Have you noticed how contrived and artificial the notion of "unsigned", "grassroots" bands has become recently? In Levi-Strauss's anthropological terms, an enormous amount of cooking goes into producing the appearance of rawness in new artists.
This CD came as a free covermount with Music Week. On the back it says,
Diesel-U-Music is an international network supporting unsigned, unsung and underground talent. Working with key organisations in the music industry, Diesel-U-Music promotes real creativity and offers real opportunities. As an invaluable A&R resource, Diesel-U-Music is proven to work, with early uncoverings of artists such as Mylo and Tom Vek in their former State Trooper and Souvenir guises. 2005 saw the best year yet, here is a taster this year's selection and, to give you an idea of where we've come from, some of our previous winners too.
(If you want more, www.diesel-u-music.com will re-direct you to a horrible branded experience including the shortlist for this year's award, to be announced any time now.)
I'm not sure how artists can maintain the sense of being "unsung and underground" when the music industry is plugging them to all their mates with free giveaways.
Perhaps Infadels were one of their previous winners because they were, I think, already fairly widely played in 2005 (uniquely among all the rash of indie tosh over the last four or five years, I actually bought their album, on emusic). Let's give the compilers the benefit of the doubt on that one. The rest of the music is either more of the same aforementioned indie tosh or rather tame rapping.
As for being "proven to work", two years on, the band Shuffle still seem to quote their 2005 Diesel-U-Music as their greatest accolade on their Last.fm profile, as does Aphletic.
Maybe I'm being unfair (these profiles are most likely written by third parties and may be out of date). But there's a whiff about this CD that brings out my cynicism. Maybe it's the idea that the CD and what it stands for is also supposed to convince people that some brand of jeans is hipper than other brands.
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