• EP Stream: Aul Boy – Making Strange

    February 28, 2020 - By 

    Everyone’s favourite rural slack power-pop escapists, Ramelton’s Aul Boy are back with new EP Making Strange. As ever, the wry quartet, led by Fionn Robinson, runs the gamut from jangle-pop ditties to experimental pocket orchestras [the masterful ‘Buttercup’]. Recorded at Donegal’s Attica Studios by Orri McBrearty, with some wonderful artwork from Daniel McGarrigle, it’s available on digitally & on CD. Aul Boy launch Making Strange tonight at Bennigan’s, Derry, and tomorrow night at Letterkenny’s Swilly Inn. Making Strange by Aul Boy

  • Color Out of Space

    February 28, 2020 - By 

    After his quarter-century exile from feature filmmaking, writer-director Richard Stanley returns with Lovecraftian passion project Color Out Of Space. It adapts H. P. Lovecraft’s short story of the same name, where an asteroid strikes a remote New England farm, unleashing an incomprehensible alien entity which begins to infect the bodies and minds of the family it finds there.  The combination of the excellent source material and Stanley—who even when his films were run ragged by studio interference remained a strikingly distinct visual stylist—should have made for an abundantly weird film, and yet the results are disappointingly orthodox. There is potential,…

  • 10 for ’20: Rising Damp

    February 28, 2020 - By 

    In the latest installment of 10 for ’20 – our feature looking at ten Irish acts we’re sure are set to do great things in 2020 and beyond – Eoin Murray profiles genre-warping musician and visual artist Michelle Doyle aka Rising Damp. Photo by Peter O’Hanlon One of the Irish undergrowth’s most febrile live acts, Rising Damp, makes music to be shook to. We first heard her at Banger Cliff, on the Sunday of Open Ear 2019, when she played an appropriately head-scrambling live set of ravey electronic punk and EBM. The Dublin artist’s effect-soaked howls and propulsive rhythms injected…

  • Beatrice Dillon – Workaround

    February 28, 2020 - By 

    It can be quite instructive to look back on divergent points in popular culture, and speculate on what could have been: the War of the Romantics between Brahms and Wagner, Bob Dylan going electric, the split between Gangsta Rap and Conscious Hip-Hop. One example which may not be mentioned in many history books is the evolutionary split in dubstep at the beginning of last decade. On one branch there was the more subtle approach by artists such as Benga, Coki, Skream and pre-chart mainstay, James Blake, whereas on the other there was the ultra-aggressive American wave spearheaded by artists like Skrillex. Of course…

  • Preview: Borders

    February 27, 2020 - By 

    If you’ve caught only a fleeting second of the visuals accompanying the music of Borders, you’ll know that it carries with it a huge weight of visual import. Spanning symphonic ambience and widescreen electronica, the record – which scooped last year’s Northern Ireland Music Prize – was a remarkably filmic meeting of the minds from two of the country’s most innovative artists, Ryan Vail and Eoin O’Callaghan AKA Elma Orkestra. It checks out, then, that such a naturally scopic, wonderfully-wrought statement on belonging and the universal power of nature and our place within it would translate well to the documentary format.…

  • Gil Scott-Heron & Makaya McCraven – We’re New Again

    February 26, 2020 - By 

    It says a lot about the enduring quality of both Gil Scott Heron and his final album, I’m New Here, that in the ten years since he passed, we’re still talking and analysing that final broadcast, trying to find even more depth hidden between the silences. When that album was first pitched in 2006, Heron had recently been released from Rikers Prison with no real prospects on the horizon. When he died six years later, he was back on a career-high with his legacy firmly galvanised and a final transmission that stands a towering monument to his lyrical dexterity, genius,…

  • Richard Dawson @ Empire Music Hall, Belfast

    February 26, 2020 - By 

    After recuperating from crossing freezing Scandinavia and France, Richard Dawson ended his rest period by performing in Belfast for the first time since his appearance at the Black Box in 2017. This time the setting was the Empire, a venue with music hall origins befitting Dawson, a performer who folds together the antique and the modern. His ability to draw such a sizeable crowd is an encouraging sign for any lovers of folk music, particularly because his style is at the less accessible end of the spectrum. Along with Dublin’s Lankum, another abrasive, brilliant group, Dawson’s recent work has done…

  • Monday Mixtape: Gender Chores

    February 24, 2020 - By 

    From Mitski and Kitt Philippa to Lucy Dacus and Maija Sofia, Belfast punk trio Gender Chores wax lyrical about some of their all-time favourite tracks. Photo by Chris McCann Kitt Philippa – ’68 2/4′ Sam: This is the closing track of Kitt’s incredible first album, and it’s my favourite one on there. It has a real steady, sure pulse that supports the refrain “Keep me going ’til the morning light”. Its gravitational pull allows the swirling arrangements of woodwind and piano to orbit out into the distance and then be gently guided back to the forefront which beautifully reinforces the…

  • Claire O’Brien – The Hollow

    February 22, 2020 - By 

      Folk music is an oral tradition: a passing down from generation to generation of not just songs, but tales and memories also. But does this definition hold up when discussing more modern incarnations of folk sounds, especially those of so-called “freak folk” or artists tagged with the New Weird label? At their best, these soft, subtly-psychedelic sounds evoke a different kind of memory, a collective natural memory passed down through the trees, the soil, and the wind. Such thoughts come to mind while listening to Claire O’Brien’s The Hollow, the latest gem from Glasgow-via-Kilkenny label, Moot Tapes.  The majority…

  • Destroyer – Have We Met

    February 21, 2020 - By 

    Over the course of his 25 year career, Dan Bejar, the driving force behind Destroyer, has carved a reputation for bombastic stylistic shifts. Stemming from an overarching philosophy that is actively against forging personal connections with his devoted following, Bejar has consistently given with one hand and taken away with the other. Whether it’s playing shows with his back to an unacknowledged crowd, or lurching from a commercial peak to an avant-garde experiment, Bejar has built one of the most interesting and expansive indie-rock projects with one simple rule: don’t even dare try and guess our next step.  Have We…