• This Ain’t No Picnic: An Interview With Alpha Male Tea Party

    Alpha Male Tea Party are a three piece math rock band from Liverpool that have made a name for themselves with hard hitting off kilter riffs and an idiosyncratic sense of wit. The lads are about to set out on an Irish Tour in order to promote their latest album, Health, with shows in Belfast, Dublin, Galway, Cork and Limerick. Jack Rudden had the pleasure of chatting to the group’s guitarist, Tom Peters, about their latest release, the math rock scene and Abraham Lincoln before they hit the road. Your five date tour kicks off on the second of May. What has…

  • Album Premiere: Zombie Picnic – Rise of a New Ideology

    Progressive instrumental post-rock four piece Zombie Picnic release their new album, Rise of a New Ideology today. This follows up on the Limerick outfit’s 2016 debut LP, A Suburb of Earth, and is available on a limited run 12″ vinyl through Bandcamp and Burning Shed. Ideologically, it’s an ambitious work that’s inspired by political figures & commentators, and the most respected names in science fiction literature. As with acts like King Crimson, the finest progressive bands are unconfined by the box in which modern prog rock & post-rock artists find themselves trapped; Zombie Picnic’s sound is imbued with the kind of exploratory, trippy experimentalism found in classic psychedelic & space rock that’s been dragged forward a millennia,…

  • RMCK – RMCK

    Anonymous, instrumental, distorted banjo looping project RMCK has just released their self-titled debut EP through Solid Choice Industries. The EP was recorded in Belfast’s Start Together Studios by Rocky O’Reilly, with engineer Ben McAuley on drums. Hypnotic & swirling, the music could broadly fall under the banner of math or post-rock but falls into fewer of its trappings, being much more intuitive and less maximalist – the work of one lone artist who remains unidentified. Solid Choice claim to know their identity but wish to protect their anonymity – colour us very intrigued as to whether they make the move to live…

  • Pre-Tour Preamble: Vasa & Body Hound

    Given our island’s reputation, in what now seems to be acknowledged as ‘the days of yore’, for independently successful rock bands of math and post-prefixed inclinations, it makes sense that mainland acts would flex their considerable muscles on our shores. Our so-called ‘island tax’ often extends to a limitation on shows from any less than stadium-ready musical artists and their ilk, but there’s a growing number of thoughtful and decent promoters out there working in synchronicity – many of whom we hope to feature in coming months – with the likes of Belfast’s Solid Choice Industries, Galway’s FEAST, Dublin’s Venture Presents joining forces, uniting the corners of…

  • Fecking Bahamas – V. Ireland

    To say Ireland has an unusually rich track record in the realms of math-rock, post-rock and instrumental music would be something of an understatement. This is something Melbourne music website Fecking Bahamas (assumingly named after the latter-day Don Caballero song ‘Palms Trees In the Fecking Bahamas’) have copped onto, manifesting in V. Ireland, a new, 21 track compilation featuring tracks from the likes of And So I Watch You From Afar, The Redneck Manifesto and Abebisi Shank to lesser-known but no less sorcerous sonic conquistadors in We Are Knives, Val Normal and Psychojet. Their fifth-region specific compilation and their first release…

  • Watch: Steve Strong – Contort/Retreat (Live)

    Arriving in Ireland last night for a tour from the 12th to the 23rd, Plymouth-based one-man post-rock show Steve Strong heads for Cork this weekend, with Galway, Portrush and Dublin following next week, as part of his Agila November ’14 tour. The man is quite a sight to behold live, dextrously manipulating tones and textures with one hand while keeping a tight and tense percussion underneath with the other. From the tour blurb: Steve Strong is a one-man arsenal of beats, tapped guitar and lush, textural melodies. His music is as withheld as it is grandiose, as skeletal as it…

  • Premiere: North Side Drive – Snow//Sea//Sky

    Snow//Sea//Sky, the new release from North Side Drive, the “quiet” solo project of math-pop lads Former Monarchs‘ singing sticksman Jonathan Pearson, is, by his own admission, “weird”. In itself, though, that’s no deviation from the norm in an ever-evolving soundscape, moving from post-rock-inflected piano/cello pieces, to a stint at solo piano in honour of his grandfather in his last EP. His third EP under the name, the release invokes weather and the elements, and the moods Pearson conveys in his songs reflect this perfectly. ‘Snow’, for instance, is a beautiful piece, stark in its beginnings, before building up in a…

  • A Brief History of Post-Rock

    Of the countless genre names that describe modern music, post-rock is probably the vaguest of those widely used. Open to generalisation, uncertainty and blind exaggeration, it has no commonly accepted definition and many acts including Tortoise and Mogwai have distanced themselves from the term. That said, much like postmodernism or the avant-garde, there remains a general consensus about the development and essential traits central to this most ambiguous of labels, currently used to describe the likes of This Will Destroy You, Mono and our very own Adebisi Shank, And So I Watch You From Afar, etc. Brian Coney attempts to trace…

  • Mogwai – Rave Tapes

    “Blur are shite.” A simple, to the point, and even iconoclastic statement that Mogwai’s Stuart Braithwaite once saw fit to wear emblazoned upon his torso. While Damon Albarn & Co. may not be everyone’s cup of tea, what seems to have really stuck in the throat of the Glaswegian post-rocker was their laissez-faire irreverence that became a quintessential hallmark of the Brit-pop era. A bugbear that provides proof, if any is still required, that those in Mogwai view their craft as a fairly serious business. So, given that they could never be described as a particularly light-hearted collection of individuals,…

  • Album stream: God Is An Astronaut – Origins

    Co. Wicklow post-rock band God Is An Astronaut are streaming their sixth studio album, Origins, via Bandcamp. Their first album as a five-piece the album “cements their place as one of the world’s most intense, musically – and visually – inventive post rock bands”. It also sees the Torsten Kinsella-fronted band’s return to Rocket Girl Records, who released their debut album back in 2005. Check out the band’s new video for ‘Reverse World’ and stream/buy Origins below.