• Pillow Queens – Name Your Sorrow

    April 23, 2024 - By 

    Pillow Queens’ third album Name Your Sorrow is a raucous feat of passion and disdain that explores the many facets of sorrow. The Dublin quartet have returned with something that offers little new, but brings to light the weaknesses of previous albums in its refinement of their shortcomings. Toeing the line between their first two albums, it lands in a sweet middle ground where we find Pillow Queens at their most refined. “Let’s just play some rock n roll music,” exclaims the opening track ‘February 8th’, punctuated by each instrument as they re-introduce the band one by one. Instruments are…

  • Pixies at 3Olympia Theatre, Dublin

    March 11, 2024 - By 

    One afternoon in 2016, I necked an industrial vat of coffee and proceeded to make the case for the Quietus that, when all is said and done and hyped and re-issued, ad infinitum, Trompe le Monde was Pixies 1.0 at their most downright irresistible. Marking their shapeshifting, space-obsessed last hurrah before combusting two years after its release in 1993, it’s spent the last three decades astride its predecessor, Bossanova, as a genre-mangling snapshot of the band being indie rock’s OG mentalists par excellence.  Eight years on, I’m more sure than ever that, for all their relative dearth of Kim Deal, it’s…

  • Other Voices 2023

    December 6, 2023 - By 

    Other Voices drew the best of Irish music to Dingle, Co. Kerry for three days of intimate performances, secret sessions and a vibrating air of magic. Now in its twenty-second year, it maintains its position as a stand-out music festival full of surprises, facilitating close access to unique performances by and for music lovers. Lines are blurred between musician and music lover, bringing a special element to the weekend that differentiates it from any other music festival. Renowned for creating a pocket of magic in Dingle every December, this year’s festival was no different.  With lit streets and pub doors…

  • Under the Island: Experimental Music in Ireland 1960 – 1994

    November 24, 2023 - By 

    The mission to track down all traces of an Irish avant-garde has received a boost with the release of this delightful compilation, compiled by Nyahh Records. The label has left no dusty attic unexplored in its efforts to drag subterranean Ireland to the surface, providing documentary proof of free-thinking at a time of joint church/state hegemony. This experimental impulse could apparently be found at all levels of society. Take the aristocratic UFO hunter Desmond Leslie, who created electronic soundscapes in his Monaghan castle and took his place with the Meeks and Derbyshires of the world. Outside the country estate, there were pioneers…

  • Rachael Lavelle – Big Dreams

    November 21, 2023 - By 

    Swirling and surreal, Rachael Lavelle’s Big Dreams is a coming of age that pokes holes in the digital, postmodern reality it exists within. Self-professed by the Dublin artist as “an introspective journey that invites the listener to ask what it means to be alive in the 21st century,” it throws you the answer in the form of another question – who knows? Conceptually faultless from its gleaming and buoyant visuals to its unnerving dream-like soundscapes, the record is both languid and urgent. Co-produced by Lavelle alongside Ryan Hargadon, cinematic orchestral structures swathe over manipulated vocals and fragmented electronic beats on…

  • Naoise Roo – Emotionally Magnificent

    November 10, 2023 - By 

    Having emerged as one of the most unique singer-songwriters in the Irish music scene with her debut album, Lilith, Naoise Roo is back with her follow-up Emotionally Magnificent. This time around, we find the Dublin-raised, Belfast-based artist at her most open and progressive. The 11-track LP delves into themes surrounding depression, public perceptions of women with mental illness and the complexities of the music industry itself. Naoise Roo’s voice has already been compared to one PJ Harvey. This is evident from opening track ‘Sick Girlfriend’, her deep voice quivering with emotion during the voices but soaring during the hook over…

  • Tandem Felix – There’s a New Sheriff in Town

    November 8, 2023 - By 

    A funky yet melancholic guitar melody moodily introduces There’s a New Sheriff in Town, the second album by Tandem Felix – a Dublin-based project of David A. Tapley in collaboration with producer Stephen Dunne. Bathing in an expansive ocean of shoegazey dream pop, the album opens with ‘Finger on the Button’, paving the way for the arioso sound to follow. The title track ‘There’s a New Sheriff in Town’ boasts a sound reminiscent of Beach House, while standing firmly in bestowing its unique sensibility.  The nine-track album exemplifies the progression of Tandem Felix as a project since their debut Rom-Com,…

  • ØXN – CYRM

    November 2, 2023 - By 

    Not content with earning a Mercury Prize nomination for this year’s False Lankum album, Lankum’s Radie Peat returns mere months later with the debut LP by new group ØXN. Originating in a collaboration between Peat and Katie Kim – who is herself coming right off the back of last year’s masterful Hour of the Ox – the pair expanded to a quartet with the addition of Percolator members Ellie Myler and John ‘Spud’ Murphy, the latter already a long-term collaborator of everyone involved as well as being an increasingly in-demand producer further afield. Long awaited since the then-unnamed group performed…

  • Arctic Monkeys at SSE Arena, Belfast

    October 17, 2023 - By 

    There’s nothing like a sold-out arena gig to remind you that online discourse is only a small part of any artist’s story. Viewed from behind a screen, Arctic Monkeys’ headline set at Glastonbury this year appeared divisive. ‘The new songs are boring’, ‘Alex Turner’s affectations have gone too far’, ‘they’ve lost their mojo’. Try telling that to the thousands of adoring fans inside a sold-out arena tonight. The crowd is young – astonishingly so for a band with nearly two decades under its belt and seven albums, the last two of which have been daringly, even deliberately uncommercial. The Arctic…

  • Autre Monde – Sensitive Assignments

    October 11, 2023 - By 

    It feels fitting for Dublin label/collective Popical Island to re-emerge from hibernation with the release of this second album by Autre Monde – something of a supergroup of Popical Island alumni, fronted by Paddy Hanna along with members of Ginnels, No Monster Club and Land Lovers. Produced once again by Gilla Band’s Daniel Fox, on Sensitive Assignments the quartet stray further still from the more conventional indie pop of their early singles, taking the more synth-heavy direction of 2020 LP The Imaginary Museum into deeper oddball territory than ever before. While the excellently titled ‘Road to Domestos’ – an ode…