Gold Blood, Audio Filthmakers Extraordinaire

The thought of the pristine being smudged is always guiltily satisfying.

Scouting For Girls have been at number one in the pop charts, with a typically limp suggestion of a song for two weeks now. This will not stand. What better way to wreak vengeful havoc than hearing their Auntie-Rock desecrated with a really filthy remix?

My nomination for such audio vandalism is Gold Blood, who seem to have the New Band Holy Triumvirate clutched tightly in their clammy hands: substance, momentum and a damn good name.

In songs like Don’t Waste My Time, the legit-retro stainless style of Gruff Rhys and Boom Bip’s Neon Neon project is slathered with a thick, grubby smear of dirt.

Gold Blood // Don’t Waste My Time

Their sound is rich, compelling, satisfying. Their style is crazed, obtuse and wholly splintered beyond the realms of normality. Their name is… well – just picture a cut on your forearm, oozing blood that shone golden, like millionaire’s mercury. Just picture it.

Sometimes, music has to be its own language, and only the most outré imagery can attempt to describe it: Gold Blood.

Gold Blood are playing at Club NME @ Koko in London on the 23rd of April

www.myspace.com/goldbloodband

Not Squares: Well Weapon, Yeah? No.

Expectations: quashed. Norms: avoided. Head: scratched. Not Squares use cowbells, ‘dirty synths’, tight double-speed drums and disco basslines, and yet the band is not instantly hateful and their songs are not the kind of generic ADHT nonsense found on mobile phone adverts. So what gives?

Call me a naive, old cynic, but what drives me up the wall is when a two-bit band scrabble aboard the most fleeting of bandwagons, whelp out a truly woeful, turgid two-bit song and make a success of themselves, all because they were bright/stupid enough to harmonise with the two-bit musical flavour du jour.

In truth, and to fully labour a metaphor, this doesn’t just drive me up the wall, but over it, down the other side and power-slides me all the way to Madsville.

So Not Squares leave me at a puzzling mental impasse: any other band making music like this would make me howl with rage, but I just can’t be angry – they’re having too much innocent fun in the frantic buzz-saw fluctuations that make up Asylum.

Not Squares – Asylum

For all I know, Not Squares could be identikit Nathan Barleys, and Asylum might have been mashed-up on their Wasp Speechtools, but I don’t think so. Youth, breezy youth, all crammed into one gleeful song – and all this delicious naivety is there to offer hope for us all.

www.myspace.com/notsquares

>Today’s New Band – Chicken Feed

>
Now, how to end the week? In a blaze of crucfyingly harsh Thrash/Dubstep-hybrid noise? Or a sub-heartbeat soundscape flutter? Look, I’m lying: the amount of planning that goes into ANBAD could be etched onto the back of a gnat, and yet this haphazard approach works more often than not.

For example – Today’s New Band, Chicken Feed, make music that’s gossamer-thin, delicate and sugary: it turns out that they’re the perfect week-ending wind-down soundtrack. If you were planning a big night out, I’m sorry. But a good snooze is just as cool, yeah?

Duck Egg Diner, emerging from a reverb-burble, plays at deliberate half-speed; laconic, shiny and bright. It’s the song that says, Aloha, Hawaii – we’re here to relax in egg-yellow sunshine until we sink into the sand and become one with the hot white granules. Lights Out slurps at Hazel Mills’ lyrics, and covers them in a dribble of over-friendly bleeping.

Chicken Feed are another good example of today’s new music; in design and execution. Low on personnel and outside influence, Chicken Feed are free to create, create, create. We listeners reap the rewards. Listen here!

>Today’s New Band – Max With Max

>”Trams! Inaugural trams!” squeaked Super Furry Animals recently in their song, er, Inaugural Trams. It is one of the few songs that fully celebrates the unbridled joys of rail travel. Trains, despite the inevitable delays, the woeful onboard food and the crummy stations, are still the superior method of transport.

Sitting at a desk with a cool drink; to be able to get up and go to the loo as and when your bladder desires; flirting with a recently-boarded and now concerned stranger; watching a beautiful series of Welsh valleys huff past your window – you just don’t find those options presenting themselves to you when you’re stuck in traffic at Junction 17 on the M6. And it is always Junction 17 of the M6.

Baalial, by Today’s New Band, Max With Max, has a train-like quality. It clanks with the soothing/jarring repetition of a train carriage, and has the menacing intent of a large, impossibly heavy vehicle moving at 150 MPH. Talhis Iblis is positively playful in comparison, shimmering and twittering, and flipping in some ingenious noises that are half bleep, half human voice.

Angra Mainyu wallops you upside the head with manic jabbering, speeding up, slowing down; a burst of crazy inventive energy.

Hearing Max With Max like listening to a scrambled mobile phone message and finding that the encryption has accidentally created a beautiful musical mess. Sweet, sweet insanity. Listen here!

