>Today’s New Band – Finneyerkes

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If you listen to a lot of music on the internet, I’m willing to gamble that the following question has crossed your mind too. Why are there so many post-rock bands? Answer: because making post-rock looks like an easy task.

Having dispensed with traditional song structure; you can just plug in and improvise, or so it seems. The less you think about what you’re doing, the more the beauty of the sounds flow through onto tape, right?

This is a fallacy, and is also why there are so many drab, tedious post-rock bands all peddling the same glum, unfocused, unwanted wares all over the internet. There is a very fine line between making lovely, semi-conscious noise-fuzz and a knuckle-chewingly lazy drone. You’ll be pleased to hear that Today’s New Band, Finneyerkes, are proponents of the former rather than the latter.

Finneyerkes make strung-out, light-as-air, soundscape-rock. If their actions matched their music, they’d stay in bed all day and dream about perfectly flat, brilliant white, snow-covered landscapes where nothing interrupts the horizon line.

Their songs lilt and lap like a stuporous sea; build up then release. Hear The Listener, its minimal reverberations overlapping and forming a larger image, like a dropped pile of so many photographs. Arshile falls from a mass of radio fuzz and, strangely but beautifully, threatens to become a huge, trancey keyboard-riff. Weird, yes: you’ll have to listen to hear what I mean.

Don’t be tricked into thinking that Finneyerkes make this music easily; it will have taken all the time, patience and frustration that is always required to make songs that sound this lovely. Their music is a genuinely soothing, sweet experience. Great. Listen here!

>Today’s New Band – Agaskodo Teliverek

>My hangover has finally abated, but the mental wooliness still remains. What I need is a jolt of life to shake me from my self-inflicted stupor. And as if by magic…

Today’s New Band are Agaskodo Teliverek. They are a rare example of a band trying to find their own, genuinely new sound. Everything is thrown into the mix in order to see what works, keeping what does, and disposing of what doesn’t. As such, there’s no set guidelines for their songs, which zip around with gleeful abandon.

The Gay Hussar is a dive into mentalist bizarro-pop, a song that’s alive with manic bursts of energised, sampled/shredded vocals to accompany the sound – a fairground organ played at double speed. It thrashes, jerks and wanders with crazed imprecision.

The Beautiful Bread Man oscillates wildly, and, on their own, the surf guitars, hi-hat spasms and noodling would sound odd, but together they clash beautifully, creating exciting webs of sound.

Agaskodo Teliverek are one-offs, and because of this will leave as many people wide-eyed with pleasure as there will be those scratching their heads, which, in my mind is the sign of a good band. Listen here!

Photograph by Krisztian Zana

>Today’s New Band – Polychromatic

>Right now – right now – my favourite band ever is The Fall. I just can’t stop playing The Classical and its lyrics (“Hey there fuckface! Hey there fuckface!”) are rattling around my brain like loose bolts in a grumpy, sweary machine.

Last week, my favourite band ever was The Pixies. Two weeks before that, it was The Smiths. And so on. People who have an all-time favourite band that never changes aren’t to be trusted, or are Oasis fans.

Who, then, is Today’s New Band’s favourite of all time? Polychromatic‘s songs don’t really give it away. They take a bit of this and a bit of that to create songs that are sometimes dreamy, sometime deranged and sometimes both simultaneously.

Skitter-scattering and cascading manically, I Fell Through (Polychromatic Remix) could be the deranged offspring of a song from the Tron soundtrack. Diamonds Are For Never and Always shimmers like the glare off a lake in a computer-generated world; it’s sweet, warm and exhilarating. Songs like CSI crunch and swoosh assuredly.

Polychromatic takes a vague swipe at the 8-bit compu-sound ethos, but mainly incorporates his own sensibilities, which are, confusingly, both a deftness of touch and a love of manic beats. It works. Listen here!

>Today’s New Band – The New Daisy Godzilla

>I’ve battled with my brain’s inability to mull over a good song before. It’s testimony to a bad song‘s raison d’etre that the exact thing that you hate about it – the dreadful catchy melody – is the one thing that the song-processing bit of your mind latches onto, limpet-like.

Events in the petty soap-opera battle between my subconscious and musically bewildered conscious self have taken an interesting turn – yesterday I had a mixture – a mash-up, if you will – of two songs playing on my internal jukebox. And not any old mash-up, either.

