• Everything Goes: An interview with Aidan Moffat

    July 12, 2018 - By 

    Still best known as one half of Arab Strab with Malcolm Middleton, Aidan Moffat’s later career has been a multifaceted one, and his latest album, Here Lies the Body, a collaboration with RM Hubbert, is one of our favourites of 2018 so far. Ahead of July dates at Galway’s Róisín Dubh (23rd), Dublin’s Grand Social (24th) and Belfast’s Black Box (25th), Cathal McBride speaks to Aidan (pictured right, with Hubbert) about this latest project and other recent work.  Hi Aidan, how has the tour for Here Lies the Body been going so far? They’ve all been pretty great so far,…

  • Girls Names – Stains on Silence

    June 26, 2018 - By 

    The fourth Girls Names full length has been a long time coming. A little under three years isn’t such a big gap between albums these days in an increasingly part-time industry, but recording updates were coming thick and fast from the Belfast band some time ago before seeming to dry up. As it turns out, an initial mix of the album was finished long ago before being shelved for 6 months and then ultimately aborted. The band then began reworking the material, taking it apart and rebuilding it with new edits and recordings. This drawn out process, as well as…

  • Aidan Moffat & RM Hubbert – Here Lies the Body

    May 31, 2018 - By 

    Aidan Moffat has a knack for a musical partnership. Having first come to attention as one half of Arab Strap alongside Malcolm Middleton from the mid-90s to the mid-00s – as well as a recent triumphant run of reunion shows – his later pairing with jazz musician and fellow Falkirk native Bill Wells saw the pair bag the inaugural Scottish Album of the Year Award for their 2011 debut Everything’s Getting Older. Now it’s the turn of guitar virtuoso RM Hubbert, perhaps best known to Irish audiences for regular stints supporting Mogwai on these shores. The pair already teamed up…

  • Ulrika Spacek – Suggestive Listening EP

    May 3, 2018 - By 

    For most bands, the EP format proves a useful starting point, a way of getting their earliest tracks out there when not in possession of enough money, time or material for a full LP, while also functioning as a low stakes release while they find their feet, not yet ready to commit to that ultimate statement of “the album”. Others though, like Ulrika Spacek, arrived so fully formed that work on an album was the first port of call, and indeed their 2016 debut release The Album Paranoia is still their strongest work to date. After last year’s quick follow…

  • Guided by Voices – Space Gun

    April 2, 2018 - By 

      As if Guided by Voices weren’t prolific enough in their ’90s heyday, Robert Pollard has amped things up considerably in the 2010s. When that classic ’90s lineup reunited earlier this decade, they remarkably pumped out six new albums within a mere two and a half year period, while the current reboot of the 1997-2004 Doug Gillard era produced two last year, including sprawling double album August by Cake. A wealth of new material from a band we once thought were gone for good is something to celebrate, but there’s been an undeniable sense since 2012 that they’ve been spreading…

  • Yo La Tengo – There’s a Riot Going On

    March 27, 2018 - By 

    Even though it’s a been a good five years since the last Yo La Tengo album proper – discounting 2015’s primarily covers and reworks-based Stuff Like That There – the band’s new album came about more by accident than design. Forced by software updates and the general onward march of technology to upgrade their home recording equipment, new material began to grow out of the practice room jam sessions that developed in order to enable bassist James McNew to learn how to use this new kit. Using these recordings as well as older snippets from over the past decade, the…

  • The Altered Hours – On My Tongue

    March 18, 2018 - By 

    The Altered Hours are a band who wear their influences very firmly on their sleeve. Elements of The Jesus & Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine and The Brian Jonestown Massacre (whose frontman Anton Newcombe released the band’s Sweet Jelly Roll EP on his A Recordings label in 2013) abound, but they carry it off with such aplomb that they manage to make this sound all their own. Following on from 2016’s full length debut In Heat Not Sorry and a string of live shows that have cemented them as one of the very best live bands in the country, the…

  • Paddy Hanna – Frankly, I Mutate

    March 10, 2018 - By 

    Four years have passed since Paddy Hanna’s triumphant solo debut Leafy Stilleto was released by the ever reliable Popical Island collective. Not that he hasn’t kept busy in that time, bridging the gap with a couple of standalone singles and fronting the mighty Autre Monde, all adding to an ever-growing CV that includes stints in the likes of Grand Pocket Orchestra, No Monster Club, Ginnels and Skelocrats. His long-awaited sophomore effort Frankly, I Mutate, released on increasingly impressive Galway label Strange Brew, features a star studded lineup of guests such as Saint Sister and Tandem Felix. Meanwhile members of Girl Band such as…

  • U.S. Girls – In a Poem Unlimited

    February 20, 2018 - By 

    Six albums in, Meghan Remy’s U.S. Girls project shows few resting on its laurels. Having originally dealt in lo-fi loops and drones on earlier records like Go Grey, subsequent releases saw her pop sensibility rise increasingly to the fore, culminating in her 4AD debut and one of 2015’s finest albums, Half Free. Eagerly anticipated follow up In a Poem Unlimited has carried that trend on with aplomb. Not only is the new LP Remy’s most widescreen, pop-heavy outing yet, it’s also her most political. Her lyrical ethos here can be summed up with the title of ‘M.A.H.’, short for ‘Mad…

  • British Sea Power @ Limelight 2, Belfast

    February 11, 2018 - By 

    Despite emerging at a time when the supposed cool of The Strokes and The Libertines reigned supreme, British Sea Power have successfully outlived most of their contemporaries to become a strange sort of cult British national treasure, concerned less with drugs and parties than with books and nature – song lyrics cover such topics as collapsing Antarctic shelves and 1953 floods, and the band once even bagged an appearance on Countryfile. Five years since they last graced Irish shores, BSP’s famously eccentric live show makes a long overdue return. After a reverb-drenched opening set from Belfast dream-pop duo MMODE, BSP…