>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 – Crocodiles

>Has summer come or is this just a very warm, pleasant dream? Manchester, home of the grey sky, fine drizzle and more grey sky, has been bathing in glorious sunshine for the past few days. My fair skin has celebrated by turning an appropriately fiesta-hued red, but I don’t care. Sun is such a rarity in this part of the world that I’d be happy if I turned purple (and at this rate, that might just happen).

You might not expect a song called I Wanna Kill to be a summery, shimmering blast of jangly garage rock, but it is. Today’s New Band, Crocodiles, find a musical space between The Ronettes and Jesus And Mary Chain, and occupy it with swathes of feedback, echo and in-yer-face lethargy.

Proving that aggressive titles are clearly their forte, Summer Of Hate furthers Crocodiles’ pared-down rock ethos. They can make lines like “Pray that you’ll come round and scratch out my eyes” sound like sleepy, daydreaming wish-fulfilment.

Soft Skull and Screaming Chrome walk different paths around the same noise-rock mountain. The destination is the same too – songs that radiate both danger and warmth. The soundtrack to a relaxing day on the beach or drug-fuelled paranoia, or both. Listen to Crocodiles here!

>Today’s New Band – Vic Mars!

>There’s probably a point, in minimalist music, where the line between ‘minimal’ and ‘mainly silence with very occasional noise’ gets blurred, bent and fiddled with. At it’s finest, this type of music brings light to your soul and aerates your mind, if that isn’t too flowery a description (it is); at worst, its open-ended nature allows for pretentiousness of the very highest caliber. John Cale has a lot to answer for.

Still, the idea of putting very little noise into a song in an age when bands are dumbly making their songs literally as LOUD as is possible, is both refreshing and an example of going against the grain – both virtues that ANBAD loves to bits.

So welcome Today’s New Band, Vic Mars, apparently from Nagoya, and apparently from the school of less=more, which pleases me no end. Vic’s songs are a little blips of sound, from a few seconds long to just a couple of minutes, glimpses of other-worldly calmness.

Tristwch is vinyl fuzz with near-discernible sounds growing organically from it. The Fountain, lush and orchestral, is still soft and absent enough to hold your thoughts. Clouds In Your Sunglasses takes a simple, sweet sound and runs with it, over and over; as smooth and slights as In is burbling and fractured.

What is great about Vic Mars‘ music is that it lets you into the mindset of the musician in a way that say, Shake It by moron-o-pop band Metro Station doesn’t. Delicious. Listen here!

>Today’s New Band – Here We Go Magic PLUS! Marlon Brando!

>If you watch On The Waterfront, like I did yesterday, you’ll quickly realise that it’s a rare movie of real brilliance. Marlon Brando, in his handsome, quirky youth, has huge impact during the film – impact that even a non-movie buff like me can see. His characterisation of Terry Malloy seems ‘real’ and convoluted in comparison to the relatively staid movie traditions that dictate the rest of the film’s pace and feel.

As such, Brando straddles the old cinema and a whole new type of cinema within one role, within one movie, and you can see it happening right in front of you as you watch. Some bands do the same thing.

Witness The Beatles (them again) zipping from ragged, hormonal rock ‘n’ roll to the lucid insanity of the St. Pepper’s era within a decade. See Public Enemy (them again, too) hopping from rapping about cars over lumpy beats to dazzlingly fierce, angry noise and free-wheeling, intelligent lyricism in the space of an album.

These bands were driven by a desire to do something differently; to stand near the edges of acceptance and have faith that when they kept pushing into the new, the results will be worth it. Not all bands that do this become Public Enemy, but the very fact they’re still trying in a time when mass-conformity is an easier route than ever is enough.

So here’s hoping, as we hope with every band on ANBAD, that Today’s New Band, Here We Go Magic, make similar giant steps. They’re from Brooklyn and are the kind of excitingly well-formed, forward-looking band that makes trudging through all the average bands’ MP3s worthwhile.

Like most really good bands, on their recordings they sound like they’re playing just next to you, except they couldn’t really do that, as their sound is too coiled with thrilling complexity. Songs like Tunnelvision are like a breeze of cool air on a sticky day, refreshing, natural and alive.

