• Little Green Cars – Ephemera

    March 11, 2016 - By 

    Following on from Little Green Cars’ stunning debut LP Absolute Zero was always going to be a challenge. The album, which was released in 2013, was a culmination of a young band’s determined and remarkably capable work up to that point. It was rife with brittle, anxious lyrics, ambitious yet subtle musicianship and stunning vocal harmonies, and was at times almost like listening to someone speak when their nerves have lead to a jarringly frantic output. Everything they had to give was thrown at us to ensure something stuck. And it did. Thankfully, there was scarcely a note on that…

  • Emmy The Great – Second Love

    March 9, 2016 - By 

    Second Love, the new LP by Emmy The Great and her first in five years, is secure enough to know exactly what it wants to be. The title, which by design immediately evokes her 2009 debut First Love, implies this continuation and growth that runs deep at the core of the album. Musically, ETG begins moving away from the acoustic folk styling which characterised her earlier releases in exchange for a more minimalist electronica. While the record as a whole is a very mixed bag, what shines throughout are the lyrics, which still retain the incisive power of her debut…

  • Big Ups – Before A Million Universes

    March 11, 2016 - By 

    Of all the notions one can fling at post-hardcore, the much maligned and misattributed genre, it does have one undeniable strength: tension. The key songs in the genre’s oeuvre are not built around a typical rock structure of verse-chorus-verse, but rather on a more fluid, almost progressive structure that emphasizes the disquiet over all else. It’s best envisioned like a constantly tightening torture rack, constantly ratcheting the tension, keeping the listener in this state of unease and the brink of real discomfort before discharging in the most cathartic manner possible. It’s one of punk’s hydra heads taken to its logical…

  • M. Ward – More Rain

    March 8, 2016 - By 

    More Rain has been four years in the making. In truth, M. Ward has been making this album his whole career, such is the omnipresence of the main ingredients weaving through the songwriter’s back catalogue. Sometimes, you just know what you are going to get with an album. Sometimes, that is a really good thing. More Rain continues to show Matthew Ward as a musician enthralled with capturing a 60s sound and wrapping it around skilled arrangements and engaging melodies. Though 12 songs long, it still feels like a piece of flash fiction, such is the tight and minimalist make up of the songs on…

  • Jeff Buckley – You and I

    March 7, 2016 - By 

    The late alternative rock icon Jeff Buckley was recently the subject of a documentary on BBC Radio Ulster’s Across the Line featuring contributions from friends, fans and fellow artists. The programme’s highlight, however, was a charming anecdote from Buckley’s sole Belfast date: after playing to a half empty Limelight, the practically unknown Buckley and his band were bemused when their simple tour rider request for ‘beer and soda’ saw them greeted with trays of filled soda farls on their arrival to the dressing room. Buckley’s confused encounter with Belfast’s finest luxury serves as a reminder of his relatively limited fame during his own lifetime: the small,…

  • Santigold – 99¢

    March 7, 2016 - By 

    Lousy Smarch weather! We’ve got Baltic temperatures, snow and whole host of other Winter wonderland treats that we were supposed to piss off back in February that have opted remain, ratcheting up the March misery. It’s cold and overcast and what we need is some good straightforward fun; fortunately, Philadelphia’s Santigold has kindly provided her new album, 99¢, to help get us through this tough time. The album offers up twelve slices of delightful poppy, reggae-tinged electro-pop songs that help to blast away remnants of the winter blues and, except a handful of cuts which should have been culled, the…

  • The Gloaming – 2

    March 3, 2016 - By 

    We’re fast approaching the centenary of the one of the most significant events of contemporary Irish history, but we all know that with all the ceremony and pomp comes memorials for a handful of inflated personalities and footnotes for the rest. What if we dropped the politicism and the commemoration of a failed rebellion and instead focused on one of the key tenets behind the act: culture. So many of the key figures were artists, writers and poets, striving to tell the tales of the land in their native tongue and yet we’ve opted to sideline that part of the…

  • Ciara O’Neill – The Ebony Trail

    March 1, 2016 - By 

    The modern folk music scene is all too often seen as the playground of minimal imagination. In recent years it has divided opinion more than most and rightfully so, suffering as it does from sub-par input with lazy, introspective lyrics and generic instrumentation. Such is the dilution of the genre, it takes something special to stand out and demand attention. Ciara O’Neill’s album, The Ebony Trail is a largely sparkling piece of work with inventive themes, ideas and directions yet it is also an album which occasionally fails to match its own high standards. Ciara takes a worn out trope and twists it into something…

  • T-Woc – Jetstar II

    February 26, 2016 - By 

    You’d be forgiven for considering a new T-woc release to be cause for celebration. It’s not that they’re few and far between (well, maybe a bit), it’s because they’ve historically been amalgamations of a few releases rolled in to one well-contained, shimmering, sonic entity. A patchwork of styles, energies, paces and sounds are sewn together to meet the creative vision of Mick T-Woc Donohoe – the Irish Mad Professor-esque engineer behind the sound desk, cutting and pasting, layering and editing until each track becomes a juxtapositional segue to the next. As mad-cap as this approach may have played out on previous releases (see 2011’s Jetstar),…

  • Handsome Eric/Maxamillian Raxatrillion – Split EP

    February 25, 2016 - By 

    Dublin’s lo-fi wonder Handsome Eric returns with a split and brings with him the upstart from the American Maxamillion Raxatrillion. Handsome Eric brings the melancholy we’ve come to expect from him as he recounts the past year of his life. Every song is short and to the point with Stephen O’Dowd wasting no time in baring his soul and getting straight to the hook in each song. Opener ‘save yrself, kill me quickly’ is a break-up song that captures the awkwardness of feeling glad that you haven’t been strung along but also pissed off that someone can’t see how great you are. All tinny guitars, crashing cymbals and…