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***A New Band A Day is taking a ‘well-earned’ break until the New Year, so no more new bands until then…***

The A New Band A Day List-Stravaganza continues – right now – with more compulsive listing without reason, thought or care. Today it’s a dip into the icy waters of 2008’s darker side…

Blandest Band of the Year

A tough, hard fought category, with listless, beige fights to the death between the bands, eliminating such dreary contemporaries as Razorlight and Keane en route. But the winner has to be Coldplay, who produced an album of such overwhelming averageness that every estate agent in the country was instantly compelled, by an unseen magnetism, to purchase a copy from their local Tesco Express.

Truly Awful Band of the Year

There was really only one ‘winner’ here, and it was the execrable, borderline-evil Scouting For Girls. If any band had been crafted by Satan himself to cruelly torment all humans, it would be them. I almost feel a sense of awe that such a hopelessly bad band could be conceived. We should all pity the day this bunch of half-wits discovered their trademark trait of repeating the same dreadful, glib lyric over and over again until blood trickles out of the listener’s nose. The only band who has ever truly made me wish I was deaf.

Worst Song Of The Year

Werewolves of London by Warren Zevon was a great song, right? And The Skynyrd‘s Sweet Home Alabama was rootin’ tootin’ awesome too, right? So if we ‘mash’ those two together, you’ll get the best song, like, ever, right? Wrong. What you got was All Summer Long by Kid Rock. Off an album called Rock N Roll Jesus, for crap’s sake. Awful beyond comprehension.

The Moment Where The Portal Of Hell Almost Opened

When the release of UK’s X Factor winner Alexandra Burke‘s cover of Leonard Cohen‘s Hallelujah mobilised the world’s soppiest army. Jeff Buckley‘s wet-behind-the-ears, caring, sharing, new-man fanbase, the majority of whom probably think Leonard Cohen was that actor who played Spock in Star Trek, decided that her version was just not, like, real enough, and tried to get their tragic hero to number one instead.

So this Christmas, the same song, which isn’t even anything to do with Christmas, occupies number one and two in the charts. That warm feeling beneath your feet is our worldly reality only just managing to avoid being swallowed up by the Eternal Pit of Fire.

Merry Christmas, everyone.