• Oneohtrix Point Never – Age Of

    June 9, 2018 - By 

    With his tenth dense and knotty release, Oneohtrix Point Never (AKA Daniel Lopatin) has constructed a lysergic, glitched out rebuke of internet culture, mapping out the deepest recesses of our often cracked and wildly over stimulated minds. Tackling themes of knowledge and truth in the Internet age, Lopatin takes his lofty queue from ’70s Prog to create a dystopian concept album wherein a singularity of artificially intelligent entities have become all knowing, absorbing the entirety of the world’s information from the internet. Of course, the Internet being the Internet, the information they have absorbed is riddled with inconsistencies, contradictions and…

  • Parquet Courts – Wide Awake!

    May 24, 2018 - By 

    Parquet Courts’ latest is a petrochemical explosion of fiery politics and sprawling creativity. Building upon their established art-punk sound, the Texan outfit’s experimentation with technicolour keyboard textures, funk grooves and Latin rhythms makes for their most immediate and stylistically diverse release to date. Aptly titled Wide Awake!,  the album is an unapologetically political outing, showcasing A. Savage’s lyrics which seethe with rage and indignation, his thoughts seemingly drawn into sharper focus by the U.S.A’s ongoing political calamity. Crunchy garage rock opener ‘Total Football’ indulges the bands more mercurial instincts with elastic time signatures and a jerkily danceable bassline, providing the…

  • The Sea and Cake – Any Day

    May 22, 2018 - By 

    Chicagoan supergroup, The Sea and Cake sprang from the mid-western city’s post-rock hotbed during the early ’90s, bringing together members of bands such as Shrimp Boat and Tortoise to create a singularly sophisticated sound. Over the course of 11 albums The Sea and Cake have plied an increasingly finessed trade, melding a love of jazz, bossa nova and ’70s Krautrock with their own breezy indie rock instincts, tearing an unlikely wormhole between the parallel universes of Astrud Gilberto, Neu! and Guided by Voices.  The band’s latest effort Any day, which arrives after a lengthy six year break, flashes to life…

  • The Go! Team @ Custom House Square, Belfast

    May 11, 2018 - By 

    This evening sees Brighton based musical magpies The Go! Team bring their kaleidoscopic, crate digging pop to Custom House Square as part of the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival. With a stellar archive of hits at their disposal, a crack nine piece band and high energy support from dance pop chameleons The Correspondents, tonight’s performance promises to kick the weekend off with an amphetamine rush of sound and colour. Purveyors of the much-maligned dance subgenre ‘electro swing’, The Correspondents are prone to mixing campy cabaret stylings and big band samples with pummelling drum and bass work outs which could well make…

  • Privacy, Freedom, Bliss and Breadth: An Interview with Hilary Woods

    May 3, 2018 - By 

    Dublin native Hilary Woods found herself thrust into the public eye while still just a teenager, playing bass in the commercially successful alternative trio JJ72. Her tenure with the band saw her tour the world, grace the covers of music magazines and even appear on Top of the Pops. After two albums though Woods parted ways with her bandmates, ready to follow her own creative voice. The road to launching herself as a solo artist may have been a winding one but since 2013 fans have been treated to three darkly dreamlike releases showcasing Woods’ delicate voice and deft song…

  • Grouper – Grid Of Points

    May 1, 2018 - By 

    Recording as Grouper, Liz Harris has been alchemising ethereal and enigmatic albums for over 13 years, combining her gossamer voice and sparse instrumentation with seemingly bottomless layers of tape hiss and static to craft richly detailed and emotionally resonant worlds of sound. With her latest release, Grid of Points, Harris’ spartan musical palette has been pared back even further, dispensing with the looped guitars and fuzzed out atmospherics of her earlier albums to create a pristine and glacial piano and voice record filled with space and extended moments of silence. In lesser hands, the album’s extreme economy of sounds could…

  • Unknown Mortal Orchestra – Sex & Food

    April 16, 2018 - By 

    Filled to brim with squelching alien textures and off kilter grooves, Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s Sex & Food is an intriguing and at times disquieting listen. Largely preoccupied with themes of isolation and disconnection, it seems fitting that the majority of the album was conceived and recorded far from the outfit’s New Zealand home in a dizzying array of far flung locales ranging from typhoon drenched Hanoi to an earthquake devastated Mexico City.  The disorientating effect of this strange release evokes the free floating ennui of having been on the road too long, feeling washed out and jet lagged in a suddenly unfamiliar…

  • The Altered Hours w/ Documenta @ Menagerie, Belfast

    April 6, 2018 - By 

    The Menagerie has really gone from strength to strength since reopening late last year. The galaxy print exterior may have been replaced by a more austere matt black emulsion and the management may even have decided to indulge patrons with something as frivolously bourgeois as a mirror in the gents but the soul of the bar and its reputation as Belfast’s consummate coven of alternative spirit remain wholly intact. Tonight’s appearance by Belfast’s sprawling drone pop ensemble Documenta and Cork based rockers Altered Hours gives the thunderous new PA system ample opportunity to shine, proving once again that the Menagerie…