The thing about music, see, is you can’t know about all of it. No matter how much you got, no matter how much you cram between your ears, no matter how long you’ve been cramming it, there’s always more.

Round our house, me and Mrs My New Favourite Band are working our way through HBO’s much brilliant Tremé. Set in post Katrina New Orleans, it follows a fantastic hotch potch of characters as they rebuild their lives following the devastating hurricane. As you’d hope for a show set in Orleans, music is front and centre.

We twigged that there were rafts of special musical guests when Elvis Costello popped up early doors acting badly. No idea who they were, but we could spot them due to bad acting. We deferred to Google to find out, but had to stop when Mrs MNFB discovered ‘The Bad Thing’ that happens in Season One while on one such expedition. Keeping it from me almost tipped her over the edge let me tell you.

So thanks to Tremé our ears are open to street folk, school marching bands, jazz of all shapes and sizes, soul bands, brass bands, spectacular Mardi Gras Indians and, thanks to Davis, mash ups of most of the above, with some hip hop for good measure.

Yes, yes, rambling, I know.

What really gets me is the brass. Which brings us to Youngblood Brass Band. See, got there in the end.

Tremé has served up some instruments we’ve never even seen before let alone heard, including the sousaphone. The big daddy of the tuba family, it wraps around the player like a snake and makes the greatest noise – a huge, deep, bassy rumble – and in the right hands it is pure funk. And the right hands, it turns out, belong to one Nat McIntosh of Youngblood Brass Band.

With just three albums under their belt since 1998 and a fourth on the way this summer, not exactly prolific, but feel the quality will you? The nine-piece hail from Madison, New Orleans, New York, Nashville, Minneapolis and Chicago, and right there you have quite a musical heritage roll call… Madison you’re saying? Home to James Brown’s drummer Clyde Stubblefield and uber producer Butch Vig, although sadly not living in the same house as far as we know.

Picking just the one track for your listening pleasure was almost impossible, so after much thought you get ‘March’ from their 2007 album ‘Is That a Riot?’ and from the new album ‘Pax Volumi’ (due this summer on Tru Thoughts), the single ’20 Questions’, which is out on 3 June. Watch it below…

As you can see, what you get here is a bunch of lads cooking up a total storm, shuffling indie kids and their guitars this isn’t. Chuck in a decent MC and the whole thing is pure joy. They’re really worth investigating, because aside from cooking up said storm they’re no strangers to spreading the word. Start at the Wiki entry and The Layered Arts Collective site layered.org and you discover they run a schools programme that covers everything from Orleans musical history to punk and they not only run their own label, but publish their own sheet music so school bands can get in on the fun. And that, in this age of identikit X Factor hopelessness, can only be a good thing.

More hear…
- The Soundcloud is a must-listen from start to finish.
- Website …
- And if you’re in London on 22 May you’re in luck. Get tickets for their show at Cargo here.

Heck. Stand by for a quick post… Canadian Stockholm dweller Richard Reagh has just caused us a right headache. Couldn’t think of a pun for the headline could we. Reagh? Is it, we wondered, pronounced Ree-ag? Or is it Rea, like Chris? One thing’s for sure, he’s not like Chris Rea is his music. Cripes.

Beautifully put together, deceptively simple and ever so slightly off-kilter, that’s Richard Reagh. Perhaps we’d get away with attaching a folk pop label… or perhaps alt folk? But… but… there’s remixes, lots of, which are rather floor pleasing so perhaps not. You can hear a twinge of Beach Boys, a sliver of They Might Be Giants perhaps in that voice. And there’s a very healthy lashing of gospel, real sing-along-a-stuff in a Blur ‘Tender’ kind of way. Have a quick tug on the new single ‘Someone Needs Me More’, just needs a gospel choir really. See what we mean? As hat fans, we’re loving the headwear too.

The plan, says Richard, is to release his ‘The Ed Harris Masters’ album in 10 bite-sized chunks with the latest chunk, ‘Someone Needs Me More’, being the third such offering. The first two chunks, and we will get bored of typing the word chunk in a minute, are corkers. There’s ‘Snowman’ (see above), the single edit of which swirls – quite literally in places – like huge flakes of snow tumbling from the sky, while ‘Whatcha Gonna’ is a proper whistle-along charmer with a bit of Spanish guitar to boot and the delightful line “if we lift of right now/we’ll be back in our beds/before we fall off the couch”. Marvellous stuff.

