>Today’s New Band – Dom Coyote PLUS! BANG! AND THE DIRT IS GONE!

>If you’re one of ANBAD‘s many non-UK readers, you may not have experienced the mysterious joys of premiere surface-cleaning product Cillit Bang, and it’s bizarrely seductive Lord, Master and Prophet, the perma-yelling Barry Scott. If you’re none the wiser, initiate yourself into the strangely alluring world of Barry here – and then consider this: without the unusual SEMI-THREATENING SPEAKING-IN-CAPITAL-LETTERS tactic deployed by the quasi-benevolent Barry, Cillit Bang would just be another product on the shelves. Barry has bellowed down the opposition and now Cillit Bang sits amongst the homecare Gods.

Like any product now, music is branded and sold to us like bathroom cleaner. Like Cillit Bang, some bands need a huge advertising pushes to really ram themselves home in the public consciousness. This practice is usually the preserve of average bands who otherwise wouldn’t really justify the money the record company has desperately thrown at them – hello Keane, Pigeon Detectives and our old buddies The Kooks.

Today’s New Band won’t need a gimmick, shouty and rictus-grinning or otherwise. Dom Coyote‘s name is pleasingly Pun-tabulous, and gains the usual ANBAD bonus marks reserved for such occasions, but it doesn’t need to be capitalised upon, because it’s his gently aggressive music that will poke you in the eye and ruffle your hair.

Dom Coyote’s sound is spooling and loose, but then tight and focused. One for the Passenger, disjointed and coherent all at the same time, rolls and rolls and rolls onwards so organically and so easily that you could imagine it happily freewheeling for ever. Under The Thumb echoes, languid, but also bristles crisply, a precise balance between paranoid dub and sprightly reggae-folk. Melodies Of Sleep narrates a kind of happy hopelessness, soothing and anxious.

At their best, Dom Coyote‘s songs sound so crunchy, so tactile, you’ll want to get your fingers involved with the sounds, a bit like an aural Rubik’s Cube. It’s as if the songs were recorded as densely as possible, and then were stripped down to the bare bones, so that only the really mouth-watering noises were left. Yum. Get stuck into his songs here!

>Today’s New Band – Run Toto Run PLUS! ‘The New Oasis’ – again!

>Yesterday, in the Guardian, Alan McGee claimed that Liverpudlian band The Grants were, “The best unsigned band in the world.” Alan McGee has a habit of making big, provocative statements, and it’s reasonable to imagine that this is another of them.

I think most people are willing to put up with these near-biennial claims, seeing as he’s the guy that signed Oasis and Primal Scream, bankrolled My Bloody Valentine to the point of personal/financial breakdown and had the nerve to release Kevin Rowland‘s My Beauty.

So, are The Grants the best unsigned band in the world? Or the next band to be lumbered with the ‘New Oasis’ tag? Well, pop over to their Myspace page and judge for yourself. To me, they dally somewhere between those other Liverpudlian greats, The La’s and Echo and the Bunnymen.They sound big, expansive and masculine but a bit tender with it. Oasis were like that too, when they were good. Perhaps Alan’s onto something. He’s been right before. But then Alan McGee is good at raving about bands. Time will tell.

If The Grants are The Best Unsigned Band… In The World!, then where does that place all the unsigned bands that have sloshed around A New Band A Day these last few months? There have certainly been a few bands that have made me more excited, more happy and more keen to pogo around my bedroom, but then we at ANBAD aren’t really in tune with the section of the public that buys U2 and Coldplay records.

For the rest of us then, here’s Today’s New Band, Run Toto Run, who have never been labelled anything by Alan McGee, and perhaps are all the better for it. Run Toto Run are unlike The Grants in so many ways – they have a neat line in delicate and fragile folky songs, which are serious and carefree all at once.

Your Face has the temerity to rescue the recorder from Primary School Hell and use it (sparingly, mind) in a way that doesn’t induce instant migranes. It’s a simple love song, unknowing, unpresumtuous and uncool. It’s lovely because of all those things.

Something To Say wafts into your life, backwards and confusing, charms you to your very core, and then drifts out again, fluttering eyelashes at you coyly. If that sounds similar to what it must be like to be seduced by Russell Brand, perhaps it is, except much less faux-Dickensian.

Something To Say is the best example of Run Toto Run‘s ability to create cute ‘n’ sincere folked-up love songs, and if it doesn’t leave you a bit dewy-eyed with happiness, then it’s time for a long, hard look in the mirror. And then listen to them, here!

