• Watch: Glimmermen – Bang

    May 24, 2016 - By 

    “With refreshingly intelligent guitar work evoking both Television and Maps and Atlases, the four tracks on Satellite People are perhaps best surmised in the title track, a tidy hybrid of Mission of Burma circa Signals, Calls and Marches EP, Pop Group and early Captain Beefheart.” So read our time-confirmed verdict (in our previous guise of AU Magazine) of Satellite People, the debut EP by Dublin’s Glimmermen way back in 2012. Four years on – and three years since the release of their impressive debut album I’m Dead – the band have re-emerged with a new single, ‘Bang’. Taken from their forthcoming second album,…

  • Watch: King Kong Company – Scarity Dan

    May 24, 2016 - By 

    Having built up momentum via YouTube that saw them secure headline slots at Body&Soul and Electric Picnic, the visual element of King Kong Company’s craft has always been an integral part of their appeal. Ensuring they stick to that tried-and-tested track, the Waterford band have unveiled the masterfully disturbing video for their new single, ‘Scarity Dan’. Directed by Jamie O’Rourke of Killer Rabbit Productions, the video – a curious take on the breaking point of the 9 to 5 worker  – “taps into something that might lurk deep within us all, something dangerous and unspeakable waiting to break loose. But even as the vile…

  • Life Festival Announce Site Map, Stage-Times

    May 24, 2016 - By 

    Marking the first Irish music festival of the Summer, Life Festival returns to Belvedere House and Gardens in Co. Westmeath this weekend with their strongest line-up to date. With a small amount of remaining weekend, two day and Sunday tickets still available organisers have just revealed the site map and all-important stage-times for their X1 outing. For all other information, including travel info, please check the Life Festival website.

  • Down With Jazz

    May 24, 2016 - By 

    Returning for their 5th edition, Down With Jazz will once again take over and transform Dublin’s Meeting House Square in Temple Bar this June bank holiday weekend (June 4/5). With a stellar line-up including ambient folk from Dublin-born, London-based improvising vocalist Lauren Kinsella AKA Snowpoet (pictured), “two-horns-no-chords” quartet ReDiviDeR, the masterful, guitar-based Weird Glitches and Dublin guitarist, rapper and composer Zaska, organisers said “we’re following in the centenary theme of 2016, on the basis it is roughly 100 years since the birth of jazz (the early jazz period considered to be 1916-1922) which we feel juxtaposes nicely with the struggle for Irish freedom and…

  • The Black Box: Celebrating 10 Years at the Heart of Belfast Culture

    May 23, 2016 - By 

    Although initially intended as a mere short term project, over the past ten years, the Black Box has established itself as Belfast’s cultural hub, right at the centre of the thriving Cathedral Quarter. No other venue here dedicates itself to such a wide remit of music, comedy, theatre, film, art, literature and spoken word, both international and homegrown. As it celebrates its tenth birthday, it would seem fitting to recollect its most memorable events, but there are really too many to recall – though the staggering list of names who’ve passed through the venue’s doors include the likes of Tim…

  • Video Premiere: That Snaake – Go Bricker!

    May 23, 2016 - By 

    Like The Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster covering late-80s The Fall, ‘Go Bricker!’ by Dublin “recessionary post-punk” band That Snaake is a vehement, breakneck effort that tells the story of a drinking session that derails and ends up in an armed coup which overthrows the government and sees random sesh-mots on Ketamine put in charge of executing the entire fisheries board (remember: your imagination is everything, folks). That Snaake’s first single, the track – heavily based around the themes of drug abuse, religious oppression and poorly conceived guerrila coups – now comes with a video to boot, marking the remastered edition of the band’s wonderfully frenzied debut…

  • Premiere: Gross Net – Outstanding Debt

    May 23, 2016 - By 

    As one quarter of globetrotting Belfast band Girls Names, Philip Quinn has rarely been off the road recently. Currently enjoying some repose before a new string of dates with Girls Names in Europe throughout the Summer – including a highly-anticipated set at Electric Picnic on September 3 – Quinn’s attention is currently fixed on his work as Gross Net, namely Outstanding Debt, a new seven-track release which we’re pleased to premiere here. The first release for Austerity Drive, it’s a compilation of material mostly drawn from “several aborted releases” that eschews Quinn’s usual guitar-based approach in favour of inducing a netherworld of varyingly…

  • Watch: Slomatics – Electric Breath

    May 19, 2016 - By 

    Not merely one of the best heavy bands in Ireland, Slomatics are undoubtedly right up there with the finest harbingers of brain-bendingly, bone-crushingly hefty sludge-doom anywhere on the face of the planet. With their perfectly-honed live show at its razor-sharp best and a new studio album, Future Echo Returns, set for release via Black Box Records in September, the three-piece have re-emerged with a typically obliterating new track ‘Electric Breath’. The sonic equivalent of self-exorcism in slow-motion, it trounces in a way and with such clinically resounding execution that Slomatics and few others like them can muster. Created by Dermot Faloon,…

  • Video Premiere: Comrade Hat – Old Amsterdam

    May 19, 2016 - By 

    Capturing the curious quality of a solitary city traipse on the continent, the video for ‘Old Amsterdam’ by Derry’s Neil Burns AKA Comrade Hat is as uniquely dreamlike as the track in itself. An experimental ambient-pop impression, it’s a nicely layered, bittersweet ode to the eponymous city, bridging “old-world nostalgia and knowing, 21st Century detail”. With a mini-album set for release in June, it makes for an immersive audio-visual encounter with a multi-instrumentalist sure to carve out his path more and more throughout the year.

  • Video Premiere: Oh Boland – Where’s The Beach?

    May 19, 2016 - By 

    Ask anybody who knows their lo-fi from their Lulu, Tuam noise-pop trio Oh Boland are a rare breed of brilliant. Having first caught our attention with their perfectly ramshackle debut EP Oh! back in early 2013, they’ve steadily grown to be one of our very favourite “rural Irish kitchen sink bottle fed rock n’ roll” (their words, not ours – fitting, though. Very.) Accompanied by a short Irish tour in June (see dates below), the band’s mad infectious new single ‘Where’s The Beach’ – recorded by Liam Day at his Tuam home studio – will feature on four-track split cassette A Litany of Failures, also featuring Shrug Life, That Snaake and Junk…