• Video Premiere: Buí – Something Else To Talk About

    Despite their relatively young age, kitchen sink indie rock five piece Buí have been crafting some of the most earnestly well-crafted power-pop tunes around. Not ones to tread the beaten path, they debuted with a fully-fledged long-player in 2017’s Eugene, and have since been built their DIY profile from the ground up. The video for new single ‘Something Else To Talk About’ is an astounding feat – an 8-bit video game animation that not just acts as an apt visual companion to the song, but functions as its own winsome arcade fable. As if the band were collectively assimilated into a Scott Pilgrim fever dream – each…

  • Video Premiere: Grave Goods – Source

    Ahead of only their third show to date, supporting Beak> this Saturday, May 18 at Whelan’s, tri-city post-punk trio Grave Goods have kindly given us a first recorded glimpse of their visceral power. ‘Source’ is the first release from a session filmed by experimental filmmaking platform IMPATV, which records & broadcasts the heavier side of DIY, experimental & underground culture. Featuring members of Pins, Girls Names and September Girls, ‘Source’ forgoes the brooding atmospheres & jangle of the aforementioned in favour of primal urgency. More than delivering on the promise of its constituent parts, Sarah Grimes & Phil Quinn’s Girl Band-recalling rhythmic syncopation lay claustrophobic, anxious loops between which Lois MacDonald’s buzzsaw guitar finds voids to…

  • Video Premiere: Shrug Life – 2009

    One of the finest cuts from last year’s A Litany of Failures Vol. II independent compilation was Shrug Life‘s ‘2009’, a misleadingly uptempo ditty that mined reprieve from the jowls of self-imposed doom. Matter-of-factly delivered, Danny Carroll addresses the effect of the too-often underexamined (by musicians) abuse of bad hash as a crutch in times of mental ill-health: “Days previous I felt like a genius; sleepless, but safe in my cure for cancer, awake for six nights, working on the answer.” Of the track, Carroll said: “‘2009′ is an awkwardly accurate description of where I found myself in my late adolescence – suffering from sleep-deprived psychosis, perpetually…

  • Premiere: Nix Moon – Ceremony

    Progressive folk meddlers Nix Moon are a more esoterically-inclined proposition than most of their peers. With new single ‘Ceremony’, that compositional ambition is present from the onset. Building from a foundation of exploratory, Eastern-tinged drone, they’ve managed sculpt a darkly layered, progressive piece that’s not tonally dissimilar to the Hail To The Thief or A Moon Shaped Pool-era Radiohead. Their trademark indigenous & mythological allegories point to that sense of otherworldly earthiness – think Jeff Buckley’s more heavy, ethereal work by way of experimental 70s psych pop masters The Pretty Things. This release bodes well for the forthcoming release of the band’s debut album later in the year, recorded in Grouse Lodge…

  • Preview: Robocobra Quartet & Meltybrains? @ Black Box, Belfast

    Two of the island’s most unclassifiable and artistically uncompromising – not to mention finest live acts – are set to play a double-headliner at Belfast’s Black Box on Friday, May 17 in what looks to be a contender for Irish Gig Of The Year. Proudly co-presented by Moving On Music and yours truly, it’s the first hometown headline show of the year for Robocobra Quartet, and the first Northern show in years for experimental  Meltybrains?. Perpetually a band of contradictions, we’ve long been one of Robocobra Quartet’s most ardent voices of praise. Their string of EPs and NI Music Prize-nominated pair of LPs – 2016 debut Music For All Occasions and Plays…

  • EP Premiere: Comrade Hat – Tuque

    Derry-based experimental pop auteur Neil Burns’ Comrade Hat‘s latest EP, Tuque, is set for release on May 10, but we’re pleased to say we have an exclusive premiere streaming a week in advance. Following a string of EPs – including his series of Winter EPs – production credits, and a high profile collaboration with Phil Kieran and the Ulster Orchestra at Celtronic 2018, Burns needed a change. In Autumn of 2018, he relocated to Toronto with some musician friends for a recharge that ultimately led to the creation of Tuque, a complete work that spans post-breakup what’s-it-all-about soul-searching to geopolitical observations in under 15 minutes, with cameos from cult musical figures of the area,…

  • Buntús Rince: Explorations in Irish Jazz, Fusion & Folk 1969-81

    Indie-punk wunderkinder Fontaines DC drew the ire of many an Irish music fan lately with the neophile claim that until Girl Band’s emergence, “the only way to sound Irish was to be fuckin’ ‘diddly-diddly-aye’”. Perhaps that statement is more telling of the limitations in Ireland on exposure to genuinely forward-thinking music on a grassroots level as it is of the band’s attitude. On an island the size of our own, there does tend to be room only for that lucky few in the bylines of the Great Irish Narrative, but that overlooks the communities of troubadours, session players and ubiquitous…

  • Video Premiere: Fears – Fabric

    A few weeks back, we described ‘Fabric’, the latest single from minimalist electronic pop artist Fears, as “an unfurling, self-produced tale of entanglement and escape that finds the Belfast/Dublin musician and producer at her most emphatic to date”. It’s the first collaboration of the year for Constance Keane, who continues down the audio-visual path with the same complete level of authorship that led to support vision justifiably supported by Moving On Music’s – NI’s foremost exponents of culturally vital music – Emerging Artist Programme. The visual component to ‘Fabric’ was directed by Daniel Butler, who had this to say of their partnership on the short film: “The idea came from a…

  • Stream New Irish Grassroots Compilation: Live @ Fennor Lane

    Tucked away amongst castle ruins and relics of history on the outskirts of Slane town, Mark Carolan runs the intimate Fennor Lane Studios. Like the encouraging number of grassroots Irish compilations and splits that have graced our Bandcamp accounts in recent times to act as connective tissue between previously-disparate scenes, Live at Fennor Lane was made with the same philosophy of shared elevation in mind, as Mark tells us: “The idea behind this album was simply to create a record worth listening to, and the live method of recording gives a characterful and natural feel to it. I hope we can bring new music to all the followers of each band involved in this project and help everyone to expand their audience. Aaaand it was great craic making it!” Featuring several of our favourite bands in the land, each more idiosyncratic than the last, contributions range from Slouch‘s submerged psychogroove, to the…

  • Naoise Roo Set To Return With Night of Music, Art, Theatre & Spoken Word

    Long one of our favourite songwriters & artists on the island, Naoise Roo has been on an extended hiatus for the last couple of years. Thankfully, she’s just announced her return EP, Sick Girlfriend, and is set to hold her first show in a number of years at Dublin’s Project Arts Centre on May 4. The show will serve as a preview of the EP, with Sick Girlfriend‘s four tracks centred around themes of depression, the negative aspects of the music industry, and the stereotypes that burden women experiencing mental illness. Roo will be joined by producer/bassist Daniel Fox of Girl Band, as well as drummer Rian Trench, guitarist Karl Tobin and…