This time, the full majesty of Ray Parker Jnr‘s Ghostbusters theme and the ludicrous repetitiveness of Count and Sinden‘s awesome Hit Me On My Beeper blended together to create a brand new hit.

In a music culture where the number of people who have also heard the same song of you is considered to be in inverse proportion to your Cool Status, perhaps brain-remixing is the only true way of remaining ahead of the pack.

So take Today’s New Band, The New Daisy Godzilla, and squish crazy, mazy songs like Birds Are A Good Idea with anything you like to make a brand new one. Even if you don’t, you’ll find that The New Daisy Godzilla are livelier than a hyperactive teenager, and ten times as noisy.

Dancing In The Graveyard jolts into life, and thrusts at you unashamedly, the band drunk and frisky with their own animation. 2Souls1City is a love song for those who love violently unexpected seismic shifts – jerking with barely-restrained energy, a blur of wild drumming and liberally applied effect-pedal guitar screeching.

Invite The New Daisy Godzilla into your life. They’ll hump your leg, run around the room a hundred times, and then exit, leaving you breathless. Great! Listen here.

>Today’s New Band – A Death Cinematic

>There has been an outbreak of bed bugs in the USA. There are ‘regular and persistent’ outbreaks from New York to San Fransisco. They have become impervious to pesticides. They are going top take over the world and parasitically enslave us all. Yes, I’m now itching all over too. No, I won’t sleep too soundly tonight either.

With that in mind, take Today’s New Band, A Death Cinematic, who have a song which sounds like one long, harrowing wail of human horror. It’s called Locust Clouds Have taken To The Horizon. It’s so close to being awful guttural noise that it’s a challenge of sorts to listen to it, albeit a rewarding and thrilling one.

Brilliance Of The First Morning Snow soothes and evaporates, leaving calm; conversely, When I Leave I Wish To Kill The Sun takes the sound of the apocalypse as a starting point and explores the resultant parched, dusty devastation. Guitar feedback wails and stabs and drones until you’ve forgotten what not hearing it sounds like.

The planets are aligning, and the die is cast. Our insect-ridden future awaits. Listen to A Death Cinematic, and await your fate.

>Today’s New Band – [INSERT CREDITS]

>If you need any proof that the music business is as box-of-frogs, bat-shit, [insert ‘zany’ euphemism here] crazy as ever, just look at the case of Franz Ferdinand. A few years ago, they were all over the music press like a bad suit. Their first album sold squillions, driven by the neat, catchy singles that kept dropping off it. They could do no wrong.

Except, of course, in Rock Music World, they could. Well, not them exactly. In fact, not really them at all. They made the numbskull mistake of releasing another good album of cleverer, catchier songs. But Rock Music World kept up its relentless, spinning pace, desperately hoovering up the new, the young and the easily fooled, and Franz Ferdinand became one of those bands.

You know, those ones. The ones that you know are bright, sharp, exciting and big – except you’re not bothered enough to buy their album, and really, when was the last time you heard them on the radio anyway?

Today’s New Band, [INSERT CREDITS] can gain comfort from the fact that their down-beat and quirky instrumentalism veers neatly around Rock ‘n’ Roll hyperbole. That [INSERT CREDITS]‘ music isn’t the usual Boards Of Canada/Aphex Twin knock-off is refreshing enough; that their music is funky, new and lithe as well is a minor joy.

The music samples this and that, looping funk stabs with film score swoops – and songs like Steal This Song jog and glide with a confident swagger. Invisible Robots is part 50’s Sci-Fi shocker and part glistening late-night slumber-beats.

Gordon Street has the nerve to sample Lou Reed‘s Perfect Day and Wayne’s World 2, and to turn them into a feedback-drenched freakout. Common Enemy is twitchy and nervous; a strange, theremin-‘n-drums, paranoid, step back in time.

[INSERT CREDIT]‘s Myspace page is crammed full of their songs, and they’re all a trip into the groove-laden Twilight Zone that is apparently hidden in a far corner of our minds. Exciting, weird and inventive. Listen here!

>Today’s New Band – Parasite PLUS! Fight The Power!

There’s a protest outside the big BBC building in Manchester. It’s anti-Palestine or anti-Gaza; I forget which. A few days ago, it was in a sorry state – one middle aged woman harrumphing at the world, a cardboard sign, and some candles. But last night, troops rallied, a large-ish, vocal group were there banging the same metaphorical drums as ever.

