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.

 

Tristram VS Nuclear Holocaust

Last night I met an old man called Yoshiro.  He’s from Nagasaki. He was 11 when it happened. He can remember the blinding flash of light, the furniture shooting across the room, the white heat.

He survived the A-Bomb, but he spend the following days watching his relatives die of radiation poisoning. He remembers the smell. Then, to support his remaining family, he worked from the age of 15 until he retired, aged 70. He’s had cancer twice. He now learns English from Audrey Hepburn movies. He’s pretty much super-human.

There only reason I relayed that story was to a) remind myself that jabbering about new bands every day is actually fairly inconsequential in, you know, the grand scheme of things, and b) simply to ramp up the pressure on Tristram.

Tristram – Dust Disturbed

One lucky member of Tristram had his name adopted as that of the bands’. I’d like to think that they drew lots, but I’m guessing that it’s just the name of the singer. That’s how a band hierarchy works.

Any potential moniker-related bickering was clearly put aside, otherwise a song as fragile and coltish as Dust Disturbed would never have been written. I suppose you could brand many songs ‘gentle and thoughtful’, but that description would rarely be as apt as it is when applied to this song.

Dust Disturbed is a delight, seemingly sprung from nowhere – born of nothing and wanting for just as little. It has exactly the self-contained beauty that most songs strive for, but never attain. Tristram, the man and the band, can be proud. Lovely, in every way.

myspace.com/tristramsongs

>Today’s New Band – Pop Fosters

>After musing on Monday about the difficulties of finding band members with a similar musical outlook, here’s an example of a band who, I think, fell happily together in a flash. They’re Pop Fosters, they’re Today’s New Band, and their initial conversation went something like this:

Sara Pop Fosters: “Want to form a band in which thrashing sounds from the drums and guitar form the limits of our complications?”

Richie Pop Fosters: “Well… I can play the guitar REALLY LOUD and can YELP with the best of them…”

Sara Pop Fosters: “Let’s ROCK, sunshine”

And lo, the band was born. Listening to them is to hear the music that every rock band member secretly wants to make – yes, even Thom Yorke – but doesn’t dare to. Primal, base, no-frills: dress it up how you want, but songs like Your Music Is Shit will pull you down to their level and club you into normality.

Utilising the age-old techniques of splashy drums, raw guitars and even rawer vocals, Your Music Is Shit is Pop Fosters’ perfect calling card – a short, sharp, buzzy shock, pulling you back to what rock music is really about: noise, fun and not caring about what YOU think.

Songs Myopic and Self Health use the same trick in different ways, and to the same thrilling , crunchy effect. I remember Keane – the very blandest of bands, remember – getting excited because they had hooked up a keyboard to a Wah-Wah pedal. For them, this was progress.

Pop Fosters deride this as frippery and pretence. They are an antidote to the arrogance of bands who think that thoughtfulness=progress. Switch off and listen here!

AKA SUGA: DELUXE

akasugaIf I could listen to only one LP for the rest of my life, it’d probably be DJ Shadow‘s Endtroducing (the deluxe edition, because if you’re only going to listen to one LP forever, it may as well be the two-disc version).

As far as LPs go, it’s pretty much perfect in every way; one of the few LPs I enjoy listening to as much now as I did 15 years ago when I first heard it.

The brilliance of the sampling, the composition of the beats and the overarching feeling that we are taking a trip through music and out the other side is inescapable and gorgeous.

Thus, I have a soft spot for choppy, sampled, soul-vibe music. Oh, hi AKA SUGA.

Now, AKA SUGA is not DJ Shadow, durr. But this is pretty great, all the same, and her sales pitch – “I’m a Japanese girl living in Bushwick making hip hop inspired soulful jams,” – is neat enough.

Anyway, slick ‘n’ loopy beats aside, I really like the odd b-boy/b-girl lyrics that feel like they have been parachuted in from another record.

Except of course, they haven’t – which is interestingly counter to the whole sampling malarky in the first place. Good stuff.

MIDWEEK MIXTAPE // 27th July 2010

This week’s news has been fluffed and plumped into a tasty political paella thanks to Wikileak’s genuinely brave and diligent exposure of what has really been happening in Afghanistan.

We asked the boffins at Wikileaks to run their beady eyes over the ANBAD Donkey, the stubbornly airborne totem that has always aroused suspicions here at ANBAD towers.

Some devilishly complicated compu-prying behind the scenes found this shocking evidence [left]. Dubya was behind him all along. Truly astonishing developments.

Sigh. MIXTAPE:

FIRST! Bravestation are easily confusable, at first glance, with UK soft-core sleaze TV channel Babestation. For clarification, there are a  lot fewer tits in Bravestation, but just as much of an illicit thrill.

Their music is angular and smooth all at once. Apparently people really like glib parallels drawn between one band and another so: Bravestation are like Arcade Fire getting frisky with Vampire Weekend. Perhaps they are a bit like Babestation after all.

SECOND! Death In Plains are easily confusable, at first glance, with UK genre-hoppers Death In Vegas. For clarification, Death In Plains  make music that would be perfect for car adverts. I won’t deny that that sounds like the least appealing recommendation of all time. But think about it: selling cars is all about highlighting dynamism, thrust, sleek lines and grace – all of which is there in DIP’s music.

