• The Afghan Whigs @ The Academy, Dublin

    Ohio’s Afghan Whigs descend upon The Academy for their first show since November 2014. “Shaking the dust off,” frontman Greg Dulli facetiously states, with a self-confidence that seems his very essence. Aside from a few vocal pitching issues – admittedly rather befitting of the music’s obstreperous character – the set is masterfully delivered by the imposing sextet. From the first, the mix is impeccable. The soul-tinged alt-rock Americans have arrived with full sensory assault in mind. Whigs’ original John Curley leads an unrelenting rhythm section over which the guitar, keys and string parts compose ardently the musical parchment for Dulli’s…

  • Marillion @ The Forum, London

    A lot can happen in a quarter of a century. 1989 saw the release of the debut releases of The Stone Roses, Nirvana amongst others. That same year also saw the debut release of Marillion with Steve Hogarth fronting them after the band had taken off to Mushroom Farm Studio near Brighton with a selection of music previously recorded in demo form with Fish. However, when Fish left the band in 1988, he took his lyrics with him, a lot of which ended up on his solo debut, Vigil in a Wilderness of Mirrors, while Steve Hogarth and John Helmer…

  • Manic Street Preachers @ Olympia Theatre, Dublin

    You sometimes have to wonder if people do these “Let’s play the album everyone likes” shows in order to destroy the album. If you’ve made one truly significant album in your lifetime, fair deuce to you, but after a while it must feel like a noose. If you were to do such a show, how would you do it? Could you do it in such a way that puts this awful beauty that hangs over you to rest, while not screwing over the people who’ve connected themselves to the record and provided the opportunity for you to perform this show?…

  • Elton John @ 3Arena, Dublin

    Singer, songwriter, straight, gay, father, activist and important enough to a second-tier North London football club to have a stand named after him: Elton John’s certainly led a colourful life. Similar colour in his life show, then, is something of a given. Tonight’s one hundredth show of 2014 and the final date of a tour commemorating 41 year old classic ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ starts with an old school rock n’ roll bent. ‘Funeral For A Friend’ and ‘Bennie and The Jets’ lead the tributes to one of Elton’s finest records, the former preceded by an epic piano lead in which sets the…

  • Duke Special @ Bennigan’s, Derry

    Bennigan’s Bar in Derry serves as the perfect venue for an intimate gig and that was just what Belfast born balladeer, Duke Special, was set to do on Friday night. Although the crowd was set-up to expect a totally warm and soft intimacy from the very start with a toned down piano and voice rendition of Duke’s ‘Freewheel’, there was a quick shift between atmosphere when his hand slamming on the keys brought the Bertolt Brecht cover of ‘Alabama Song’ forcefully to the ears of the audience. No one seemed to be taken aback as I was. Being one of…

  • Yasiin Bey (Mos Def) @ Vicar Street, Dublin

    The man on stage would like you to call him Yasiin Bey. “Ali, not Clay,” he says. That doesn’t stop the gig’s posters and tickets from bearing the name Mos Def in larger lettering than that of his name of choice, however. Coming on stage around 10pm in an oversized scarf and baggy tee, he opens with ‘Cream of the Planet’, an unreleased track from 2010. Though billed as a fifteenth anniversary celebration of 1999’s breakthrough release Black On Both Sides, the night sees Bey jump from era to era, appropriately enough as 1982’s seminal hip-hop flick Wild Style plays…

  • Robert Plant w/ The Last Internacionale @ Olympia Theatre, Dublin

    It’s funny to think that Led Zeppelin spawned practically every rock’n’roll trope that elicits either an eye roll or a “fuck yeah!” (depending one’s state of inebriation). The old clichés have gone from birth through acceptance, weathering punk’s dismissal into irony and meta-referencing, and all the way around again until it’s hard to decipher what point on the rotation things currently fall. New Yorkers The Last Internationale are somewhere on that loop, a band that could comfortably populate the background scenery in Almost Famous, such is the posturing and rock-by-numbers shenanigans that are in progress onstage. The guitarist even gives…

  • Lykke Li @ Vicar Street, Dublin

    In April 2011 Lykke Li made an unlikely appearance at the old Tower Records for Record Store Day. With several hundred happy punters crammed in amongst the vinyl, she performed material from her (at the time) recently released second album and international breakthrough ‘Wounded Rhymes’, and absolutely blew the rest of the line up out of the water. It took all of three minutes to identify Li’s stand out live asset, one that an album and a significant step up in stage size has done little to change: honeyed soprano vocals applied to poetic emotional trauma. We were hooked. There’s an obvious hole to…

  • Luke Abbott, Somerville, Subplots @ Pepper Canister Church, Dublin

    Arriving at the Pepper Canister church on Dublin’s Mount Street last Saturday evening one was met with seemingly incongruous signage screaming Hidden Agenda. Truly esoteric, casual bystanders might have suspected a hijacking, an unsubtle protest at the church in modern Ireland. The fact of the matter was something less overtly political, yet just as exciting. The Dublin venture whose name adorned these signs was putting on a thrilling concert in this venue, an evening of music grounded in folk that gazed ever skyward.Stepping inside, the mood was one of quiet wonder, as smoke softly drifted through air and rich, thick…

  • Black Stone Cherry w/ Theory of a Dead Man @ The Academy, Dublin

    Who said Ireland wouldn’t welcome the sound of American southern rock this side of the seas?  Hosting a roaring avalanche of sound from the Kentucky boys of Black Stone Cherry, Dublin’s Academy exploded with an onslaught of American heavy metal Thursday evening, continuing record-label Roadrunner’s long tradition of importing this genre of American rock into European audiences. Fresh off a tour warming up for Lynard Skynard, Black Stone Cherry’s electrifying performance proved yet again that they too are a headlining bastion of hard rock. Roused by a titillating set from Canadian rock group Theory of a Dead Man, the sold-out…