• Irish Tour: Brian Wilson

    July 27, 2017 - By 

    The downright legendary Brian Wilson and his band live in Galway and Dublin. Words by Steven Rainey and Aoife O’Donoghue, photos by Aaron Corr and Sean McCormack. Festival Big Top, Galway There’s a moment in the 2014 Brian Wilson biopic Love & Mercy where Brian – played by the wonderful Paul Dano – starts playing ‘God Only Knows’ for the first time on the piano. It’s probably one of my favourite scenes. It’s a quiet and poignant moment of the film, and I remember getting chills, awestruck at how such a simple melody was having such a hold on me.…

  • Townlands Carnival 2017

    July 27, 2017 - By 

    Townlands Carnival 2017 rolls up to one of the rainiest days so far this summer but it doesn’t stop the party hardened masses who’ve made their way to Macroom. After the trials and tribulations of Garda checkpoints stopping all incoming public transport, this reviewer is sorely disappointed to miss Gash Collective’s opening showcase at the Subatomic but there are whispers around the festival of an excellent starting performance from these rising stars of the Irish electronic scene. Jamie Behan closes out the Friday night with his faithful brand of techno. Saturday is a brighter and busier affair with the sun…

  • Avey Tare – Eucalyptus

    July 26, 2017 - By 

    Collaboration has typified Avey Tare’s output since the turn of the century – those proto-Animal Collective recordings of Spirit They’re Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished and Danse Manatee, which saw the beginnings of that band’s gradual amalgamation; Pullhair Rubeye with múm’s Kría Brekkan; the more garage-tinged Avey Tare’s Slasher Flicks project. Even Animal Collective, active now for the guts of two decades in some form or other, has always been a mutating thing from album to album, with various permutations of its members dipping in and out indiscriminately. Avey Tare – David Portner to his nearest and dearest – has been…

  • Premiere: the 202s – Dash For The Exit (Real Love Doesn’t Lie)

    July 26, 2017 - By 

    Dublin trio the 202s have shared the third single from their forthcoming third album. Following from ‘Up In Thin Air’ earlier this year and ‘Oh My My’ in January 2016, the band’s own brand of indie-pop shines through once again on ‘Dash For The Exit (Real Love Doesn’t Lie). With a healthy dose of krautrock’s percussive clatter, coupled with ambient, melodic textures and a distorted vocal, the track is one that rests in your mind for hours after listening, tickling the nerves in head that nudge you back to it again and again. Our Will Murphy described the 202s as a band…

  • Waxahatchee – Out In The Storm

    July 25, 2017 - By 

    The buzz surrounding Waxahatchee is something else. Ever since 2015’s Ivy Tripp, the project has been generating a ludicrous level of hype. Now, two years later, they deliver Out In The Storm, an album which promises to be a fairly emotionally raw exploration of the dissolution of band leader Katie Crutchfield’s last relationship. On the surface there is a huge amount going for this album. It’s their first release on Superchunk’s Merge Records, a supportive, decently sized label which has given them room to breathe and explore. They’ve got John Agnello behind the desk. He’s a man who recorded and…

  • Moments in Love: Balearic Favouritess from Bullitt’s Jonny Carberry

    July 25, 2017 - By 

    “My definition of Balearic? It’s music that’s mostly eclectic, happy, sexy, not cheesy, that gets its roots in the origins of dance music and flourishes on the dancefloor; a sound that makes you forget genres, or categories and you just enjoy it, listen to it – dancing and sharing it. Beat poetic, but real!” DJ Alfredo, Balearic innovator. As this Test Pressing article shows, the term ‘Balearic’ is a bit elusive and often poured over. To me as a ‘DJ’, it means the freedom to play lots of different genres and tempos: ambient, soul, new age, lounge, disco, industrial, electronic…

  • Exhibition: SANDMAN @ The Complex

    July 27, 2017 - By 

    Tonight sees the opening of SANDMAN in Dublin’s The Complex. SANDMAN is the second exhibition from Stream, an artist-led project, and follows on from their successful first show in the same space in April. The brief for this show saw Stream ask “the artists involved to produce work which considers the human tendency to worship; to elevate objects, ideas or people to semi-divine or miraculous status. We would like the artists to contemplate the role of worship or superstition within our current Western culture and our future culture, from a religious or secular perspective” The exhibition’s theme also draws on elements of…

  • Exhibition: Isabel Nolan & Brendan Earley @ Douglas Hyde

    July 26, 2017 - By 

    This Thursday sees two solo shows launched in Dublin's Douglas Hyde Gallery: Kerlin Gallery's Isabel Nolan in Gallery 1, with mother's tankstation's Brendan Earley in Gallery 2. Nolan presents a mixture of mediums, making use of photography, drawing, sculpture and installation work in a show titled: Calling on Gravity. Her work is an enquiry into why of existence drawing on a diverse set of characters, both real and fictional, as inspiration. Earley's show, titled back of beyond, sees the artist comment on escapes to the wilderness – be they completed by him or in the past by painters, filmmakers and walkers. Earley is…

  • Cornelius – Mellow Waves

    July 24, 2017 - By 

    Keigo Oyamada (AKA Cornelius) could easily be described as a jack of all trades but certainly not as a master of none. In the 11 years since the release of his last studio album Sensuous, he has been involved in a wide range of projects from working with Yoko Ono and The Yellow Magic Orchestra to scoring music for 2010s Scott Pilgrim vs. The World and the anime series Ghost in the Shell Arise. After a long departure from writing his own music, he was inspired to create something more personal, drawing on the loss of many of his childhood…