• Premiere: Bear Worship – Frequency

    October 20, 2017 - By 

    Back in June we were very pleased to premiere one of our favourite Irish albums of the year, WAS by Dublin’s Karl Knuttel AKA Bear Worship. A release we called “a prismatic traipse of melodically rich, compositionally ambitious alt-pop” the album peaked on various tracks, not least new single ‘Frequency’. Backed by b-side ‘Post Geographical Orientalism – a beautifully woven, Grandaddy-esque effort – the single is a layered, synth-washed gem that sees Knuttel’s beatific vocal take centre-stage. We’re all over this, and you should be, too. Frequency/Post Geographical Orientalism by Bear Worship

  • Video Premiere: Best Boy Grip – Molecular Individuals

    October 20, 2017 - By 

    Having already received support from the likes of Steve Lamacq and Tom Robinson on BBC 6 Music, ‘Molecular Individuals’ by Eoin O’Callaghan AKA Best Boy Grip is a track perfectly typical of the Derry musician’s ever-ambitious sonic scope. Summoning the likes of Talking Heads, The Books, Peter Gabriel and LCD Soundsystem – and that’s just touching the surface – it’s a masterfully giddy, wonderfully polychromatic effort that confines within its three-and-a-half-minutes O’Callaghan’s serious multi-instrumentalist flair. Heard the new Beck album yet? This one track is ten times better than that. Take note, Hansen. The track is out via Amelia Records now. Buy it…

  • Happy Death Day

    October 20, 2017 - By 

    Happy Death Day is a minor slasher remix built around repetition, in a genre already prone to it. Theresa, or ‘Tree’ (Jessica Rothe), is a sorority sister bi-atch who wakes up in a stranger’s dorm bed, hungover and late for class. It’s her birthday, the same as her late mother’s, and she’s in a bad mood, ignoring her Dad’s persistent calls and carrying on with a married professor. She seems to have been in a bad mood for a while. Late that night she gets cornered in a dark underpass on campus by a creep in a buck-toothed baby mask…

  • Album Review: Bully – Losing

    October 19, 2017 - By 

    There are some voices that leave words somewhat redundant. Those special chords that can conjure inordinate amounts with so little. In spite of its deliberately anarchic and amateurish intentions, the punk community has had more than a few. Think of John Lydon’s instantly recognisable sneer, H.R.’s reggae inflections or Corin Tucker’s earth-shattering roar. There is a real magic to them, so every time you find one that even approaches their majesty, it should be a call for celebration. Bully’s Alicia Bognanno has one of those voices: One of those voices that demands your attention and instantly embeds itself in your…

  • Album Review: And So I Watch You From Afar – The Endless Shimmering

    October 19, 2017 - By 

    As they embark on a vast European tour in support of their fifth album, The Endless Shimmering, it is nice to make the note that it was as a result of a decade’s worth of extensive, ubiquitous touring and ferocious dedication that North Coast instrumental behemoths And So I Watch You From Afar got to where they are now, holding a place as one the island’s best and widely loved acts. It’s something that saw them play over 300 shows between 2009 and early 2011, venturing on sprawling tours across continents and countries rarely travelled by independent and relatively niche acts –…

  • Picture This: Inspirational Arts Award @ The Library Project

    October 19, 2017 - By 

    Catarina Leone – Chrysalis Established in 2009, the Inspirational Arts Award, named after the Dublin printing studio of the same name, is an annual award open to recent graduates from the photography and lens based courses of Dublin IT, iadt Dun Laoghaire, Limerick IT and Griffith College Dublin. The award fulfils two briefs, firstly thanking the students over the years who have support Inspirational Arts with their custom, and secondly it provides a second chance for them to exhibit their graduation projects in an external gallery – further showcasing their work and beginning the transition from photographic student to artist. This…

  • Interview: Come On Live Long

    October 18, 2017 - By 

    Ahead of playing the final RHA Hennessy Lost Friday on the year on Friday night, we talk to Louise Gaffney from Dublin indie/alternative-pop maestros Come On Live Long about progression, perfectionism, influence and the importance of enjoying the moment. Go here for more info about the show. Hi, Louise. Your second album, In The Still, was released back in May. It’s right up there with the best Irish albums of the year. How was the songwriting process for this one? The songwriting process for In The Still was a little different to how it had been for the previous record. The…

  • The Jesus and Mary Chain @ Vicar Street, Dublin

    October 19, 2017 - By 

    It seems that there’s a different vibe in The Jesus & Mary Chain camp since the release of Damage and Joy in March of this year; antagonism replaced with affability and scorn with humour. It’s in and around six months ago that the band visited The Academy with their first studio album in almost twenty years fresh off the presses, and tellingly on that outing it was Psychocandy material that made up the bulk of the setlist. Not so in Vicar Street – their seminal debut rears its head, but tonight’s is a much more rounded selection and the band…

  • Half Forward Line – The Back of Mass

    October 18, 2017 - By 

    Power-pop act Half Forward Line are a Galway-based trio of Irish garage rock relative luminaries, spearheaded by the self-deprecative lyrical mastery of So Cow‘s Brian Kelly. Their debut album, The Back of Mass, comes out on October 27. The band also features Oh Boland‘s Niall Murphy on bass and Ciaran O’Maoláin on drums – who, incidentally, recorded the album over the course of two days in the lounge of a derelict rural Irish pub. As ever, Kelly delivers eleven tightly-woven slices of life in an increasingly-disconnected world that is modern Ireland, typically banged out in under a half-hour. Dizzying, anxious bubblegum pop and the pristine chord progressions Teenage Fanclub somehow never wrote hyperactively lay the path…