• David Bowie – Blackstar

    January 8, 2016 - By 

    If David Bowie’s The Next Day, overall an excellent record, had a killing flaw it would be a lack of experimentation and ambition. Bowie has always been regarded as a frontiersman, working on the fringes of the avant garde and reinterpreting it for the masses without simplifying it. His career has been driven by the seemingly endless drive towards the future and the new, which lent The Next Day an unfortunate overtone. Its fourteen tracks were steeped in Bowie mythology, each one acting almost as a summation of a specific part of the man’s storied career. It felt like a…

  • Hinds – Leave Me Alone

    January 7, 2016 - By 

    Welcome to 2016. It’s a new year with new opportunities to be realised, new landscapes to be traversed and new ideas to be formed. So what better way to kick off this new and exciting twelve month period than with a delightfully fuzzy throwback album that wraps itself up in the sweet sounds of the 1960s. Leave Me Alone, the debut LP from Madrid’s Hinds, is covered head to toe in a profoundly retro lustre, taking a homemade lo-fi jangle rock sound and filtering it through The Velvet Underground. While the weight of the influences can be overbearing, it is…

  • Sea Pinks – Soft Days

    December 22, 2015 - By 

    With five albums in little over five years, Neil Brogan’s work ethic is admirable. And that’s just with Sea Pinks – add to that the albums and EPs he drummed on with Girls Names before his 2013 departure, an excellent recent EP with post-punk quartet Cruising and a low key solo EP as Winterlude early this year and you wonder where he finds the time. With more and more small bands operating part-time in today’s unsteady music business, longer gaps between releases are increasingly common, but the release of Dreaming Tracks in late 2014 still feels like only yesterday, and…

  • Wizards of Firetop Mountain – Wizards of Firetop Mountain

    December 1, 2015 - By 

    Having been a staple part of the Irish rock food pyramid for many years, gigging religiously and opening up for titans such as Boris, Sleep, and Red Fang, to name but a few, when Wizards of Firetop Mountain announced their debut LP would finally materialize this November, many would be slapping their knees and roaring “it’s about time!” The band have well proven their mettle over the last four years on the back of a demo, double-sided single, a popular Youtube video, and of course, their rise to furniture-level recurrence in music venues all around the country.  With many of…

  • Shye Ben Tzur, Jonny Greenwood & The Rajasthan Express – Junun

    November 30, 2015 - By 

    Those coming to this album as the newest project by Jonny Greenwood have been misled. He is on this album, and seems to play a vital role, but it is not his album. It has been a subtle but consistent insinuation that Junun is largely the work of the composer and Radiohead member in collaboration with a few other musicians. Clearly Greenwood’s following has been exploited to try and trump some interest into a project that may have otherwise gone unnoticed but the result may be the actual alienation of fans who would have found this album on their own…

  • King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard – Paper Maché Dream Balloon

    November 11, 2015 - By 

    Their long-winded name gives the distinct impression King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard are some whacked-out middle-aged men playing 80’s progressive rock, talking about spirituality and shit.  And on previous albums they have leaned in that direction, with sustained improvised grooves, but it has always been more in line with repetitive psych rock rhythms, than drawn out introspective jams.  On last album Quarters! there were majestically sprawling tracks, four of them to be precise, lasting 10 minutes and 10 seconds each.  They used wizardry of Gandalf proportions to instil magic in songs of that length, intricate musical patterns were weaved…

  • The Chills – Silver Bullets

    November 3, 2015 - By 

    When it comes to The Chills‘ comeback, a great many folks have been running with the return-from-the-wilderness narrative. Not surprising considering it has been 18 years since their last album proper, 1996’s lackluster ‘Sunburnt’, and the subsequent publicity fade-out. One can imagine, however, that not for one second did Martin Phillipps stop running through melodies in his head. You can also imagine that he wasn’t going to launch back into it until he was good and ready. And so Silver Bullets, the result of a recent, joyously-consistent flurry of activity, suggests there’s a whole lot to be said for taking…

  • Alarmist – Popular Demain

    November 3, 2015 - By 

    Dublin four-piece Alarmist’s first full-length album Popular Demain feels like it has been a long time coming. Having released their debut EP in August 2011 followed by the Pal Magnet EP in November 2013 the band have very gradually been growing into their sound, leaving each element to develop without urgency. The result of this patient honing of sound on Popular Demain is a collection of eight tracks that seamlessly combine elements of Math-Rock, Jazz and Ambient music without ever letting any of those sound become overbearing. Instead, the style and atmosphere created is an almost entirely unique one; complex…

  • SlowPlaceLikeHome – Romola

    October 31, 2015 - By 

    Fishing boats come in and out, young men and women in wetsuits ride slices of polyurethane on foamy waves and dogs run after luminous tennis balls on the sandy beach. The coastline has potential for escape but the oppressiveness of being surrounded by the sea can take its toll. The Atlantic North-West’s SlowPlaceLikeHome manage to walk this line between an oppressiveness and freedom. Album opener ‘Our Rules’ starts off with the synth taking the lead and allowing Mannion to take the song in directions you wouldn’t expect but which don’t feel jarring to the listener. The song ends with the…

  • The Annulments – Everything I Lost

    October 27, 2015 - By 

    In an ideal world, the title of a record would tell you everything you need to know. Maybe not in the literal sense, as you’d wonder how many copies of Nickelback’s latest LP, 12 Generic Cobain Aping Songs, would sell. Everything I Lost, the debut album from Dublin folk group The Annulments is a great example of a name perfectly fitting an album. In three simple words, the phrase is able to evoke this incredibly personal sense of longing, sadness and pathos, yet is vague enough to apply in any context: loss of love, financial security or even a sense…