THIRD! Squarefeet – I’ve featured bands from the outlandishly named Espoo, Uusimaa in Finland before. I’m never going to tire of spelling out just how great Finnish music is, or actually spelling out that location on my keyboard. Squarefeet is a band that are far more electronic than most I feature from that part of the world, but still present is the archetypal Finnish grasp of a brilliant tune. Yum.

FINALLY! Blood Feathers must have the same kind of fun that any band that cranks out this kind of staccato and upbeat rock has. The beauty of this kind of music is that its simplicity allows for Good Old Fashioned Fun, but also allows for bad Old Fashioned Clunky Rawk. Fortunately, Blood Feathers produce the former in spades.

DONE! We’re off to waterboard the ANBAD Donkey.

>Today’s New Band – Ice, Sea, Dead People

>Look, it’s the elephant in the room. Let’s get it out of the way right now: Today’s New Band has the most incredibly pun-tastic name of all time. The name Ice, Sea, Dead People is truly brilliant. Pun-laden names can go horribly wrong – remember Test Icicles, anyone? – but this band have taken the concept, mixed their metaphors and hit it for six. If I’m being honest, they would have been picked as today’s new band on the strength of their name alone, even if they were as limp and insipid as Pete Docherty after a week long camping trip with Amy Winehouse in somewhere as irresponsibly named as, oooh, here.

Whilst Ice, Sea, Dead People may conjure up images of weatherbeaten, salty old sailors singing mournful shanties, the music they play is almost the exact opposite. If you asked them to sing a sea shanty, it would probably be played at a bazillion miles an hour and feature the word ‘shanty’ yelped all over it. That’s pretty much how their great, mentalist, song Hence Elvis pans out, the sound of three fabulously crazy punk songs in one. My Twin Brother’s a Brother sounds like they’ve just realised that being in Ice, Sea, Dead People is the most fun in the world – and let’s face it, it probably is.

Listen for yourself on their MySpace page, and marvel at the joyful way the songs rush off in front of you like a firework. You’ll be making the stereotypical “Oooooh” noises as the songs explode, spraying multicoloured sherbet everywhere, and, like a firework display, you’ll wish that they just went on forever. Ace. Great artwork on the background of the MySpace page too…

>Today’s New Band – The Love Kevins

>The second gig I ever went to was to see Manic Street Preachers in 1996. They were just post-Richey, pre-Big Time and were noisier, angrier and more intelligent than anyone I had ever met growing up in Stoke on Trent. I pushed to the very front and spent a happy hour crushed against glum, milk-white girls wearing kohl and leopard print.

The Manics’ primary attraction is their wilful perverseness; actively encouraging people to dislike them, releasing hit-and-miss albums that confuse the unsuspecting. They have veered, in deliberate disorientating fashion, from smooth rock to grating punk to electro-flop and back and forth and back again as and when they like it, not us. And all the while not caring, growing stronger, tighter, feeding off the anger, hate, bewilderment.

Now they’re releasing a new album, produced recorded by another man who doesn’t give a shit – Steve Albini. It prises open the past, using Richey’s lyrics, and deliberately treads over fan/media fetishising of 1994’s The Holy Bible. Perhaps it’ll be great, perhaps it won’t be. It doesn’t matter. That’s the point.

Today’s New Band, The Love Kevins, have songs with titles whose themes might have interested the Manics a decade or so ago. Oh, and just take a second to fully appreciate the minor brilliance of The Love Kevins’ name. Continue.

“You’re going to die, you’re going to die alone,” is the chorus We’re All Going To Die, a song whose sweet melody that couldn’t vary much more from the vocal sentiments. Plain, bare and calm, it’s the sounds of objective lushness. Stop Being Perfect passes quickly and quietly before you realise how enjoyable it was.

The Love Kevins are from Malmo in Sweden, and – surprise – have the Swedish way with top pop tunes, and add to it a dollop of strange, unexpected perverseness. Perhaps the Manics would like them, in secret. You will – listen here.

Butchers & Bakers: Donuts

butchersandbakersAs ANBAD has been on an unexpected hiatus yet again, I may as well just jump in the deep end with this one and say how much I think Butchers & Bakers‘ deliciously-named Brunch is simply the kind of song I love to have fall into my lap every now and then.

Just as laptops now allow anyone to make any noise they want – and so many songs have become swamped with everything – synths are no longer luxury products.

All you need is a bit of pirated software and a $25 USB-keyboard to play any synth sound ever, and just maybe you too could be Vince Clarke, right?!

When every noise is within easy reach, the hard part becomes choosing how to narrow down your selection to not very much and finding something cool to do with it.

 

Thus, Brunch/Emulator’s blooping synth flourishes are agonisingly simple but hideously effective, perfectly and oddly complimenting Rebecca’s (yes, I read the band info for once) vocals.

There’s nothing really obtuse about this song: it’s just a good song, being good and fun, and odd, and slightly off-kilter enough to grab your attention. This might sound like I’m underplaying the band’s abilities: it’s actually about as high a compliment as you can pay any song.

