>Today’s New Band – Keyboard Choir

>When I was younger, I was camping by a river. It was a cloudless night, and the stars completely filled the sky. I looked up at them, trying to stop my thoughts from drifting into that terrifying corner of the mind that cheerfully, and optimistically, tries to comprehend infinity. My theory is that if you try to think about the size of the universe, then one day your thoughts will spiral away at an unstoppable exponential rate, your eyes simultaneously widening with overwhelming realisation, with the words DOES NOT COMPUTE flashing up before your eyes forever.

As a distraction, I fiddled with my 12-band nerd-tastic short-wave radio, trying to find John Peel’s weekly show on the BBC World Service. Faced with such a bewildering frequencies, and lacking the fine-tuned motor skills to rotate the tuning dial, it wasn’t an overwhelming surprise that I failed. Happily, at the bottom of one of the short-wave bands I found a squealing, bubbling mass of space-electro, semi-random interference noise, which perfectly accompanied my mildly hysterical gaze into of life, the universe and everything.

If any lesson is to be learnt from all of this quasi-hippy yapping, it’s that sometimes even the most obscure sounds can fit the right occasion. Today’s New Band, Keyboard Choir, aren’t so deliberately obtuse that they sample radio static, but their songs do conjur up the same, icily distant feeling. Bugs samples an eerie clip from a 1960’s radio recording due to be played post nuclear war, and leaves an echoing, metallic shimmer of worry behind it.

In some ways, I suppose, there is a backwards-looking stripe running through Keyboard Choir‘s songs. Skylab‘s plaintive electronic sounds are the noises glum, lonely astronauts would force out of their simple onboard computers in the 1970’s. The loneliness of space and the anxiety from the confines of their mechanised life enclosure is all there.

It’s rare for a band to actually get within spitting distance of the sounds that they originally wanted to make, but it does seem that Keyboard Choir have done it. Ethereal and delicate. Super. Listen to them, here, right now!

>A New Band A Day Is In A Tent… Again – Part Three

So by now, we’re probably trying to swim back from the Isle of Wight in a vain attempt to wash the mud off before careering home. OR, in the unlikely event it was warm, sunny and dry, we’ll be feeling like the smuggest people on the planet. Somewhere in between the two is most likely.

So, tomorrow, there’ll be an exciting update on which were the best bands we saw at Bestival, before filling you in on all the juiciest new bands whose soothing sounds you’ll need to ease you into Autumn.

Love,

Joe & the ANBAD “roadtrip posse in full flavasome effect”

>A New Band A Day Is In A Tent… Again – Day Two

So by now, we’re probably lopping off toes due to either trenchfoot or frostbite, or both. But we’ll have seen some great bands, without doubt. We also might be “drinkin’ thru the pain,” a bit like I fancy Lynyrd Skynryd would do. But without also getting high on crack and crashing a plane.

But you, the dry, happy, non-drenched reader needs new bands. So here’s the BEST OF A NEW BAND A DAY, all for you to catch up on the best bands, noise makers and crazies we’ve had on A.N.B.A.D.! Great times.

Spare a thought for us!

>A New Band A Day Is In A Tent… Again

So, after refusing to learn from our last, chastening experience at a music festival in this summer-less country, the intrepid A.N.B.A.D. team is at another one, this time about as far south as you can go in the UK, in the vain hope that the weather’s better there. It won’t be.

We’ll be sheltering from the rain, wind and stupefying frustration of 30,000 damp people at the lovely Bestival, on the Isle of Wight. The line-up might just make the inevitable rain worthwhile, comprising as it does of super-music-types like My Bloody Valentine, George Clinton, Aphex Twin and a whole BUCKET LOAD more.

So, there’ll be a reduced service here at A New Band A Day until Monday, but we promise to return refreshed*, happy** and with a brain full of ace bands to yap excitedly about***.

In the mean time, why not have a good old scroll around the column on the right and see if any of the old bands of the day you might have missed tickle your fancy?

Love,

Joe and the ANBAD gang

*sodden

**desperate for warmth

***this bit’s probably true

>Today’s New Band – The Gravity Crisis

>If you were to draw up a list of all the necessary things to make an acers band, it’d probably be surprisingly light on ingredients. The list might read along the lines of: great choruses, satisfying chord changes, Keep-It-Simple,-Stupid Lyrics and a working knowledge of what makes the audience decide to get sweaty and excitable – a list that’s temptingly short and sweet. It’s probably this innate simplicity that is the reason for hairy teenagers everywhere to ask for a £69.99 Argos guitar for Christmas in the first place.

The truth is though, that, like unicycling whilst juggling flaming chainsaws, combining all of these things is a lot easier said than done. It’s also why we have to settle for bands like the Kooks et al whilst we wait for the really good bands – who can alchemically squeeze all the simple stuff into their songs – to come along. So, tip your hat, then, to Today’s New Band, The Gravity Crisis, who might just have got it all right.

What’s most exciting about their un-self-consciously fun, catchy songs is that just when you think they might start to wander dangerously close to convention, or repetition, or conservativeness, they veer off in a burst of fuzzy guitar happiness, tails wagging and tongues lolling. Japan is HUGE and crunchy, Animator has all the whoa-oah choruses you’ll ever need and Medicine has howly, simple guitar lines that you’ll spontaneously hum when you’re pouring your cereal next week. The Gravity Crisis are the indie dictionary definition of early promise. Fingers crossed!

Listen to their bounce-a-delic songs here – it’s like the feeling of meeting an old friend you’ve not seen for ages.

And Finally…

A Brief Overview of 2000 Trees Festival –

Mud
Rain
Cider
Hayfever
“Gong Showers”
Lovely People
Sunshine that comes too late
Best band of the weekend – Art Brut. Like, durrrr.

>Today’s New Band – Tent

>Mmm, camping. My last experience in a tent was at Glastonbury 2007 , and while I wasn’t shivering, soaking wet under a tree, scooping wet food into my mouth trying to keep warm whilst listening indifferently to the music being played, I was vomiting into black bin bags in my tent, having hilariously contracted sickness and diarrhea. Not great times, but memorable at least.

So to make New York’s Tent today’s New Band Of The Day was a minor, slightly pathetic, personal triumph of eschewing awful canvas-related memories from my mind. Still, it was worth it, because Tent make some great music. Stop and Go is alternately dense and sparse, with thin drifting vocals – and Tight Squeeze is similar, basic and minimal but coupled with a dreamy vocal melody.

In some ways Tent are like a groovier version of Kings of Convenience, but without any of the blandness that that may imply. Their music is a tightly contorting glide, slightly spaced-out and wide-eyed. I’d be tempted to describe it as techno-folk if that didn’t sound like the worst genre of music of all time. Perhaps the best thing to do is to listen to it for yourself at their MySpace page.