The Front Bottoms live at Mandala Hall in Belfast. Photos by Claire Kelly
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This is the end of the indie technocrats. Nearly a decade after the release of Limbo, Panto Wild Beasts graced the Olympia stage for the last time. While this signals a very real end for the Kendal four-piece, it also serves as a more abstract end for an era of indie as a whole. Everywhere you look, mid-noughties bands are calling it a day. The age of four blokes and a guitar is over. But then, Wild Beasts never subscribed to this image of the scene. Their music was meant as the antithesis of the cheap lager and a pack…
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Dedekind Cut is the current pseudonym of Northern California based experimental composer & producer Fred Welton Warmsley III. His 2016 debut $uccessor was a singular piece of work, an abstract, opaquely kaleidoscopic fusion of paranoia and dread, sonically teased out via digital/analogue and synthetic/organic contradictions. If that record edged into the far corners of noise and drone music, then its true successor plumbs depths equally as distant. Named after the mountain lake town in which its creator – who used to produce and release music as Lee Bannon – resides, a multitude of sonic components make up the macrocosm of…
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Public Access T.V. live at Academy 2 in Dublin with support from Munky. Photos by Ian McDonnell
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Rejjie Snow had been knocking around for the best part of a decade now without a “proper” release under his belt (though 2017’s The Moon & You mixtape was excellent). In the six years since he broke onto the scene with ‘Trumpets’, the Dublin-born rapper has gone from being a YouTube buzz artist to collaborating with Joey Bada$$, supporting Madonna and hanging out with King Krule so fast that it’s hard to know exactly when the turning point really was. Any one of these things would have been the dream come true for a boy from Drumcondra and yet Mr. Snow – real name Alexa Anyaegbunam – achieved…
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Having last played the venue back in 2014, it’s been announced that Los Angeles trio HAIM will play Dublin’s Olympia Theatre on Tuesday, June 12. Tickets for the show – which takes place as part of the band’s UK and European tour this June – go on sale next Friday, February 23.
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Hailing from Derry, alternative-folk singer-songwriter Simon Herron plays, in his own words, “quiet, creaky, melancholy songs. Mostly.” It’s a wonderfully terse, and therefore very apt description for an artist who clearly chooses his word carefully in song. Taken from his forthcoming EP Now I’ve Closed My Eyes, ‘For a Minute’ is a wonderfully-woven tale of fingerpicked guitar patterns, sparse percussion and Herron’s evocative lyricism. Speaking of the track, the Liverpool-based musician said, “’For A Minute’ is essentially a tribute to the life and work of my late Grandfather, the Irish poet and playwright, Francis Harvey. His work deals with both the people and…
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In what’s one of our most anticipated Irish releases of 2018, traditional vocal quartet Landless have released the video for ‘Doomsday’, the first single from debut album Bleaching Bones. First heard on their eponymous debut EP, the Belfast & Dublin-based outfit’s brief & minimal video highlights the qualities – “Evocative, celestial, ethereal and, above all, extremely resonant” – that make Landless such an important prospect in the current resurgence & contemporary progression of Irish traditional music. Bleaching Bones is out on March 9 through Humble Serpent Records, with the Dublin launch at St Ann’s Church. More details here. Read Dominic Edge’s 18 for ’18 piece on Landless.
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Early-to-mid noughties NME nostalgists, rejoice: it’s been announced that the Killers and Franz Ferdinand will team up with for an open-air show at Dublin’s RDS on June 26. Tickets for the show are priced at €69.50 and go on sale on Friday, February 23. While we have you, here’s Jonny Currie’s verdict on the new Franz Ferdinand album, Always Ascending. Remember ‘Michael’? Feels like a lifetime ago, man.
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Whether you look to his work as one-half of Solar Bears, his solo project Trenchurian, making up one quarter of Leo Drezden, or co-heading recording and production duo The Deaf Brothers with Robert Watson aka SCAN, Rian Trench is constantly finding new ways to demonstrate his remarkable versatility. Currently making his way through Mexico, the Wicklow producer and musician has recently released a suitably blissed-out re-imagining of ‘Sum of its Parts’ by Come On Live Long. Marrying flourishes of shapeshifting synth and a host of reposed beats, it’s a sublime effort that forges completely new from the original.