>Categorisation – one of the many concepts that send the more humourless rock star into paroxysms of righteous anger – “We don’t want to be pigeon-holed, maaan,” they cry, whilst continuing to grind out a single style of music for the whole of their careers. Most record shops, though, bravely risk the wrath of these tortured rock ‘n’ roll artists, and go ahead and categorise CDs willy-nilly.
This is done mainly out of kindness, to make it all very easy for those of us who are not mouthbreathing morons to steer clear of the Best Mum in the World…Ever! CDs in the ‘Cds For Cretins’ section. Often though, even the most astute of the shop owners will struggle to categorise the bands that are so wilfully obtuse that you will often find a resulting ‘Just Noise!!!!!!’ section, usually just after the ‘Experimental Bolivian Dub’ niche.
This is probably where you’d find Today’s New Band, Hntrhntr – a band whose love of breakneck schizo freak-out noise-mageddon is only matched by their hatred of vowels. The truly lovely thing about this kind of music is that is entirely polarises opinion – no-one ‘kind of’ likes it. You’ll either find the short, frankly bonkers, songs on their MySpace page such as brth and ptchbtch to be ZOMG!!! AWESOME!!! or ZOMG!!! WTF!!!, with little room for intellectual maneuver. brth sounds like what you’d hear if you were mummified in custard whilst being beaten to death with spanners, and cmblst is what it would sound like if you suddenly fell into a space-time wormhole and found youself 4 miles above Jupiter, descending rapidly through sulphur clouds.
They’re headpoundingly brilliant, blasting your ears with sounds from your worst/best nightmares – and you’ll decide whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing within about 10 seconds.