• 16 For ’16: exmagician

    January 26, 2016 - By 

    With their debut album teetering on the brink of release, Belfast’s exmagician are primed for a remarkable 2016. Cathal Mc Bride traces their formation, recent output and what lies ahead. Photo by Ruth Kelly Rising from the ashes of Cashier No.9, that band’s primary forces Danny Todd and James Smith have put their old project to bed and reinvented themselves as exmagician. The sunny sound of Cashier’s To The Death Of Fun has now been traded for something slightly darker, and although acoustic guitars are still a dominant force, it’s less folksy this time out, with a greater leaning on electronic…

  • Sea Pinks – Soft Days

    December 22, 2015 - By 

    With five albums in little over five years, Neil Brogan’s work ethic is admirable. And that’s just with Sea Pinks – add to that the albums and EPs he drummed on with Girls Names before his 2013 departure, an excellent recent EP with post-punk quartet Cruising and a low key solo EP as Winterlude early this year and you wonder where he finds the time. With more and more small bands operating part-time in today’s unsteady music business, longer gaps between releases are increasingly common, but the release of Dreaming Tracks in late 2014 still feels like only yesterday, and…

  • METZ w/ Oh Boland @ Whelan’s, Dublin

    November 10, 2015 - By 

    It’s surprising that Toronto’s METZ didn’t come to Ireland when touring their self titled 2012 debut, given the appetite in this country for the sort of noise rock they trade in. So after a reportedly thrilling appearance at Electric Picnic this year, it’s nice to see them wrap up the current leg of their European tour behind even better follow up II with a stop off in Whelan’s. Sadly Protomartyr, who accompanied them on the UK dates aren’t present tonight, but Co. Galway’s Oh Boland more than make up for that. Their hook laden garage pop feels like it could…

  • Label Mixtape: Rough Trade

    November 5, 2015 - By 

    Having founded the first Rough Trade shop in London two years earlier, Geoff Travis first launched the independent label of the same name in 1978, at a time when an abundance of new underground acts inspired by the DIY ethic of punk were just dying to be heard. The shop and its distribution network were already providing a valuable retail outlet for these artists to get their records on sale, so starting a label seemed like the logical next step. Despite being at the heart of the post-punk and alternative scenes throughout the 1980s, by the dawn of the 90s…

  • Girl Band @ Bar Sub, Belfast

    October 1, 2015 - By 

    Most of the recent reviews for their full length debut Holding Hands With Jamie have said the same thing: no other band sounds like Girl Band. And it’s true. Sure, there are echoes of noise-rock, post-punk, krautrock and techno but they’re mixed together in such a way that no label can accurately capture the enthralling racket this Dublin quartet makes, while frontman Dara Kiely sings, speaks, shouts and screams surreal non-sequiturs over the top, sounding like the Irish lovechild of Steve Albini and Mark E Smith. While Kiely’s lyrics, when audible, initially appear to be hilariously odd – packed full…

  • Girls Names – Arms Around a Vision

    September 21, 2015 - By 

    Although the current line up of Girls Names have been playing live for well over two years now, aside from a cover of Brian Eno’s ‘Third Uncle’, new album Arms Around A Vision (and recent single ‘Zero Triptych’ – a track that would have made a perfect centrepiece to the album had it not been perversely left off) marks the debut of Gib Cassidy behind the drums in place of founder member, Sea Pinks’ Neil Brogan, as well as guitarist Philip Quinn’s full integration into the band, having only appeared on synth duty for two tracks on 2013’s The New…

  • Sufjan Stevens @ The Helix, Dublin

    August 31, 2015 - By 

    Once impressively prolific, new music by Sufjan Stevens comes along at a much slower pace these days, so the anticipation for tonight’s show, the first of two sold out shows at The Helix and the opening date his European tour, has been building for a while. After an support set from bluesy mother and son duo Madisen Ward and the Mama Bear, Sufjan and his unassuming looking band take to the stage, and it’s immediately clear that we’re in for a very different show from when he last visited these shores four years ago. For a start, we’re all seated,…

  • Midweek Mixtape: Short Songs

    August 12, 2015 - By 

    Despite being the accepted standard for radio play etc., sometimes there’s something unsatisfactory about the three-to-four minute pop song. It can, on occasion, feel like one idea has been dragged out a bit longer than it should have been, with superfluous guitar solos, incongruous bridges and unnecessary third verses, simply because it’s deemed that anything below this length is unacceptable. The best musicians, though, have the confidence and self awareness to keep things brief if they can say all they need to say in one or two minutes (or even less). Such tracks can easily be mistaken for throwaways, but…

  • Label Mixtape: Matador Records

    July 13, 2015 - By 

    Founded in 1989 by Chris Lombardi in his New York apartment, before Gerard Cosloy came on board the following year, it’s remarkable how quickly Matador Records became one of the most influential record labels operating in the indie world. As well as signing US bands, the label also became a reliable source for British bands on small UK labels to expand their international reach. Now part of the Beggars Group, recently operating in London as well as New York, and still going strong with the same two managers at the helm, Matador inspires such devotion that Pavement and Guided By…

  • Mogwai w/ RM Hubbert @ Olympia Theatre, Dublin

    June 22, 2015 - By 

    Not all bands survive long enough to have a twentieth anniversary tour, at least without reforming first. What’s remarkable about Mogwai is that they still feel like a current band, not yet reduced to being a mere heritage act, and so it’s difficult to conceive that they’ve been around that long (in the same way that it’s difficult to conceive that the mid 90s were quite that long ago, even for those of us young enough to have been in primary school at the time). As such it’s genuinely exciting to see what way tonight’s set will go, with such…