s sound is spooling and loose, but then tight and focused. One for the Passenger, disjointed and coherent all at the same time, rolls and rolls and rolls onwards so organically and so easily that you could imagine it happily freewheeling for ever. Under The Thumb echoes, languid, but also bristles crisply, a precise balance between paranoid dub and sprightly reggae-folk. Melodies Of Sleep narrates a kind of happy hopelessness, soothing and anxious.

At their best, Dom Coyote‘s songs sound so crunchy, so tactile, you’ll want to get your fingers involved with the sounds, a bit like an aural Rubik’s Cube. It’s as if the songs were recorded as densely as possible, and then were stripped down to the bare bones, so that only the really mouth-watering noises were left. Yum. Get stuck into his songs here!

MIDWEEK MIXTAPE // 22nd August 2012

Sometimes it feels like it’s getting harder to criticise Alex James from Blur, especially after his band’s recent, glorious, lap of honour.

Who could be cold hearted enough to poke fun at a quarter of a much-loved British institution?

In honesty, ANBAD isn’t even sure if it can find the snark to gently rib him every week any more.

Then ANBAD re-discovered this photo of our Cheesiest Hero casually strolling, Lord of the Manor style, around his estate, lazily observing the Tory Prime Minister chatting with Jeremy Clarkson… and everything fell back into place.

Alex, you’re wonderful/sad, brilliant/crazy, admirable/eye-rollable. Smell my cheese, you mother!

MIXTAPE:

FIRST: Mining Boom defy fashion and decided to make the kind of music they wanted to (which is buzzy, poppy garage rock) – and it’s impossible to deny that this is admirable in a new music world that values fashion and genre-hype as much as it does good tunes. Which, happily, PDA has in lethargic spades.

NEXT: Mr Ben Sir are a North-East Collective. I’m not sure why that’s important, but it seems so on first listen, and who am I to deny my subconscious judgement? Ports is just minimal enough not to be cloying, and just acoustic enough to be devastatingly gentle.

THEN: The Staves are even more gentle, and even more minimal, but their songs are feminine and carefully constructed in a way that a lot of similar songs aren’t that listening to their music transcends a mere song-experience, and pops us into a happy place instead.

FINALLY: I was 1000% (ONE THOUSAND PERCENT) positive I’d featured Yucky Slime before. I mean, duhhh: here’s a schizoid, buzzy punk band with the name Yuck Slime, who make shouty, fuzzy power-pop. How did I miss them before?

Misses Ellen Sunday and Her Fantastic Cats; Dog, Man, Star, and (Laser) Ray.

Spending a vast proportion of your time listening to new bands affects your behaviour in unexpected ways.

The ups I don’t need to tell you about – they are all documented here – and the downs I will spare you. The unforeseen result has been to spend the rest of the time scouring the albums of my past for safety and comfort.

Seeking solace in cherished and half-forgotten albums is clearly a reflex action to counteract all the newness – and a quick glance at the ‘Recently Played’ list on Spotify tells a story of mid-90s teen infatuation: It’s A Shame About Ray, Elastica, Dog Man Star.

This old-band-yin is counterbalanced by the new-band-yang of the likes of Misses Ellen Sunday and Her Fantastic Cats.

They’re not the first band on ANBAD with unwieldy names or song titles, but they are the first to do so whilst playing such a delightful, strange, and – yes – delightfully strange mandolin songs.

Misses Ellen Sunday and Her Fantastic Cats // I Thought I’d Take It For Myself Like The Others All The Same

I Thought I’d Take It For Myself Like The Others All The Same isn’t just a mouthful, it’s a whole meal, but the song itself is an utterly lovely paean to loneliness and love. Sparse, touching and pretty – it’s a song that is touching, multi-faceted and shimmering with delicate beauty.

The accompanying picture on their Myspace page is one of cats firing red and green lasers from their eyes. What’s not to like?

www.myspace.com/missesellensunday

RADIO SHOW // February’s Top Five New Bands

February went fast didn’t it? It’s almost as if it was shorter than the other months or something.

Inevitably, the great new bands intruded our lives thick and fast, and here is a 15 minute radio-riffic celebration of February’s Five Best New Bands:

ANBAD RADIO SHOW // February’s Top Five New Bands

And here’s the links to the bands mentioned in the show:

Martial Arts // Something Beginning With L // Memo // Broken Deer // Scary Mansion

And then here’s the links to the interviews mentioned in the show:

Egyptian Hip Hop // Interview

Stained Glass Heroes // Interview

Ace Bushy Striptease // Interview

Phew. That’ll keep you busy. Some great bands coming up this week – keep ’em peeled…

Nutíd – Minimal Disquiet

Last year there was a smash the system land-grab of the once-coveted Christmas Number One slot in the UK, as the latest Cowell-protegé X-Factor moppet was beaten to their standard chart slot by a concerted effort to get Rage Against The Machine there as, like, a protest, yeah?

Inevitably, this year a similar proto-revolt is taking place, albeit with a slightly more wry bent. But in trying to get John Cage’s 4’33” to number one, what is being said? That the X-Factor isn’t art? That silence is preferable to some mawkish, cobbled-together TV spin-off song? Or is it simply ‘LOL’?

The truth probably lies somewhere amongst all those thought-puddles. The simplicity of the idea, and of Cage’s concept, is what appeals the most. Simplicity, generally, will always succeed. This is an idea that Nutíd have wholly embraced.

