With a first date set for March 25 having sold out in a minutes, Grammy Award-winning folk comedy duo Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie AKA Flight of the Conchords have announced an extra date at Dublin’s 3Arena on April 2. Tickets for the show – which takes place as part of their “Flight of the Conchords sing Flight of the Conchords Tour” – cost €28 and go on sale on Friday, November 3 at 10am.
Arguably the most important group on the European avant-garde music scene for the past 50 years, Dutch collective Instant Composers Pool will perform four dates in Ireland over the next few days. Brian Coney talks to ICP co-founder, virtuoso drummer and multi-instrumentalist Han Bennink about free jazz, opportunities for younger musicians, constantly pushing the boundaries and more. ICP play the following dates. More info here. Thursday, November 2: Culturlann, Derry Friday, November 3: The MAC, Belfast Saturday, November 4: The Sugar Club, Dublin Sunday, November 5: Triskel Arts Centre, Cork Some of my favourite ICP releases include your 1972 solo…
Artists can spend an entire career trying to forge a distinguished identity, but every now and again one arises and manages to do just that after one record. Karin Dreijer, AKA Fever Ray is one of those. Dark, distorted monochrome throbs and nuanced icy atmospheres helped her self titled debut reach critical acclaim back in 2009, revealing an ear for the organic compositions and textures that Dreijer couldn’t express with her sibling as one half of The Knife. It’s devilish that a surprise follow up album, Plunge, would be released digitally (physical release landing February 2018) in late October, arriving…
Cork, ever Ireland’s unexpected cornerstone of hazy psych, can boast another addition to the canon in the The Sunshine Factory‘s new single ‘Seer’, which we’re delighted to premiere here. This comes alongside the announcement of their debut EP proper, Cruelest Animal, the title track of which was released last year following a string of extremely promising demos and homemade recordings. Towering out of the speaker like some meta-diegetic music recorded live from a cave to soundtrack a climactic David Lynch scene – probably one of Evil Coop walking cooly away from a major explosion – ‘Seer”s measured, primal urgency, gives way to an incredible synth motif – think Vangelis’ Blade Runner Blues – before settling into a mess of rusty, screeching guitars.…
Being the big fans of Come On Live Long that we are, it’s with great pleasure that we share the latest single from guitarist and vocalist Robert John Ardiff‘s forthcoming solo album, Between The Bed and Room. Following the brittle and really rather magnificent ‘Paint Your Nails’, ‘Lying in the Gutter’ is an even more delicate affair. The rich, vast textures of Come On Live Long’s sound are stripped away to leave Ardiff exposed and reliant on a self-trust and confidence in compositional simplicity. Luckily, in the singles preceding this and once again here, there seems to be no shortage of that. Seems we…
Dundalk-based artist and multi-instrumentalist Shane Clarke AKA Elephant has returned with one of his strongest single efforts to date, ‘Time Will Tell’. Featuring a wonderfully collaborative DIY video contributions from 28 different Dundalk artists, Clarke said of the Bowie-influenced track: “‘Time Will Tell’ is a song about death. Its irregular arrangement and calm-to-chaos approach is an extension of the deeper feelings within. Like a teenaged temper boiling over, grieving loss and remembering lost love. Unbalanced, unhinged and hauling ass through circumstance without having time to come to terms with where you are and how you are supposed to feel about it when…
Metropolis 2017 kicks off on a chillingly Irish Saturday afternoon, with only the bricks and mortar of the RDS and surrounding bodies to fend off the cold. Being one of the country’s few festivals taking place at this time of year, expectations are set on a show that can begin to bridge the gap between the shimmering of Body and Soul and the last trumpets of Electric Picnic. Tara Stewart gets the ball rolling on the industries stage (a slight change of programme) and plays to a largely vacant room. Her last track, a brilliant mix of Bollywood and Jay-Z…
We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: Dublin quartet Autre Monde are one of the very best indie bands in the country at the moment – the proof being scattered all over their eponymous debut physical release, out now on borderline-iconic Dublin indie label Popical Island. Barely allowing us to sit upon their opening (acclaimed, by our reckoning) batch of singles – available on Bandcamp – the act are undeniably referential to contemporary pop & art-rock from the mid-sixties through today. Indeed, they make an art out of mining genuine originality from a breadth of genre touchstones like Talking Heads, Can or Pavement, simultaneously giving a nod to underground movements like CBGBs new wave…
One of the country’s finest songwriting voices, Rory Nellis, releases his second album, There Are Enough Songs In The World on November 11. The frontman of deeply-respected Belfast power-pop outfit Seven Summits, his 2015 debut LP Ready For You Now was followed by a string of numbered singles, drip-fed to us over the space of 18 months in a typically curated fashion, to make up There Are Enough Songs In The World. It’s an approach, as we’ve already said, has served to isolate each song in its own right, building up and developing a narrative that is clearly threaded throughout the release. A collection of parables, ruminations, and the many suspects of the…
We have to say – per capita, there’s no other town or city in Ireland producing DIY indie rock at the rate of Limerick. We’ve got Hot Cops in Belfast, Slouch in Dublin, but we can now happily add Static Vision‘s self-released 10-track debut to the likes of Eraser TV, Cruiser, Anna’s Anchor, oh, and The Rubberbandits, to the city’s list of self-made accolades. Equal parts effervescent and slack, What is and Now is a stab of garage post-punk in the ’80s SST, Wipers-esque vein that could pass for an undiscovered proto-grunge gem from the midwest in 1989 fronted by a time-travelling Will Toledo, and having been…