They had a song that went, “We’re together! We’re united! We will never be defeated!” It sadly lacked that little bit of pizazz to really, incisively shake the evil empire out of its corporate fug. Sadly, not one of the protesters had even a cursory knowledge of Sham 69‘s back catalogue, as they would have known that “divided” would have been a much better rhyme for their final couplet. Frankly, by the looks on their faces, “We will never be delighted” would have been more appropriate.

Some people just need a wall to bang their heads against. In this group’s case, the TV studios where they film BBC Children In Need is close enough to The Man to suffice. The only banging of heads induced by Today’s New Band, Parasite, will be those that occur on the dancefloor of a sweat-drenched club when the involuntary arm-flailing his truly mentalist tunes cause take their toll.

Parasite is a DJ who, seemingly, whelps outrageously hardcore jungle tunes. That, and the fact that they’re brilliant is all you need to know, in many respects. The fabulous thing about music this out-there and non-inclusive is that it will deter anyone who is even a tiny bit concerned with artifice. If you’re the kind of person who worries that your skinny-tie-and-ironic-tanktop will be simply ruined in the sweat-pit conditions of a jungle or breakcore nightclub, stop reading now.

If, though, losing it on the dancefloor for six straight hours, until your limbs, ears and mind are all aching is your idea of a good time, then his music should be clutched close to your clammy chest. Parasite’s songs are designed for losing yourself in exactly these conditions. Now Get Ill, straddling novelty and mind-shredding brilliance; I Love You Baby, pounding you into broken submisison with ragga-jungle clout; Strong Like A Lion providing quasi-respite, bubbling and echoing before it zips into banging mentalism again.

Parasite makes music with a smile on his face, but is dead serious about having a good time. Music for the fans, by the fans, with no regard for being named on any hipster magazine’s ‘cool’ list. You may not like the sound, but the reasoning’s perfect. Listen here!

>Today’s New Band – We Fly Ships PLUS! Hatred!

>NB: Since publishing this post, Julian and I have conversed via email. Julian’s actually a good guy whose frustration with the music industry’s reluctance to give bands time to develop got the better of him, and I was just the person he vented his spleen to on the spur of the moment.

I don’t blame him for his frustration – I share it – so happily, him and I have the same basic ideas and views on music, and all is well. However, the core points of the post remain important, so I’m keeping it up, though with this caveat.

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Excitingly, I got my first hate e-mail the other day. It was from a man called Julian Deane, who apparently runs a company called Raygun Music Management. He manages a few decent bands. Julian said that ‘most of the bands on ANBAD are shite’ and that ‘any idiot can post a Myspace address every day‘.

Hate mail is rewarding in so many ways – it means that something I’ve done has riled someone enough to actually spend time letting me know how they feel. Hate mail has as much impact as the praising emails that I get, in that it further confirmed that ANBAD is on the right track – by aiming not to please all of the people all of the time.

I’ll happily admit that not all the bands on ANBAD are as ‘good’ as the others, but only if you define ‘good’ by, say, the likelihood that lots and lots of people will like them, which in some people’s eyes also translates into ‘potential for record sales’.

ANBAD isn’t about taking part in some sort of dick-swinging contest, desperately trying to find the next big band before anyone else. There are loads of websites doing that. We just want to find bands which sound like something we haven’t heard before. That’s the only criteria, really. If a band does go on to bigger things, just like early ANBAD alumi Dinosaur Pile-Up appears to be doing, we’re more than happy.

With all that in mind, maybe you’ll like Today’s New Band, or maybe you won’t. Hopefully, you’ll think that We Fly Ships sound like something that you haven’t entirely heard before. We Fly Ships are perfect week-ending material, half relaxing and half bangin’, just like all good weekends should be.

Sometimes they manage both of these opposing feelings in the space of one song – World in Reverse spends the first, loopy, misty minute threatening to explode, and then transforms into something big, fuzzy and enveloping. Listen to it and try to resist being groped by its tempting grooves and luxurious melody. You’ll wish that you could be listening to it a lot louder in the same way that Orbital‘s albums are never quite as earth-shattering as their live, loud counterparts.

The Bears Are Dead is, frankly, a wonderful mixture of warm synth washes, clattering drums and manic dog-barking. Yes, it’s verging on the boundaries of sanity, but that’s usually a good thing. It sounds like an early Spiritualized song remixed by Adrian Sherwood which is then remixed again by, oooh, Mr Oizo.

