• Goat Girl – Goat Girl

    April 12, 2018 - By 

    Named in reference to Goat Boy, Bill Hicks’ salacious stage persona, London four-piece Goat Girl give some clue to the contents of their debut album through their own half-abandoned alter egos. Vocalist Clottie Cream (Lottie), drummer Rosy Bones, guitarist L.E.D. (Ellie) and bassist Naima Jelly seem to both crave and dismiss the kind of anonymity that will allow the music to stand entirely on its own merits. Alongside this is a darkly humoured veneer that hangs over the songs, which often masks an incisive sting. Much has been made of the band’s South London origins, and their sonic and geographic…

  • Explorations in É: An Interview with Dowry

    February 21, 2018 - By 

    There is an ambient apposition at work through the debut single from Dowry, the solo moniker of multi-instrumentalist and composer Éna Brennan. In É unfolds with measured purpose, the instrumental track building gently in tension as it moves from a drone base through subtle orchestral counterpoints towards its dramatic, understated conclusion. Éna creates her sounds with violin and a loop pedal, inviting the listener to become entangled in the earthier low tones, and the ghostly high register notes that pull away from their mire like will-o’-the-wisps. It’s that same emotional evocation that we’ve encountered on Éna’s earlier compositions, and in…

  • Dedekind Cut – Tahoe

    February 20, 2018 - By 

    Dedekind Cut is the current pseudonym of Northern California based experimental composer & producer Fred Welton Warmsley III. His 2016 debut $uccessor was a singular piece of work, an abstract, opaquely kaleidoscopic fusion of paranoia and dread, sonically teased out via digital/analogue and synthetic/organic contradictions. If that record edged into the far corners of noise and drone music, then its true successor plumbs depths equally as distant. Named after the mountain lake town in which its creator – who used to produce and release music as Lee Bannon – resides, a multitude of sonic components make up the macrocosm of…

  • Festival Preview: It Takes A Village 2018

    January 12, 2018 - By 

    At the final All Tomorrows Parties festival at Pontins Holiday Camp, East Sussex in 2013, one music fan-in-residence jovially likened the rows of chalets and wandering music fans that inhabited them as being like some kind of ‘dystopian playground’. They didn’t realise the prescience of their reflection at the time. All Tomorrow’s Parties subsequently went down in an inglorious debt-ridden blaze after so many stellar festivals – events that took the holiday camp model and created a communal event where artist and punter stood on equal footing. They ate, drank, and slept together, got fucked up and came back down together; they…

  • 18 For ’18: Dowry

    January 2, 2018 - By 

    Happy new year! We’re pleased to present 18 for ’18, a handpicked selection of Irish acts we’re absolutely convinced are going places in 2018. Over the next couple of weeks, we’re going to be previewing each of those acts, accompanied by words from our writers and an original photograph by our wonderful team of photographers. First up is Dublin composer and artist Éna Brennan AKA Dowry. Photo by Aaron Corr ___ “Surround yourself with kind and sincere people and all will be well.” (Dowry proverb) Éna Brennan has made sure to do just that over the past year. Having played with…

  • Album Review: Courtney Barnett & Kurt Vile – Lotta Sea Lice 

    October 26, 2017 - By 

    It’s a laid-back love-in and we’re all invited – we always knew these two kids would get it together. The Melbourne-Pennsylvanian alliance of Courtney Barnett and Kurt Vile sprang organically from the grooves of Vile’s Smoke Ring For My Halo, an album with deep personal resonance for Barnett. Her then band, CB4, ended up supporting Vile’s own Violators a couple of years later as his Wakin on a Pretty Daze record was taking hold in people’s consciousness, and the two became gradual friends over the ensuing years’ international festival circuit. Ideas were bounced, files were shared, and eventually Lotta Sea…

  • St. Vincent @ Olympia Theatre, Dublin

    October 23, 2017 - By 

    We heard it here first. St. Vincent is 80% Irish. She tells us this in a rare glimpse into a personal moment, the stage persona briefly dropped to let the audience in. So, here we all are in the middle of a meticulously constructed piece of musical theatre, and Annie Clark is talking about the first two Irish potato famines. Not even the Great Famine – the rockstar famine – but the first two. “It was always family lore that we were Irish” she smiles, and cynicism be damned, it’s actually believable when she claims Irish crowds are her favourite.…

  • Avey Tare – Eucalyptus

    July 26, 2017 - By 

    Collaboration has typified Avey Tare’s output since the turn of the century – those proto-Animal Collective recordings of Spirit They’re Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished and Danse Manatee, which saw the beginnings of that band’s gradual amalgamation; Pullhair Rubeye with múm’s Kría Brekkan; the more garage-tinged Avey Tare’s Slasher Flicks project. Even Animal Collective, active now for the guts of two decades in some form or other, has always been a mutating thing from album to album, with various permutations of its members dipping in and out indiscriminately. Avey Tare – David Portner to his nearest and dearest – has been…

  • Big Walnuts Yonder – Big Walnuts Yonder

    May 10, 2017 - By 

    A lifelong self-professed student of the bass, Mike Watt has tirelessly explored the instrument’s intricacies since his teenage forays into punk rock with D. Boon in Minutemen. Watt’s subsequent four-decade career has seen him play with a slew of bands and collaborators, influencing countless players along the way. Through his tenure with fIREHOSE, Dos, and in later years The Stooges and current freeform trio Il Sogno Del Marinaio, Watt has bounced between genres, musicians and continents playing his trade; mastering his instrument. It was in Japan that the genesis for Big Walnuts Yonder began, from a conversation between Watt and…

  • Thurston Moore – Rock N Roll Consciousness

    May 8, 2017 - By 

    There is barely a facet of modern rock and indie that doesn’t have at least some minor degree of separation from Thurston Moore. During and since his time with Sonic Youth, Moore has collaborated with a formidable raft of musicians, be it via stage or studio, not to mention giving Ian McKaye a run for his money in the talking head department when it comes to music documentaries. His presence in modern music is ubiquitous, so it seems almost slack that Rock n Roll Consciousness is only his fifth solo release. Give him a break, though. Moore is a busy…