>A band’s name doesn’t really makes a huge difference to how you perceive them. This isn’t the same as liking a band’s name, which is an arbitrary personal choice – and in the case of heavy metal bands, whether you like the indiscriminate scattering of umlauts or not – but if you think about it, U2 would still be as will-sappingly dreadful even if they were called Bono’s Big-Top Dancing Monkey Troupe.

So: Today’s New Band. Their name is Frantic Clam. Some of you will like the name, some will think it stinks and most will hopefully be too busy listening to their great, driving, songs to care.

Fort Worthless hammers a steady beat – the kind where our human, subconscious need for steering-wheel-drumming bubbles to the surface – and the band carefully construct a web of choppy guitars, chipper lyrics and handclaps-a-plenty around it. It’s a pop song of sorts, subscribing to the age old pop values – use a good tune, a catchy chorus, and loads of hooks. It works, and it’s the kind of song that will make a difference to the band’s life.

Korean Beauty Queen is another chugging, sparse-then-noisy-then-sparse-again angular art-rock jab to the ribs, arriving quickly in a screech of its own importance and disappearing just as rapidly.

Frantic Clam say that they ‘sound like tinnitus’. I think any sufferers would be happy to swap that internal broken radio buzz for Frantic Clam‘s off-kilter swagger. Listen here!