We Fly Ships are as warm, loving and intimidating as getting a hug off someone who’s E’d up to the eyeballs. Snuggle up to them here – maybe you’ll be enraged enough to write me a stroppy email. And then read ANBAD – The eBook and work yourself into a frenzy of righteous anger.

>Today’s New Band – Death of Concorde PLUS! Changes are afoot!

>The A New Band A Day Internet Monkey has been hard at work behind the scenes recently. Changes are afoot, and shortly, ANBAD will ‘relaunch’ (i.e. look a bit different, but not too different) with a whole host of ‘new’ and ‘exciting’ ‘features’ to scroll unexcitedly through before clicking on the link to The Onion.

If you are one of the zillions of our lovely email-subscribing readers, have one last look at the old site – it’ll make you feel even more underwhelmed when the new one is whelped, jaundiced and screaming into the internet world. Otherwise hold tight and prepare for wide-ranging, skyscraping* change!

People don’t like change, as a rule. In ANBAD‘s case, change was deemed necessary because the website looks a bit like it was cobbled together by a computer-illiterate colour-blind idiot with a mild obsession with vinyl-munching robots. In music, band after band claw onto what they know and daren’t change a thing. As anyone who has attended a business seminar and is well versed in corporate bullshit will know – sharks have to keep moving, or they die. If we extrapolate this information to the music world, this makes Oasis a dead Hammer-Head.

We hold the most admiration for bands who, at the very least, try something new. So here’s Death Of Concorde, Today’s New Band, trying something new. The fruity-sounding Bath Partners is a jittering delight, lush and sparse all at once. Old Hammond organs swoosh about, deforming and collapsing into new sounds as and when needed. Communism is a song title that sounds like it ought to be on Side Two of David Bowie‘s Low, but wouldn’t fit, what with it being a mentalist, mechanoid monster of a song, sampling both heavy metal riff-o-rama and fairground organs.

It sounds like Death of Concorde are eager to squeeze the wrong shaped blocks into the wrong holes, and manage to do it too, without their sounds becoming either a mess or contrived. Concorde Museum shimmers, wanes and echoes like a tape recording of an orchestra put through a guitar chorus effect pedal, always just on the right side of becoming all-out white noise. Melodic and dense, it’s a soundscaping delight, pushing textures here and there excitedly.

So, as you hold your breathe excitedly for the ALL! NEW! ANBAD!, why not tune in and space out with Death of Concorde, and ease your passage into oxygen-starved unconsciousness…

*actually quite minor

>Today’s New Band – Awesome Wells

>We started yesterday with a quotation, and that shaped up pretty well, so here’s another one: “The goodness of the true pun is in the direct ratio of its intolerability.” That one was from Edgar Allen Poe, and it makes us think our writing has some associated respectability when really, it doesn’t. In all honesty, we still haven’t totally figured out what he’s trying to say. But anyway, – PUNS! – we can’t get enough of ’em at A New Band A Day.

So, inevitably, it’s Another Day, Another World-Class Pun. Today’s New Band is – wait for it – Awesome Wells. His music is soft, strong and long, like Andrex toilet paper, except you wouldn’t want to wipe any part of your body on this – it’s too good.

The Highs and Lows of… is an eight-minute long magnus opus, that starts with chanting rounds, clapping, brass and a military drumbeat and then decides that, having started with such a rich and varied sound palette, everything else may as well be thrown into the pot as well. Strings, glockenspiels, accordions and samples of big bands then all make a fleeting appearance. On paper, this sounds like a recipe for overblown, rock-star-experimenting-with -new-solo-material- type disaster, but Awesome Wells clearly has a deft touch and all the sounds are massaged gently into something that is not only coherent, but hypnotically soothing.

After that, how many people would then have the audacity to cover the Theme From Twin Peaks? To anyone who has spent hours drawn in my David Lynch’s masterpiece of TV weirdness, the song has such strongly defined emotions stitched to it that this too seems like a bold step too far, but Awesome Wells gets away with it in style. Removing it almost completely from its’ origins and yet retaining every haunting nuance is some achievement in itself, but to then pull it away even further into new, fascinating places, as the five-minute weird-out at the end does is evidence of a special talent.

If you combined mid-90’s Tortoise with the entire BBC Sound Effects Library, you may come close to approximating Awesome Wells‘ sound. But you wouldn’t come anywhere near to his precise, caring control – the sounds ebb, flow and weave together to the point where any lingering doubts are assuaged by the gleefulness of the sonic journey you’ve just taken. Make yourself feel underwhelmed by your comparative lack of talent here!