Nutid //Capricorn Hill

Theirs is a sound that wavers between ultra-minimal and densely enveloping, though identifying exactly when the transition takes place is the hard part. Capricorn Hill’s half-folk, half-art swoon hits like a tiny ice-cold tsunami teasing listeners into daydreams of their making.

It turns out that Nutid is also the name of a range of kitchen appliances at Ikea that are functional, anonymous, mass market, and simple. Nutíd could only reasonably be compared to the latter. Beautiful, dizzying, and all the more disquieting because of it.

www.myspace.com/nutid

>Today’s New Band – David Cronenberg’s Wife

>Oasis are in the process of releasing their new album, Dig Out Your Soul, at the moment. This is still Big News in the UK, and especially so here in Manchester, their home town. Seizing on the fact that this new-fangled ‘internet’ thing might be a good promotional tool, they have used a little-known website, MySpace.com, to allow YOU, the public at large, to listen to the whole album in it’s entirety before it’s released, you know, in shops.

So, here’s the brief A New Band A Day review:

It’s a clunker
Noel isn’t even the best songwriter in Oasis any more.

I don’t enjoy criticising Oasis, though it’s fashionable to do so. I was 14 when they released Definitely Maybe, and it was one of those fabulous defining moments that you get now and then in your teenage years.

Oasis list The Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the Sex Pistols among their influences. Today’s New Band, David Cronenberg’s Wife, list the Germs, Swans and The Birthday Party in the same section. One band is producing interesting and inventive music, and the other the same old cobblers. You guess which one is which.

Runaway Pram is a swirling, organ ‘n’ guitar-led, echoing stomper of a song that seems to have been recorded to deliberately disorientate the listener. At times, it’s so heavily soaked in reverb that I wondered if it had been accidentally remixed by Lee Perry in one of his more bloody-minded moods. It’s equal parts mid 60’s Psych and Garage, Goth and 96 Tears by ? and The Mysterians. Their music swirls around you, teasing and taunting you into having a good, weird, time.

David Cronenberg’s Wife – blurring the line between so many genres you’ll experience the pleasant feeling of been punched in the head with the contents of a Virgin Records bargain bin. Listen to them here!

>Indica Ritual – Today’s New Band

>I had one of those iPod mental tics this morning. You’ll recognise the problem – wandering along, scrolling through the albums, but none of them that scram up the screen seem to be the one that’s just right for that exact moment in time. This morning I knew that I needed a sound that was just so, something that was fast, hard and upbeat but that wasn’t gabba or screamcore. Something like a cross between early-90’s period Prodigy and, I dunno, The Fall. One of those kind of moods.

Funnily enough, I couldn’t find any songs that fitted hitherto-yet untested combination of cranky Mancunian miserablism and mentalist bonkers-core aggro-noise. In a fit of idiocy, I picked the full 10-minute mix of So Much Love To Give by Thomas Bangalter & DJ Falcon. After 8 minutes, I realised that my infatuation with Thomas Bangalter perhaps doesn’t stretch to a full 10 minutes of the same loop over and over again, however LOL! AWESOME! it sounds to start with.

It later occurred to me that what I actually wanted to listen to was Today’s New Band, Indica Ritual. Their song Top Forty is all of these things: 1) Bonkers, 2) Super-duper funky, and 3) Sounds like a test version of the 1973 Tomorrow’s World TV theme tune that was rejected for being too ‘out there’. Mostly, though, it’s a superbly alert, twitchy song that sounds confident and cocky. It’s modern without being arch or knowingly ironic, taking the path of least resistance to the parts of your brain marked ‘fun’ and ‘quirky’. Dad’s Wristband nicks the ace crunchy guitar sound off the first half of David Bowie’s Low and moulds it into a tasty, inventive instrumental. And surely Num Lock sounds more creative, more wild and more new than is plausible.

Indica Ritual are quite possibly the band you have been looking for, like, ages. They are actually brilliant, in every sense of the word. You must listen to them now, or your life will be that much poorer. Drown yourself, laughing, in their songs right here!

P.S. This is the second Liverpool band in a row on A.N.B.A.D. Could another accidental trilogy be the making? Tune in tomorrow to find out!

>Today’s New Band – The Witch and The Robot

>
Oh yes, I’ve been to Cumbria. For the uninitiated, it’s the very northern, remote part of England; full, as I remember, of natural beauty, rain and – in Barrow-in-Furness at least – very large and intimidating men. It’s also the home of the strange and brilliant band British Sea Power, whose album The Decline Of British Sea Power is an oft-overlooked classic.

Today’s New Band, The Witch And The Robot, are from the same green, lush part of the world and are championed by, indeed, British Sea Power. This is as suitable recommendation as any, and The Witch And The Robot don’t disappoint. The same air that gave BSP a crazed edge has blessed a second band with a similarly obtuse outlook on life.

The Best Free Show On Earth whistles one flute-loop over and over so many times that an entirely unexpected Orbital-esque feel blossoms out of the song’s lovely, Byrds-y, sun-soaked roots.

That song is shot with vanilla-flavoured normality in comparison to Sex Music (Beef On Wax), which is a song in several, absurd, contemplative parts. It starts here, then peers over there, and then is suddenly distracted by something else. You know how you’ve always longed for a song that combines safari parks, feline disaster, cod-funk and spoken-word pieces? Well, prepare to sleep easily again: you’ve found your perfect song.

Despite the cream-pie attacks at their gigs, The Witch And The Robot aren’t zany-kids-TV-pranks crazy, they’re just wildly inventive; free-association idea-forming as they play their old/new songs carefully and cleverly. They don’t deserve sympathy, or confusion, or apathy – just your full attention.