• Lighght – Gore​-​Tex In The Club, Balenciaga Amongst The Shrubs

    September 3, 2019 - By 

    Lighght is no stranger to chaos. The Cork producer’s first tape, The Skin Falls Off The Body, was, as its title suggests, an exercise in nasty, bile-dripping body horror. Recorded a full three years prior to its release last December, it represented a direct response to a very specific personal trauma in the artist’s life. It’s vulgar sound design specialised in unrelenting syncopated drums, unseemly quicksilver whirring, and serrated, industrial buzzing, a pool of emotional sludge. Though impressively visceral and absorbingly unsettling, it ultimately lacked a sense of completeness.  It also provided no indication of what his future full-length debut…

  • This Month In Irish Music: June

    July 5, 2019 - By 

    Was June the strongest month in Irish music this year so far? By way of Girl Band, Yankari, Uly, Roisin Murphy and more, Colin Gannon makes a strong case in his monthly round-up. Girl Band — Shoulderblades Girl Band (pictured) are back. Dara Kiely’s ungodly, contorted howl is back, as exorcistic and scabbed as ever. In the same month that Two Door Cinema Club made their excruciatingly ghastly comeback, Ireland’s revered purveyors of shadowy, techno-informed noise rock arose from their slumber. Kiely’s health problems led at least in part to their lack of visibility over the past few years, creating a…

  • This Month In Irish Music: May

    June 18, 2019 - By 

    In the latest of a new regular series, Colin Gannon rounds up the very best Irish tracks released of the month just gone, featuring Alarmist, Post-Punk Podge and the Technohippies, Gemma Dunleavy, April, Department of Forever and more. Citrus Fresh — DiCaprio The abrasive grain of the Limerick accent render it a useful weapon for aggressive, menacing rapping, as Hazey Haze’s attritional style has expertly shown. But Haze’s friend, collaborator and spiritual brother in Limerick’s DIY rap scene, Citrus Fresh, adopts a different mode on the tender, celestial ‘DiCaprio’: a break-up song, captured in low-fidelity hip-hop. A twinkling sample recalling the…

  • Junior Brother – Pull The Right Rope

    May 29, 2019 - By 

    Imagine Joanna Newsom had gorged on grainy VHS tapes of Richie Kavanagh instead of the modernist compositions of Ruth Crawford Seeger, weaving guitar stabs and tambourine whacks to soundtrack drunken treks through rural Ireland. This verdant picture, brought forward by Kerry bard Junior Brother, glistens to life on his enchanting debut album, Pull the Right Rope, released through Galway’s Strange Brew label. Born and raised just outside of Killarney, the origin story of Junior Brother, the performance name Ronan Kealy nabbed from an early 17th century play he studied in college, is equally as pristine and adventurous as his music.…

  • This Month in Irish Music: April

    May 6, 2019 - By 

    Colin Gannon rounds up the very best Irish tracks released of the month just gone, featuring Eomac, Joni ft. The Cyclist, Bitflower Bb, Blusher, Fixity, Repeater, Fynch, Just Mustard, Anna Mieke, Leo Miyagee and more. Eomac — Drawn in Sand / Joni Ft. The Cyclist — Hapsi (DDR2) Last month, in a not-so-enlightened Irish Times article, an Irish music industry figure deduced from her experience that the advent of a new radio station dedicated entirely to playing Irish music is necessitated (in part) by the “fragmented and disjointed” state of independent music in Ireland. At best, this assertion is dumb…

  • This Month In Irish Music: March

    April 1, 2019 - By 

    In the latest of a new regular series, Colin Gannon rounds up the very best Irish tracks released of the month just gone, featuring The Claque, Uwmammi, Invader Slim, James Joys, Cassavetes, Jafaris and more. The Claque — Hush Hush, the transfixing single from The Claque — the newly reinvented trio comprising of Alan Duggan (Girl Band), Kate Brady and Paddy Ormond — was this month’s most wiry, propulsing listen. Miasmic textures, beautiful, veiled melodies and bristling, febrile noise collide, ensuring the group avoid immediate categorisation. The eardrum-splitting tautness of Girl Band does come to mind, but the group are…

  • 19 for ’19: Elikya

    March 28, 2019 - By 

    More than any other group in Ireland, Elikya bleed history. Founded in Limerick in 2001 as a community choir of sorts, Elikya’s primary objective was to promote “multicultural diversity and integration through the sharing and promotion of Congolese music and culture”. Over the years, the group became a home for a coterie of legends in Congolese music. Drummer Trocadero — a child prodigy who started his career with the famous Congolese singer and bandleader Johnny Bokelo Isenge — joined them early on but it was 2017 when the group’s profile rose significantly. The iconoclastic Pepe Felly Manuaku, founder of the…

  • This Month in Irish Music: February

    March 3, 2019 - By 

    In the latest of a new regular series, Colin Gannon rounds up the very best Irish tracks released of the month just gone, featuring ELLLL, Mob Wife, Fehdah, Larry, Sunken Foal, Soulé, Postcard Versions and more. ELLLL — Pepsi Ellen King’s work as ELLLL is fast becoming one of the most searingly vital things in Irish music. As well as being super busy (she’s released two equally erudite EPs in the space of two months), King has managed to keep the quality to an almost peerless quality. The latest batch of tracks, Confectionary, all named after a sweet shop delicacy,…

  • This Month In Irish Music: January

    January 31, 2019 - By 

    In the first of a new regular series, Colin Gannon rounds up the very best Irish tracks released of the month just gone, featuring SOAK, Arvo Party, ELLL, Problem Patterns, James Joys, Sister Ghost, Gadget & The Cloud , Maria Somerville and more. Problem Patterns — Allegedly In a month where the R&B musician R. Kelly—after painfully long years of swerving accountability for persistent, unsettling claims of heinous abuses—may finally have his day of reckoning in a court, new Belfast-based feminist punk group Problem Patterns’ snarling debut single, ‘Allegedly’, lands a certain potency. The word allegedly—itself a necessary adverb used in copy…

  • Milo – Budding Ornithologists Are Weary Of Tired Analogies

    November 7, 2018 - By 

    Milo’s raps are that of internal monologues, paradoxical truths and caustic wit. His flow ricochets around the rap cosmos — choppy to smooth, elliptical to gratifyingly loquacious — before fate slots it away in pockets of dream-like production that is heavily indebted to jazz’s freest, most nakedly emotive, compulsions. Scallops Hotel, his side project and producer alias, is low stakes in the best possible understanding of the phrase. A sublime January release earlier this year, sovereign nose of (y​)​our arrogant face, marked newfound terrain for Ferreira through sheer uniformity in pace and a flow that is becoming increasingly screwed into…