• Tame Impala – Currents

    Australian Kevin Parker is the inventive mind behind Tame Impala; a band among the new wave of psych-rock revivalists.  It began as a solo venture, as he wrote, recorded, produced and performed the music, before expanding to become the outfit we know it as today.  Most psych bands nowadays fit into two categories: they’re either a throwback to classic psych instrumentation, making use of feedback, and often get too caught up in clichés; or they operate like Deerhunter or Tame Impala, touching on the past but managing to make use of modern electronics to add a depth of tone and…

  • SOAK – Before We Forgot How To Dream

    Youth is a wonderful and bliss experience, and it passes us by too quickly. Bridie Monds-Watson, still in her teenage years, has been able to pen the most relatable experiences and over the past few years, her progression into an artist has unfolded before our eyes. Having written single ‘Sea Creatures’ years before it made it to the Radio 1 A List, SOAK has been gaining traction across the UK ever since. With notable fans across the Beeb and even further afield, along with appearing at numerous festivals across the UK, it wasn’t long before Rough Trade took notice and…

  • Hudson Mohawke – Lantern

    To put it colloquially, Warp Records have been absolutely killing it over the last two years. Given their legacy within the electronic music world, the Sheffield label has always guaranteed a certain level of quality, but in recent years their output has begun to become so much more fascinating. Any label that can release the like of Boards of Canada’s Tomorrow’s Harvest, Aphex Twin’s Syro, Flying Lotus’s You’re Dead! and Clark’s Feast/Beast within two years is doing something terribly interesting. The most recent release in their agenda is Hudson Mohawke’s latest LP, Lantern, his first major release since his barnstorming ‘Chimes’…

  • Sun Kil Moon – Universal Themes

    It’s fair to say Sun Kil Moon guitarist and vocalist Mark Kozelek is a multi-faceted and somewhat temperamental individual: he wears his heart on his sleeve and bears his soul through song. He had a well documented spat with The War on Drugs last year after their sound bled on to his stage at a festival, and has even criticised his own fans for being a bunch of hipster “guys in tennis shoes” [ed: see Laura Snape’s recent piece on his on-stage response to her attempts to interview and profile the artist]. Last year’s release Benji was an emotionally wrought…

  • Muse – Drones

    Let’s keep this short and sour: not only the most aptly-titled album of a generation but easily one of the most soul-crushingly tedious, cack-handed things you’ll ever have the utter displeasure of sitting through. Origin of Symmetry is now such an inconceivably long distance away it verges on the positively mirage-like. Zero stars. Brian Coney

  • Joanna Gruesome – Peanut Butter

    As a band alleged to have formed at anger management classes, Joanna Gruesome are a surprisingly jovial, albeit dark-humoured group when interviewed.  The band’s guitarist/singer Owen Williams summed this up describing the album when, he said: “This is our second record.  It is about 20 minutes long and aims to expose the radical possibilities of peanut butter.”  This tongue-in-cheek adolescence also runs through the core of the music, which displays glimpses of emotional depth but quickly resorts to bursts of noise, redolent of a teenage temper tantrum. Debut album Weird Sister was a mixed bag that threw up the occasional odd-ball…

  • Tandem Felix – Comma EP

    On their new EP, Comma, Dublin’s Tandem Felix have toned down the gritty anxiety that added a particularly distorted, glitching atmosphere to their 2013 EP, Popcorn. That grit, which gave Tandem Felix’s folkier basis a very psychedelic edge, has been twisted slightly to incorporate less abrasion and a little more lap steel guitar. The result is that Comma’s five tracks bear a lot of similarity to the likes of Beck’s Sea Change or Morning Phase, or to the more tender points in Wilco’s discography.  That’s not to say that the anxiety is gone, however. The lyrics express the same sense of…

  • The Fall – Sub-Lingual Tablet

    Only a fool writes off The Fall, a band that have had more returns to form than most bands have had records. With the current lineup now being their longest serving as a complete unit (aside from the recent addition of second drummer Daren Garratt), some have accused them of getting too comfortable and being in need of another shake-up like the days of old, since 2011’s sloppy Ersatz GB, a surprising misstep after the back-to-back excellence of Imperial Wax Solvent and Your Future Our Clutter before it. 2013’s Re-Mit then failed to fully compensate, being a mish-mash of greatness…

  • Donal Scullion – Superpowers

    As an NI Soul Troop mainstay, Donal Scullion is more than familiar with the nuances of jazz, funk and, of course, soul, not to mention the work that goes into arranging tracks that bear those generic attributes.  This is what contributes to Scullion’s grasp of composition and style on his debut solo offering Superpowers; an album that is full of all the tropes of big-band splendour but tows the line quite sweetly between the singer/songwriter and pop-soloist milieus.  In theory, that’s a tall order and not without its pitfalls, but Scullion has obviously approacehed Superpowers with enthusiasm and vigour, and…

  • Ciaran Lavery & Ryan Vail – Sea Legs

    While people will continue to argue tirelessly about whether the internet has been a good or a bad thing for music, here comes another argument for ‘good’. Derry minimal electronic musician Ryan Vail and Aghagallon alt-folkster Ciaran Lavery first became friends online before finally meeting up at a festival they were both appearing at and decided to collaborate on this mini-album. Regardless of whether or not you think streaming music is as bad as killing elephants like Tom DeLonge claims, the sense of community that the internet affords to bring together musicians from different musical backgrounds to try out collaborations…