Fangela is so soft and dreamy that blissful sleep might be induced in all it’s listeners at the point where the song brilliantly slumps into an organised jumble of cascading sound. Both Of Us, howling with rounds of feedback, is a step on from the kind of sonic experimentation that Spiritualized used to be so good at, repeating variations on the same sound again and again and again until they mean something special.

It’s hard to imagine who could be so cold hearted and lacking in heart to not love Here We Go Magic. Delicate, bold and inventive, the sounds they make will linger in your head long after you’ve heard them; if the melodies themselves don’t loop crazily in your memory, then the feeling they induced will. Lovely, lovely, lovely. Check them out here!

>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

>The Election (Inevitably), Intercontinental Travel and Today’s New Band – Collapsing Cities

>Apparently there’s some election taking place at the moment. You’d think the news services would have made more of a fuss about it. I wasn’t sure if thrusting young Turk Obama or wrinkled old veteran McCain would have got my vote if I were eligible, but then i saw this video and my mind was made up instantly. Such is the power of an inspirational, heartfelt piece of music.

Here at A New Band A Day, our political experiences extend as about as far as occasionally listening to Rage Against The Machine for ten minutes, until the never-ending slap-bass causes objects to be hopefully thrown towards the ‘off’ button. The only vote for change we’d really like to endorse is the start of a new world where our old buddies Scouting For Girls would be locked into a room with a hungry tiger as a matter of course.

In this brave new world, Top of The Pops would be back on TV, every night; Jarvis Cocker would be Prime Minister and any band that didn’t meet the criteria of ‘just don’t sound anything like The Kooks‘ would join Scouting For Girls in the Tiger den. This means that Today’s New Band would, thankfully, be saved, and deservedly flourish.

Collapsing Cities are the band that probably hold the record for ‘Most mind-numbing trip in a Transit van just to get to rehersals’, as they, apparently, live in both London and Aukland. Perhaps they meet in Dubai to discuss which whether to buy some new cymbals or not.

Whatever their travel arrangements, their music doesn’t show any signs of weariness – Fear Of Opening My Mouth is a tinny, droning suicide/love song that pauses to declare “If I’m still a telemarketer next year, I think I’ll end my life” before zipping off again, all hi-hats and lovely, simple guitar noise. It’s a song which feels like it should be accompanied by colour-leeched videos from the early 1980’s of children playing in the shadow of horrible high-rise flats. Hope and despair, see?

I could identify the moment I realised that Collapsing Cities were an actually very good band, and it was the point in Or So I Said, just when I was hoping a guitar break would begin and wrench the song off to new exciting places, it did just that – and did it perfectly, too.

So, vote, if you can, or want to, but only vote for something you really believe in. I believe in good music. I voted for Collapsing Cities. Cast your vote here.

>Today’s New Band – Oreagonomics

>Williams Syndrome is a brain disorder. Those who have it often display likable symptoms – extraordinary love for music, unusual communication skills and a general happiness, whilst lacking in common sense and predictability. Today’s New Band, Oreaganomics, personify all these things, playing fast, loose and carelessly with all the noise they’ve just realised is at their disposal.

So then Happy Plate is a fairground organ gone bad, wild, disordered and drifting in and out of coherency; the happy-sinister music you’d expect to be playing when the Joker appeared in the 1960’s TV version of Batman. It’s a hip-hop skip through a dream where everything is in terrifyingly bright Technicolour, until the buzzy lo-fi guitar ending that’s as welcome as it is unexpected. Iceberg shuffles insistently, tramping a rough beat over and over, obliterating and then re-discovering itself again.

Leaping sideways just when you don’t expect it, I Feel Fine is as washed-out as Fabio‘s jeans, albeit with less tightly defined buns and much more substance. It swishes back and forth like a lazy wave humping a beach, sparse and loose.

Oreaganomics give you an idea of what today’s music would sound like if all records were still pressed onto wax cylinder. Spasmodic, restless and inventive, they burst with eclectic frenzy, over and over again. Great. Let Oreaganomics melt your mind here!

>Today’s New Band – Munch Munch

>There’s a lot to be said for precision and organisation. Streamline your life for mega profit! A tidy home is a tidy mind! De-clutter your surroundings for SUPER ZEN! There’s a reason that Chuck D is such a furious individual, you know – he hasn’t tidied his Rumpus room for years.

