• Ciaran Lavery & Ryan Vail – Sea Legs

    April 22, 2015 - By 

    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…

  • Villagers – Darling Arithmetic

    April 21, 2015 - By 

    Villagers has always been something of a vehicle for Conor O’Briens creative vision. Early on as a band it enabled him to explore the rich soundscapes we heard on Becoming A Jackal; the arrangements were complex, brooding and gave more than a tip of the cap to Nick Drake’s darkest days and recordings, but was most certainly foregrounded with O’Brien’s soloist vernacular. {Awayland} had a different, but no less focused modus operandi, with O’Brien and co. expanding a sound that ultimately felt like a more colourful, collaborative experience. Now on album number three, Villagers’ Darling Arithmetic goes beyond a back…

  • The Mighty Stef – Year of the Horse

    April 27, 2015 - By 

    Dublin’s The Mighty Stef went for nailed-on quality with the production of The Year Of The Horse, traveling to California to splash out on Arctic Monkeys and QOTSA studio legend Alain Johannes. It’s a solid tactic, and sees the rocker’s tight, clean yet snarling stomp polished to a complex gem of a guitar album. It’s been a long road at a full eight year since Stefan Murphy released his debut, entitled The Sins Of Sainte Catherine. Perhaps that heady sense of an album slimmed down and refined over an extended period is a product of the wait; the outcome of…

  • Robocobra Quartet – Bomber EP

    April 16, 2015 - By 

    In the quest for the new sound, the path is one paved with ambitious intentions and fraught with admirable failed experiments and laughable attempts at the avant garde. Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music is a terrible album that forces the listener to reconsider what they might constitute as real music, while Lulu is an album where James Hetfield feels it appropriate to yell “I am the table”, while Lou Reed’s withered husk struggles to sing some Burrowsian tripe. Both of these releases are burying their fingers in the earth, digging for something and coming up with dirty fingers. There are…

  • Therapy? – Disquiet

    April 9, 2015 - By 

    When talk first began of a sequel to ‘Troublegum’, the 1994 punk-metal opus that made legends of Co. Antrim trio Therapy?, your writer couldn’t help but feel pangs of uncertainty. From a band that over the course of 25 years plowed a fiercely independent furrow, and did so while thinking about ten steps ahead of the musical sentiment of the time, a move for nostalgia would be surely a massive anti-climax after producing two career-defining albums in ‘Crooked Timber’ and ‘A Brief Crack of Light’. Is it? Well… the jury is still out after a fortnight’s constant listening, which, for…

  • Shlohmo – Dark Red

    April 9, 2015 - By 

    Up until this record, the first since 2011’s Bad Vibes, Shlohmo existed in that murky area of electronica that throws up morpheme collisions like glitchhop, witchtrap and future-garage. His particular brand of emotive electronica had, on his solo releases, hovered just a few notches over the ambient dissonance line and on his collaborations he exhibited a chameleon like ability that let him lend his talents over the genre boundary without stretching too far out of shape. Just look at last year’s collaboration with Jeremih that saw the LA based producer slip seamlessly into RnB like a seasoned pro. While that…

  • White Hills – Walks For Motorists

    March 25, 2015 - By 

    Good old Space Rock: for when you need songs to last ten minutes but you’re not in the mood for all that proggy, time signature business. When you need to rock out but still wanna feel mellow, man. When you want to think about the vastness and complexity of the universe but you aren’t really up for much thinking. The genre provides so much and demands little in return. Zone out under your headphones at home, or wig out in the front row behind your fringe, head shaking from side to side, rib cage secretly on the verge of collapse…

  • Kendrick Lamar – To Pimp A Butterfly

    March 24, 2015 - By 

    Precursor: the hype was justified. The long awaited “good kid, m.A.A.d city 2.0” is here, and well, it’s not that. It’s something else. It’s somehow bigger, darker, catchier and more socially significant all at once. Kendrick Lamar’s third studio release To Pimp a Butterfly is all of those things, and nothing like what we expected. Opener ‘Wesley’s Theory’ – featuring George Clinton, produced by Flying Lotus, sampling Boris Gardiner and a voice clip of Dr Dre – is an eye-opening funk monster to end all preconceptions. Aside from the immediately clear difference in instrumentals – good kid’s slick trap beats…

  • Bee Mick See – The Belfast Yank

    March 18, 2015 - By 

    Does belonging to a location make an album better? Is Springsteen as interesting if you remove New Jersey or Nebraska? What about NWAand Compton? If this is the case, then rapper Bee Mick See’s debut Belfast Yank deserves some serious credit. The album is entirely engulfed in Belfast. Its language, culture and people are the subjects of various tracks ranging from loving portraits (‘Belfast Slang’) to lacerating polemics (‘Natural Scents’). Even his flow, which owes an obvious debt to Slug from Atmosphere, is heavily accented; it could only belong to this city. In spite of its overproduced beats, which bares a welcome resemblance to Malibu Shark Attack, it’s a strangely emotionally honest album. BeeMickSee is surprisingly…

  • Modest Mouse – Strangers To Ourselves

    March 17, 2015 - By 

    Given their track record, the announcement of a new Modest Mouse record should be cause for excitement; lest we forget Lonesome Crowded West and The Moon and Antarctica. While their 2007 effort, We Were Dead Before This Ship Even Sank, was somewhat lacking, the group have such a unique sound and energy that this could be written off as an unfortunate blip in an stellar track record. Sadly, while Strangers to Ourselves does have many excellent tracks it, fundamentally, is a messy and disappointing album. Beginning with a solid one-two of ‘Strangers to Ourselves’ and ‘Lampshades on Fire’, the album…