>Today’s New Band – The Shot Heard Around The World

>Yesterday’s yummy, super-twee (but not in an awful ‘Tweecore’ way) band, The Bumblebees, got me thinking. Actually, they got me a-hankerin’ for some more jangly indie. This hankering intensified when I accidentally subjected myself to a video of the Ting Tings’ awful song Shut Up and Let Me Go this morning. Its ultra-hip, consciously-ironic, sunglasses-indoor idiocy made me feel all hopeless. Where’s the fun, or the the sense of reality in their super-slick, focus-group-defined sound?

So Today’s New Band was always going to sound like their music was a) heartfelt, but not sincere; b) enjoyable, but nicely throwaway; and c) both happy and sad. So, say a big ‘hello’ to The Shot Heard Around the World, a band who fulfil those criteria and are as far removed from plastic generic stupidity as possible. They sound like people playing music for the fun of it. LOL!!!, as ‘the kids’ would say. They’re also the second band from Brooklyn to feature on here in a week. Perhaps the A.N.B.A.D. staff are fishing for invites over there or something.

Make of that what you will, but one thing you will definitely recognise is a good indie tune when its tinny-guitar-twinkling winds its way into your brain, and the marvellous is, and does, just that. Rough, ready and engaging, its a song full of harmonies and a sprinking of the pleasantly inevitable glockenspiel that makes you feel happy to be alive. Evening Prayer is homely, warm and sorry – “I treated you less than right, girl that’s true/But everything will turn out right… Nothing ever turns out right,” lamenting and apologising.

Thinking about it, all of the bands this week so far have been very… human. Celebrate a theme as broad as humanity and listen to The Shot Heard Around the World‘s songs here!

>Today’s New Band – Candythief

>Remember how we went mental over the brilliant “The Battle Is Over” by Paul Hawkins and Thee Awkward Silences a few days back? Remember how we raved about the voice of the guest singer, Candythief? Well, with a shuddering inevitability, Candythief is today’s New Band Of The Day!

There’s a couple of ‘truisms’ when it comes to discussing vocalists. The first one is to point out that sometimes you hear a voice so beautifully penetrating that it speaks to you in a different way to most others. “That sounds wonderfully mindless,” you’re thinking, but it’s true in the case of Candythief. Singer Diana’s voice is the kind that would make you mix your metaphors and make you happy to crawl over hot broken glass, just to ask her to sing you to sleep at night. It’s genuinely lovely – rich, dreamy and innocent enough to sound slightly dangerous.

The second ‘truism’ is to say that a good voice can hide a glut of crappiness, mainly the enriching of average songs. The happy news is that Candythief sing great songs, subtle and entrancing. A Good Day is one of these songs. It’s as light as a feather and yet as powerful as a punch on the nose. “I feel like there’s petrol in my veins, whilst fierce joy’s bursting through my brain” she sings, while guitars and violins meld into a rolling accompaniment.

Junk is similarly ace, a wandering, violin-powered drift through a happy/gloomy folk nursery rhyme. The good news is that she’s just got a record deal and so, hopefully, these fabulous songs can gently slide in to as many people’s ears as possible. There’s honestly no reason not to listen to Candythief’s songs, so do it here! – http://www.myspace.com/candythief

>Today’s New(-ish) Band – Dawn Landes

>There are no real hard and fast rules for bands appearing on A New Band A Day. We’re strong believers that there’s no merit in consistency. Some bands we feature on A New Band A Day are so new that they’ve still got the umbilical cord attached, look a bit jaundiced and have only received a hundred or so visitors on their MySpace page. The thought that our humble l’il webs(h)ite has poked a few more people their way makes us feel all warm and fuzzy inside. And a little bit smug too, but that’s more of an ongoing personal issue that frankly needs to be resolved sharpish.

Other bands we feature are a little less “new” in terms of how long they’ve been making music, but are still unknown enough to warrant featuring. We still feel warm and fuzzy about this too. THUS: Today’s New(-ish) Band is Dawn Landes. Dawn’s already recorded her second album of lovely, folky songs and is about to embark on a world tour. Her Myspace page is brimming with these simple, breezy songs, like Straight Lines, though slightly thrillingly, songs like Kissing Song start to transcend folk simplicity approach buzzy acousto-noise as the track finishes. But for easy, sugar-hooked-up-to-the-artery excitement, just listen to her Bluegrass-style cover of the ubiquitous whistle-fest that is Peter, Bjorn and John’s Young Folks. If that isn’t an example of a cover surpassing the original, I’m a blinkered idiot.*

So how does an artist whose most fun-filled song is a cover and is releasing albums and touring the globe even warrant featuring on a website that is dedicated to new bands? Because of this: no-one knows how to pronounce her name. Go on, try it. Did you say “Dawn Land-es”, “Dawn Lands” or the Francais-style “Dawn Land-ay”? This was the deciding factor. If you produce great music, but the pronunciation of your name is a mystery, you’re new enough.

Listen to her music on her MySpace page here!

*this may be statement of fact, not hyperbole