We’re looking forward to hearing the whole lot as an album, you know, 10 tracks in a row by the same person, like how we listened to music in the olden days. Call us old fashioned.

More hear…
- Website … Facebook … YouTube … Soundcloud …
- BTW… Mr Reagh has kindly helped us out with his name. “Everybody has trouble with Reagh,” he tells us. “Think of a ‘Ray’ of sunshine.” Will do sir, will do.

We’ve just had a brilliant idea. See, we get sent quite a bit of music in the hope we’ll write about it. The excellent Song, By Toad Records did just that… and their music comes with beer. So what if we set up mynewfavouritebeer.com would breweries send us quite a bit of free beer to write about in a music journalism style? No, thought not.

Anyway, to the point. Edinburgh’s Song, By Toads Records have teamed up with the city’s Barney’s Beer Brewery for a Record Store Day experiment that isn’t likely to be repeated in a big hurry. In our previous life record labels and breweries were often been mentioned in the same breath, normally to do with the former organising something in the later and not doing a very good job. Believe us, we were invited much of the time.

Yeah, well forget all that because on Record Store Day 2013, which is 20 April, record label meets brewery in a well organised, limited edition release of music and beer shocker. The plan it seems is for Song, By Toad to stick out a 250-edition clear red vinyl 12-inch featuring eight tracks from, it says here, “emerging bands from the Scottish underground DIY scene”, while Barney’s stick out a limited edition, lovingly presented four-pack of beer with each bottle featuring two tracks in the shape of download codes.

The winner is the first to sell all their wares. Beer vs Records, see.

When we thought about it for a bit, quite a while if truth be told, we thought is was a done deal. Beer wins easy because you get a decent pint AND eight tunes, MP3 admittedly… but then we thought about the clear red vinyl 12-inch and how nice that sounds and then we unrolled our promo of the featured tracks and… well, now we’re not so sure beer does win. And when Beer goes head to head with Records, the 12-inch will be for sale in more places than the beer, but then we imagine that record shops aren’t licensed to sell beer, nor would you expect to pick up a 12-inch in an offie, not matter how nice the colour of the vinyl.

Oh, yes, right. Music. You get two tracks by, in alphabetical order, starting with our faves, the shoegazey Le Thug, twinkly dream popsters Magic Eye, the ‘atmospheric punk sludge rock’ of Plastic Animals and ragged indie rockers
Zed Penguin.

So… back to the beer, which is making our mouths water just reading about it… you get a bottle each of Le Thug Lager (4.8%, Light straw coloured, smooth and a light fruity zing. A clean, dry, finish), Zed Penguin Pale Ale (3.8%, gold coloured, a good honest full-bodied pale ale with a subtle citrus & spicy hop finish), Magic Eye Red Rye (4.5%, made with two types of rye malt & German melanoidinmalz. Copper/dark amber colour, with a crisp, toffee apple & fruity taste) and Plastic Animals IPA (5%, light straw coloured, assertive bitterness, erupting with US style hop character).

We’ll let you know who wins.

More hear…
- beervsrecords.com, Song, By Toad Records, Barney’s Beer and Record Store Day should keep you busy while we’re at the bar.
- We’ve just looked and there’s hundreds of beer blogs, really like Boak and Bailey’s Beer Blog and the grandmaster Pete Brown. Don’t think we’ll be writing about beer any time soon.

Three piece! Hamilton! Canada! Beards! Tunes!

We thought about leaving it at that, and knowing how lazy we are you would have probably shown little surprise that we are now resorting to six-word posts with exclamation marks.

We came across this lot via their video for new single ‘Two Reasons’. It features the face painting of artist James Kahn and to be honest, it freaks us out a bit. It’s very good, but it is a bit freaky. The video will no doubt be one of those things that’s going to explode, they’ve already clocked up a healthy 750k YouTube views, but we can’t help feeling Young Rival are better than a cheap viral campaign.

We watched the video and it is clever, but the music is cleverer. We’ve just sat and listened to everything on their soundcloud, nary a dud in sight. Check our their very excellent self-titled 2008 debut EP, especially “Too Hip”, and the eponymous debut album from 2010 and we are most certainly going to investigate last year’s “Stay Young” album (from which comes the excellent “Nothing You Know Well” above) when it hits the UK to coincide with the live dates looming in May.

And what is it about bands not from round your parts that makes them seem so much cooler than anything from round your parts? See, Young Rival are guitarist and frontman Aron D’Alesio, bassist John Smith and drummer Noah Fralick. Yeah, admittedly they need to get a bassist not named after beer, but the other two, brilliant names lads.

So, the music then, finally. They sound big and full and rounded and noisy. Scuzzy seems appropriate. Theirs is a scuzzy sound, full of backward looking references, they mention The Beatles, The Kinks, Yardbirds, and “all that stuff” and delightfully, says D’Alesio, “I didn’t even know who Kurt Cobain was until the guy died, y’know?”

There’s a really good piece about them on their website by Ben Rayner. Well worth a read. See, for us, that sort thing is worth 100 quirky videos. Long live music journalists eh?

So… to sum up. Cool as monkey’s nuts, this lot. And there’s a singing monkey’s arse in the video for the new single for those who like that sort of thing. Us, we’re sticking with the music, thanks all the same.

More hear…
- The new single ‘Two Reasons’ is out on 6 May. The video is here if you want to freak yourself out a bit.
- Catch them live at The Garage in London’s Highbury Corner on 14 May and at Brighton’s Great Escape Festival, at some point between 16-18 May.
- Website, Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud, etc.

Thing is, we’re often a step or two behind when it comes to sniffing out the good stuff. It’s not so much that we’ve not got the ears, more that we’re bone idle if we’re entirely honest. But this lad, this lad, is going to drag us along in his getting properly famous wake. And we will finally be able to say told you so because, well, Mr Ollie Rudge will be famous and we will have told you so.

See, we’ve been out and about this week listening to lots of live acts in Access To Music‘s Atom Live regional heats. Long story.

Ollie Rudge, a second year ATM student in Birmingham, joined the fun as special guest playing a short set each day while lunch was munched. Heard him for the first time in Brighton, the second time in London, listened to him online from Darlington, a fourth time in Norwich… you get the picture. The more we hear, the more we like.

He’s on the tour because he bagged himself the chance to release a single through Island Records later in the year after he was plucked out by the label in a showcase thingy run by the college. In the meantime, he’ll be releasing his own EP, ‘I Will Be You Sun’, in a couple of weeks and this seemed a good chance to get him a taste for life on the road.

Hailing from the deep dark West Midlands, Ollie is not only fine company, his musical turn is refreshingly different. He can veer from the thrillingly simplest of sounds – sometimes nothing more complicated than one-finger chords, or hammering out infectious almost tribal rhythms on open strings – to the most delightfully resonant finger picking. And he’s got a resonator. “The best Christmas present ever,” he beams whenever he slings it over his shoulder.

Resonator? Mentioned them here before haven’t we? Hang on… *sound of internet rummaging* yup, Adelaide’s Cape had one. They are the weapon of choice for blues and bluegrass musicians, people who know how to make the most of the glorious, loud, bright metallic sound. In Ollie’s hands the thing sings. It pings and chimes as clear as a bell.

But there’s more. The songwriter bit, right? Right. With the world and all its friends strumming a sodding guitar and singing songs, standouts are few and far between these days. There’s Ed Sheeran, natch, a former ATM student who you might have noticed was snapped up major label style, and look what happened to him. He killed a Pink Floyd song in front of our very ears at the Lympics and got away with it.

And that’s where Ollie scores big. No, not killing Pink Floyd songs. Songwriting. I refer you, m’lud to the band Eyes In Istanbull! for who young Oliver is the standing up singing drummer. Yup.

Do you see? He gets it. He understands the value of making songs sound good. Doesn’t matter if it’s just him or if it’s with a band. Or probably someone else’s band for that matter. And that’s the difference, he’s making songs work however, where ever and with whoever.

And it’s a fucking delight to be blunt. If only there were more like him.

More hear…
- Ollie Rudge’s debut ‘I Will Be Your Sun EP’ is out 15 April. Pre-order here.
- The soundcloud with some bits and bobs… the Eyes In Istanbull soundcloud where you should listen to ‘Warm Dark Places’, which is that good it reminds us of ‘Walking On The Moon’…
- The Ollie Rudge Twitter… and the Eyes In Istanbull! Twitter.
- See the resonator in action, here.