Of The Bands I've Seen So Far . . .

I have that problem that you get when you like so many bands that you can't possibly remember them all, and this is bad enough with the big popular bands that I like - the amount of times I've forgotten to mention Fall Out Boy on lists of my favourite bands, and they're like in the top five (My Chemical Romance, Pierce The Veil, Fall Out Boy, Of Mice & Men, The Blackout).

But since I've started this blog, I've found a whole load of other, small bands that are just as awesome, and I really should listen to a lot more. Finding time is the problem. So here, I'm making time. I am in no way finished with looking at new bands (probably never will be), but of the bands I've seen so far, here is a list of my favourite song from each one - let this serve as a reminder for any of the rest of you who liked them but forgot to carry on listening as well . . . (coherency may vary as I've been living off a 95% chocolate diet for the past 48 hours)

Aspirations - Remember When
To be fair, there's not many songs to choose from for these guys at the moment, but this would probably still be my favourite song by them anyway. I like the screaming, it sounds like a mad person talking to themselves. I also thought that the line "no more hardship" was "no more horseshit".

Bring Home Ohio - The Way It Goes
Because of the awesome guitar at the start, obviously.

Cobalt And The Hired Guns -You Left Your Sweater
It's so happy and clappy, and heartwarming montage-y. It's so lovely, and let us hope it never gets ruined by being used in an iPod advert.

Liar Liar - High'N'Low
I really can't decide properly, because I am all over all of the songs on their He Said, She Said EP, but I'm picking this one because awesomeness and sing-a-long-ability.

Messenger Down - Die Sehnsucht
I don't know what my favourite MD song was before, but I love this one. It's all lonely and really shows off the singing.

Silver Story - My Empire
It's so quiet and chilled at the beginning, and then kicks in and it's all wow. I think I remember the last time I wrote about this one, and I said it sounds like the kind of song you'd use in a film for where they're being romantic in the rain.

Nobody Takes Vegas - Midnight In Nagoya
I like the beginning, how it builds up. It reminds me of those 20 minutes where I tried to play Mirror's Edge or whatever it's called, and I gave up cause I couldn't run across the tight rope fast enough.

Owls In The Attic - Big Fire
This one, yes. Yes yes yes. As usual, the contrast between clean vocals and screaming is really well done, and it sounds like a storm.

Look, A Band: Cobalt and the Hired Guns

not sure what's happening here

As with several things, I was first introduced to Cobalt and the Hired Guns by my friend Hannah, because she throws music at people. I did give them a bit of a listen at the time, but I’m going to do it properly now for the purposes of blogging and helping the music industry, and because they're actually awesome.

Thanks to shouting until I was given information about them, according to the Internet, Cobalt and the Hired Guns are Matt Hart (bass, guitar, vocals), Tom Fort (bass, guitar, vocals), Jesse Alexander (drums, vocals), and Mike Roth (bass, guitar, vocals), formed at Oberlin College, Ohio, although they’re mainly based in Chicago now, and have been around since 2003, although their first album, Jump The Fence, was released in 2008 – they’ve done another one since then - Everybody Wins!. No messing about for these guys, this is serious business – unless you count that apparently one of them uses the song Slow Down at the end of the day in a primary school as a soundtrack to the kids packing up.

Their song MySpace (Like You Like Me) is the one I keep getting told to listen to (by Hannah). It’s good and fun, very jumpy-abouty and happy, which probably makes it all the more unusual that I like it so much. It’s the kind of music you use in the background of a Persil advert, if that makes sense – the sort of ‘happy kids roll in the mud and climb trees’ feel to it. I like You Left Your Sweater better though (that kind of rhymes), it’s got even more of the active party-time-ness in it. But then there's also Oregon, I Know, which isn't anything like what I usually listen to because I don't like guitar solos just for the sake of them, but dayummmmm.

I could go on about all their songs, but I wouldn’t want to spoil the fun. What you should know is that it is exactly that – fun. Fun, happy stuff, one of the few bands that I like listening to that I could show to my younger siblings without really being considered a bad influence. The tags on their bandcamp say “americana pop punk rock fun horn section upbeat Chicago”, which sums it all up really and also counts as a sort of tl;dr for this whole post. If you like horns, if you like pop punk, if you like people from Chicago and you like bands that really know how to make very pretty music and are going to be performing at SXSW this summer (14^th March – Haddington’s, noon; 14^th March – Bourbon Girl/Orange Amps Stage, 3pm; 16^th March – Empire Auto Club & Control Room Patio, 3pm, all in Austin, Texas), then you should definitely listen to Cobalt and the Hired Guns.

Facebook / Twitter (kind of) / Website / Youtube