>Today’s New Band – Kezzie Beat

>Deep breath, and straight in: Today’s New Band, Kezzie Beat, makes music that is nerdy, obscure, almost incomprehensibly repetitive and mainly of interest to a selected few who consider early 90’s videogames to have the Best Music Ever. For these reasons alone, we should laud bands like this as a precious commodity.

To take a Gameboy or a NES as a starting point from which to make music isn’t really as unusual as it may seem. Limiting your sonic options in this way is akin to a band picking the same combo of drums, bass and guitar as a million other bands have before. Kezzie Beat starts with her limited palette in an attempt to create something more than the sum of its parts.

It’s a success – and here’s where she differs from many of her peers in the Chiptune/8-bit/whatever scene: where most songs produced in this way can be admiringly described as “the soundtrack to a videogame you’ve never played,” Kezzie Beat‘s songs step gingerly away from the obscure-Japanese-videogame-composer template. Her music takes hesitant steps towards life, love and happiness – you know, the big things that don’t involve cheat codes, mid-level-checkpoints or CONTINUE Y/N?

In songs like Evaporating An Ocean, she attempts to inject as much life as possible, flailing to get out of the end-of-level boss rut with some satisfyingly tactile, fuzzy grunting sounds, a manically bleepy melody and atypical rhythms. 233 is joyously smart, bright and wide-eyed – almost touching. Not quite – the sheer mechanical nature of the 8-bit computer sounds have a defiantly inhuman sound – but almost.

Kezzie Beat: where the videogame bleep nearly held hands with human emotion. That’s close enough. Listen here!

>Today’s New Band – Ghost In The Water – CENTENARY SPECIAL!!

>Almost astonishingly, today we publish the 100th band to appear on A New Band A Day. A Centenary! A Double Golden Jubilee! This is a (very) minor achievement of sorts, considering my attention span is comparable with that of the proverbial goldfish, and the transient nature of the Tubular Interwebs. However, it’s a happy occasion I suppose, even though I didn’t receive a telegram from the Queen.

Like truculent teenagers though, we don’t want to celebrate this too much, and would prefer to remain sulkily opposed to convention, whilst secretly longing for participation in it. Thus, Today’s new band was going to be, appropriately, one that embodies ANBAD‘s core ethos. Then it became clear that this would mean the appearance of a band that is anxious, annoying, deliberately obtuse, and with dubious personal hygiene, it was decided to just stick a good band on, like usual.

So with none of those things in mind, here’s Today’s New Band, Ghost in the Water, and they’re probably just about right if you’re interested in, you know, having a good time, whilst reflecting on life’s foibles. Hallucination is another one of those great songs that is the product of a lifetime consuming as many different types of music as possible.

It’s the song you’d want on at your wedding, pleasing everyone equally. Your uncle will dig the 70’s grooves, your stuck-in-the-Eighties cousin will crack his hip breakdancing to the synth squelches, and even your 16 year old Nu-Rave, ex-Emo, waiting-for-the-next-big-craze nephew will be fake-reminiscing about the Second Summer of Love in no time.

If this makes Ghost in the Water sound like one of those semi-generic French electro combos that seem to be genetically predisposed to grind out BANGIN’ CHOONZ and BANGIN’ CHOONZ alone, you’d only be half-right. The 4Traks remix of Cardinal Red is a weird splicing of folksy yearning, 80’s poodle-rock soloing and Bambaataa keyboard stabs. Even more weirdly, it works.

It’s a risky business, stirring all those discrete elements into one big melting pot, but thankfully Ghost in the Water have got away with it. Find yourself playing ‘Spot the Musical Influence’ here!

>Today’s New Band – Appleblim – Bestival Themed Week!

>A New Band A Day continues its trawl through the Best of, er… Bestival

A.N.B.A.D. is about to go on holiday. Not the kind of holiday we’ve been on recently, when canvas, mud, cider and temperatures approaching zero Kelvin have been the primary features, but one in France, where the sun is out all the time, the steak is de cheval and the music is one of two options: Stupidly bangin’ or merely stupid.

But before we cram ourselves with the rest of the cattle on the cheapo flight out there and dream of all the vin rouge, steak tartare and hypermarchés that makes France so special, there’s time for one more fabulous nouvelle bande for you to rub against your curious ears.

Indeed, Today’s New Band, Appleblim, are perfect for those in-between moments in life, say, whilst you’re helplessly speeding at 300 MPH in a metal tube in the stratosphere, and you need to be distracted so that your whitened knuckles loosen on the arm rests.

Detached and calm but jittering, Peverelist Appleblimcircling skitters lopsidedly, whilst its cousin, Peverelist Appleblim Over Here is almost ‘anti-dub dub’, and electronic, spacey, wide-open track of epically small/large proportions. Circling Bass Clef Remix is even further removed from the ordinary, threatening to veer either towards mentalism or straightforwardness, but never reaching either point, thankfully.

Check it out and then check your mind out to Appleblim‘s space-tastic tunes – right here.

