• The Jesus and Mary Chain @ The Academy, Dublin

    Jim and William Reid seem to be getting on just fine these days. You can tell from the minimal interaction and eye contact onstage when the notoriously fractious brothers get The Jesus & Mary Chain tours off the ground. In 2014 the band played a warm-up show in Vicar Street – a kind of dress rehearsal of sorts for their then-imminent Psychocandy tour. It was a ramshackle event from start to finish – and all the more exciting for it – where it seemed the band may not have lasted to the end of the set never mind the beginning…

  • Sun Kil Moon – Common As Light And Love Are Red Valleys Of Blood

    In his fifty years on this earth Mark Kozelek has, as he informs us on this new record, lived many lifetimes. His listeners have lived a large part of them too – from his Red House Painters days in the ‘90s, through his solo work and with Sun Kil Moon, Kozelek has never shied away from baring the hard truths and hurts as well as indulging in the simple joys. Album number eight, despite being a double, is a more condensed temporal experience, recounting the same number of months in the singer’s life from January to August in 2016 while…

  • 17 For ’17: DIE HEXEN

    Extending from the north of Ireland to the east of Asia, the scope of DIE HEXEN – spatially, temporally, and ideologically – is vast and fascinating, executed in a fashion that marks this enigma of performance art apart from any other musician in the country. DIE HEXEN defies definition or categorisation, an identity and an idea constantly in flux. It’s a marriage of western and eastern concepts; of the unique post-World War II Japanese art theatre, Butoh, the dance of darkness; of myriad twentieth century cinematic, musical and pop-cultural influences; of personal experience and wilful passion. We’ve had glimpses of…

  • 17 for ’17: Our Krypton Son

    Our Krypton Son’s ethereal sounds may seem bathed in “the glow that flashes red” from the sun of Superman’s home planet, but we don’t really need to look as far as the celestial bodies. Those auroras closer to home should take just as much responsibility for where Chris McConaghy’s melodies emanate from, piercing every so often through the coastal skies to inspire and ignite. Written in the small village of Creeslough in northwest Donegal, the sonic themes of Fleas and Diamonds swell and meander like the landscape of the county that birthed it; impenetrable yet so welcoming once breached, a…

  • The Flaming Lips – Oczy Mlody

    In a typically out-there press release for Oczy Mlody, Wayne Coyne evokes “A future where OczyMlody is the current cool powerful party drug of choice and sleeping is the ultimate cure for everything” – a scenario that takes place inside a hedonistic gated community where people opt out of reality into a fantasy world. Coyne’s conceptualisation of the fourteenth Flaming Lips album proper is incredibly close to that of The Who’s aborted Lifehouse project (that ultimately became the 1971 Who’s Next album), set in a futuristic world where society is hooked up to The Grid via “experience suits” and programmed…

  • Inbound: Brand New Friend

    As the seasons inevitably turn and summer ambles into autumn, sometimes you need music to augment the mood and bridge that interim between the party and the comedown; the wind-down from long evenings boozing by the canal and the sinking realisation that it all has to finish up sometime. That seems as good a time as any to welcome a brand new friend into your life – four of them, more accurately – playing a blend of sad and raucous, joyous and melancholic songs about love and other less important things. Initially Taylor Johnson’s solo endeavour, the addition of his…

  • Teenage Fanclub – Here

    Summer’s over, but summer’s here…how can that be? That’s the perennial effect of a Teenage Fanclub album – “Simple pleasures are all we need/ Sinful leisure, it’s all we need.” Recorded between Provence, Glasgow and Hamburg, Here is album number ten from a band that took the seeds sown by the finest B-bands – Big Star above all else – and made the heartlands of Scotland a rival to the American west coast when it came to pristine pop music. The time between their records has been unhurriedly expanding – six years on from Shadows the template remains unchanged as ‘I’m In Love’ strums Here…

  • Everything Shook – Drinking About You

    Everything Shook have proven one of the more interesting outfits on the Irish live circuit of late, a kinetic and technicolour blend of music, electro-performance art and synchronised choreography. The trouble with such visual bombardment is often that while it’s entertaining in the moment, it’s a transient thing. However, