Your New Favourite Band #4: Evans the Death

Your New Favourite Band is a brand new feature series on No Ripcord. Each month, we will be profiling two of our favourite newcomers, publishing a short biography, video, and embedded audio file.

Aside from the all-important No Ripcord seal of approval, there is an additional prize at stake for the most popular of these two artists. The artist whose profile article receives the most 'Tweets' and Facebook 'Likes' will win the title of No Ripcord Readers New Artist of the Month along with one month's worth of free banner advertising on the website. So please bear this in mind and use our Social Networking buttons judiciously to vote for your favourite.

Evans the Death

As anyone who's ever tried to pluck one out of thin air will be able to testify, a good band name is hard to find. A common fallback solution for the creatively redundant is to reference something from the arts world - this can be a book, a poem, or a film, but nine times out of ten it is another band's song. Boring. If you're going to reference something, you should at least make it something obscure. Calling yourselves Wonderwall would be career suicide; borrow the title of an unreleased demo by a cult hardcore band, on the other hand, and you're set for life.

By adopting the moniker of a supporting character (an undertaker, no less) in Dylan Thomas's 1954 radio drama Under Milk Wood, the five members of indie-pop act Evans the Death are making a clear statement: they're smart, maybe a tiny bit pretentious, and they aren't afraid to be different. I applaud their choice.

A good name, however, will only get you so far. Fortunately, Evans the Death have the tunes to deliver. The bands's debut single Threads (released 4 July on Fortuna POP!) barely scrapes past the two minute mark, but it's as intelligent and wildly exciting as anything else I've heard this year. How many other young British bands would have the confidence to launch their careers with a song about Cold War-era anxiety? I'll let you ponder that one. Inspired by the 1984 documentary of the same name, it's fitting that Threads recalls some of that era's finest indie music, such as The Fall, My Bloody Valentine, and influential lo-fi pioneers Black Tambourine.

Our second featured track is I'm So Unclean, which will feature on the band's upcoming debut album and may well end up released as a single itself. Less paranoid in its subject matter than Threads, and a little more pop-orientated, I think it would make an excellent single choice. It's a bit like The Pains of Being Pure at Heart... you know, when they were good.

Further information on Evans the Death:
Evans the Death on Facebook
Evans the Death on MySpace
Evans the Death on Twitter

This month's other profiled act is Trogons, who you can check out here. If Evans the Death are your favourite of the two, please use the Twitter and Facebook buttons below to cast a virtual vote for them.

EVANS THE DEATH are No Ripcord's New Favourite Band for June 2011. Congratulations to them and thank you for voting.