Meanwhile, look out for ANBAD on our return in two weeks, with loads more acers bands (durrrr), but also a MONSTER MASSIVE SUPER SURPRISE! What could it be? You’ll have to wait and see to find out!

Oh, OK, it’ll be a WOW-WEE SUPER site re-design. Pfft. A Bientot!

>Today’s New Band – 747Music

>One accusation that I sometimes hear levelled at the truly incredible Boards Of Canada is that they’ve found a ‘sound’, and just ground out three albums’ worth of songs that are all slight variations on a theme. There is probably an element of truthiness in this, but frankly, fans of BoC don’t care. They just want MORE, because even assuming that BoC are a one-trick pony, it’s such a wonderful trick, complaining just sounds silly.

But what would BoC sound like, if, you know, they shuffled things up a bit? Well, maybe somewhere close to Today’s New Band, 747Music. Hailing from Ontario, 747Music is a self-confessed BoC nut, as an initial listen to his music will confirm. The love of softly and harshly deformed analogue-y sounds are all there as well as the samples of voices, and the tasty beats. But his work is no mere copying exercise – Untitled is a rolling, crunchy electric behemoth and Electric Epiphony is 10 times harder and faster than anything BoC have ever done, punching forward until it falls to bits. The songs are short, lilting and worm their way into your mind, and in some ways, they’re mini-epics – a series of mental day trips, if you will. Worth a listen, without doubt – so do so here!

Today’s Glib Comparison: Well, yes. Boards Of Canada having sex with The BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Whilst, inevitably, The Pixies watch, silently.

>Today’s New Band – MISTER BEEP

>Just as the Emo scene attracts people who like to wear black, cut outrageously stupid fringes and look identical to one another, and the Nu-Rave scene attracts 15 year olds who want a legitimate reason to dance to Scooter, the Chiptune set attracts people who are A) Nerds and B) Musicians. This is an unusual combo – mathematically-minded musicians are hard to come by – you don’t hear Thom Yorke yapping about logarithms. Actually, that’s probably a bad example, but you get my point. Nevertheless, the Chiptune scene is a monster on the Tubular Interwebs, and we have lavished much praise on it’s luminaries such as PixelH8 before.

Much of the enjoyment of chip music can rely heavily on nostalgic memories of late 80’s video games, though occasionally people like PixelH8 transcend those boundaries. However, just because Today’s New Band, MISTER BEEP, produces music which sounds like it really could be from an 80’s ZX Sinclair Spectrum game (because it has, kind of), doesn’t mean the music is like listening to someone on the bus play all of their polyphonic ringtones to their ‘bezzie mate’.

MISTER BEEP‘s music sounds great, at least to my ears – the ears of someone who spent much of their youth trying to complete Switchblade and Fantasy Island Dizzy on their ZX Speccy. Like how Orbital produce music that sounds like the soundtrack to a film never produced, MISTER BEEP‘s sounds like the tune that would have accompanied Chase HQ 3, had it ever been made. Those of you who used to revel in the excitement of spending 10 minutes waiting for the screeching loading noise for Operation Wolf to finish will find Who’s That Robot and Escape From 16-Bit Land leaving them joyously happy. Perhaps that’s the point of the chiptune: nostalgia through new (old) music. Pleasure through rubber keyboards. Mmm, sexy.

Listen to his ZX-tastic tunes here!

>Today’s New Band – oMMM

What would the sound of sleep be like? Silence? A deeeep humming noise? Your parents’ voices chanting “blood….blood…blood” over and over again? Something similar to the noise when you load a game into a ZX Spectrum? We may never know.

Or perhaps we will – because Today’s New Band, oMMM, produces songs that are apparently “spaced out bedcore…a bedtime pop experiment!” Don’t let that fool you, though – this music isn’t like Side Two of The Orb’s Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld. Instead, oMMM is a musical trip, a treat of inventive bleeping and what could be hesitantly described as ‘soundscapes’. In songs like CATWALKTVKAYAKARMX, the sound drifts – but not aimlessly. oMMM are taking us on a bit of a journey – but a nice one, with a break for a cream tea somewhere along the line.

SZWOMMMRMX could be described as residing somewhere between Boards of Canada, the ubiquitous Aphex Twin and Four Tet if we were being particularly lazy. Which we are. It’s a particularly lovely, deliberately dream-like skittle through spacey sounds.

oMMM’s music is calming yet attention-grabbing, a brilliant musical representation of the relaxation and insanity that both tumble from sleep. The music is good for your ears, and the calmness good for your mind. Listen NOW at oMMM’s Myspace page!

And if you found that all a bit too serious, here’s the best/most ridiculous song about a £1.50 portion of chicken and chips performed in a grime style ever. Thanks to Scatman Jamie for pointing out the brilliance of ‘Junior Spesh’

***BLOGGER’S BROKEN AGAIN – NO IMAGES TODAY***