Whilst the idea of Chuck D calming down purely because he’s broken out the Dustbuster might be slightly* untrue, there really is as much to be said for disorganisation too. OK, so a desk chock full of papers might cause your plate of toast to fall to the floor, inevitably butter-side down; but how else would you find out whether you like the taste of floor fluff on your toast or not?

The point is that apparent chaos can have pleasant, unexpected results. Today’s New Band don’t seem to merely thrive on the unexpected noise that’s made as they bash instruments, but have adopted it as an ethos. They’re the appropriately named Munch Munch, chomping, as they do, through instruments, sounds and styles, all with fabulous disdain for convention.

The gloriously bonkers-named Endolphins is a twinkling frenzy of invention, clattering, shimmering and splashing all over the place through all of its 3 minutes – and yet there’s a lovely melody that occasionally resurfaces when it feels brave enough. Wedding begins in barely-there chaos, all noise and no direction, before suddenly transforming into a super-fun fairground organ-led pop song, and then reinventing itself for a second time in the same song a few minutes later.

Gloriously deranged, Munch Munch are flailing, crazily, sticking thumbs into pies here, there and everywhere and yet managing to pull out a plum each time. Welcome back, insanity. Embrace it wholeheartedly here!

*wholeheartedly

>Today’s New Band – Kontakte

>There’s a short documentary knocking about the internet about the making of Public Enemy’s astonishing It Takes A Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. In it, one of the Bomb Squad production team explains that when recording the album, they wanted to bring the noise to the fore, to disorientate and shock the audience. “The Noise”, he explained, wasn’t just some half hearted hip-hop shout-out to be “Brought”, like the song Bring the Noise might suggest, but was a whole alluring entity to itself: every single noise coming at you all at once. It’s an interesting concept that neatly sums up Public Enemy‘s uncompromising bombast.

The funny thing about noise is that what one person considers beautiful another will find execrable. This almost fully explains the bewildering nature of the enduring popularity of The Kooks, but not quite. Sometimes noise production doesn’t connect on the usual musical level, but in a way that engages another part of the brain. Today’s New Band, Kontakte, make music like this.
Two And A Half Thousand Miles is obscenely spacious, and is probably the music you’d hear if you lay dying in the middle of the Mojave Desert. Ghosts of Electricity drifts by calmly, interrupted now and then by a sinister hiss – punctuating the song with some sort of urgency. The remix, by Electric Loop Orchestra is as good, if not better, picking up the slack and bashing you about the head, phasing frantically and creating a song through a twin enjoyment of melody and mind-warping effects.

Disorientation then re-orientation. Familiarisation, then enforced bewilderment. This isn’t always music, shifting from discernible melody to heaving fuzz with ease. It is, however, definitely worth a listen.

>Today’s New Band – The Joy Formidable

>The weekend already! It’s been a weird week on A New Band A Day. Coherency is low on the ANBAD agenda at the best of times, but this week we’ve been all over the shop like Amy Winehouse on DisneyLand Paris’s new ride, Journey to the Centre of Crack Mountain.

We’ve romped between super lo-fi tinkling with Magpied and the sleepy bleeps of oMMM, via the rollicking insanity of the Velvet Orchestra and the jaunty jangles of Buen Chico. So in some ways, Today’s New Band, The Joy Formidable, is a bit like the conclusion at the end of a high-school essay, albeit an essay that begins, “What is a New Band? The dictionary definition of a New Band is…”.

That is to say, The Joy Formidable are tinkling, sleepy, rollicking and jangly all at once. This is a Very Good Thing, and can be plainly heard for yourself on their track Cradle, a driving pounder of a song, which, with its “Woo-woo-woo” male/female vocals, sounds, frankly, a bit like what My Bloody Valentine would sound like without quite so many layers of fuzz. Austere punches its way forward bluntly but delicately, leaving you sure of their intent – to RAWK, but in a measured way, slightly reminiscent of Yeah Yeah Yeahs in ‘noise’ mode.

I usually wouldn’t compare bands to others – it’s mainly unhelpful – but look, I’ve just done it twice. Maybe it’s because The Joy Formidable are really good, maybe it’s because I’m feeling lazy. I hope it’s the former. Even more thrillingly, all their songs are FREE! to download at their MySpace page, and their’s even a remix by old friend of ANBAD, Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs! What more could you ask for, really? Listen to their great stuff NOW, here!