Moreover, Butchers & Bakers were always likely to emerge on ANBAD: in their photo they pose with a plate of donuts.

The band are from Brooklyn. I daydream about the Peter Pan donut bakery in Greenpoint, Brooklyn at least twice a week, and the naive and foolish part of me hopes that those donut pictured above are snatched from those very shelves.

Ah, whimsy.

MORE: facebook.com/Butchersandbakers

>Today’s New Band – Facteur **ROAD TRIP GIMMICK ENDS TODAY!**

>That’s right folks, this week’s borderline-awful ROADTRIP! gimmick is drawing to a close. And yet, for all its conceptual craptitude, we’ve dug up a lot of ace bands so far on our virtually-drunken, imaginarily-debauched trundle around Northern Europe. Sweden’s Envelopes, Norway’s Hiawata! and Poland’s MR BEEP have provided us with a ADHD-fat-kid-in-an-ice-cream-parlour sample of Upper-Euro music, and brilliant it all has been too.

Thus, before we head back to Cyber-Calais (Yes, this is getting tedious now), for the ferry, we’ve stopped in France for one final hurrah, and look who’s Today’s New Band – it’s Facteur! Now, as the observant of you ANBAD readers will readily acknowledge, if there’s one thing we hate to regularly do, it’s to recycle old musings and pass them off as new. So, without further ado – just what is it that makes French dance music so awesome? We may never know – it’s certainly not the legacy of Johnny Hallyday – but Facteur aren’t concerned, and certainly aren’t hanging around to find out, as they’re too busy thrashing wildly around the room, losing themselves in their ridiculously thumping songs.

Pick any of the songs – any – on their Myspace page, and you’ll be yearning for the dancefloor instantly. If you can’t imagine yourself going chicken oriental in a nightclub to their frighteningly CHOON-tatsic remix of Asshole by Giko, you may have exhausted your brain’s supply of serotonin, in which case, call a priest and wait calmly for death. It’s Friday night. Go nuts and dance in your bedroom to his brilliant tunes, and worry about how daft you look afterwards. You deserve it.

Vena Portae: Torn Pages, Elliptical Pleasures

Remember when bands were just bands? You know – sticking together through thick and thin, the last gang in town, endless solidarity, yadda yadda.

Time was when your belief in a band could be shaken to the core if, say, the bassist nipped off to pootle around in a side project.

No-one cares about this any more, of course, least of all bands themselves. It’s so easy to record songs today (hell, Gorillaz have whelped an album they recorded on an iPad) that obscure side projects, intercontinental-collaborations and secretly-longed-for self-indulgent free-jazz ensembles are the norm.

Vena Portae (which, band name fans, is a vein that carries blood to the liver) is the collaborative side project of Emily Barker and Dom Coyote. As an example of the democratisation of technology, information, and, thus, the un-boxing of creativity, their song Day After Vows is perfect.

Day After Vows is essentially an example of the music of now: quickly made, fire-and-forget, endlessly curious. These songs aren’t designed to please crowds or act as the tuning fork of a generation of disenfranchised teens – they are made simply because the artist wanted to, and as such they can stand purely on their own merits.

Capturing of a moment of pure creativity, momentum and inspiration, this song lulls, soothes and poses as many questions as it answers. Found sounds are snatched and bent for the purposes of a song with no reference points.

Consider it a lovely curio, a glimpse of a sudden urge, a torn page from a bursting notebook, and it’s an art piece; approach it as an elliptic dream-song and it’s a sensual pleasure. If this is the future, I’m more than happy to slip quietly into it.

www.emily-barker.com // www.domcoyote.net

MIDWEEK MIXTAPE // 20th June 2012

Another week, another nugget of Alex James From Blur news: this time it’s news that Fat Les, his 1998 World Cup spin-off ‘project’, is reforming without their bassline wrangler extraordinaire.

This is clearly a mindless decision. How will Keith Allen even begin to cope?

ANBAD’s campaign to Reinstate Alex James In Fat Les starts here!

MIXTAPE:

FIRST! Starlight Girls channel the eeriness of  disused fairground ghost-trains, and 50’s shoop-shoop pop songs into their gently freaky pop.

This is the kind of music that could, and perhaps should, soundtrack Burlesque sideshows and Freakshow extravaganzas all over the land.

 

SECOND! Straight-up guitar music usually gets short shrift here on ANBAD. It’s not the guitarist’s fault, you understand. It’s just that, well, it always works out that way. Mind you, ANBAD doesn’t have a lot of Kenyan music either – so here’s Arnavah to redress two balances at once. Guitar lullaby-pop that is almost lighter than air.

 

THIRD! Beatroot crowbar “Latin, African, Caribbean, funk, soul, hiphop and rock… records, movie soundtracks, dancehall themes, 1950s surf tunes, fanfares and cheerleading chants” into their cut ‘n’ paste hip-skank-pop songs. Just think how long picking the samples must take. Yikes.

 

FOURTH! ANBAD is always, always swayed by odd names, and so Raven Fur had me at “Raven Fur”. Fortunately Saline is a crumbly, distressed lo-fi crunch through fields of oddness.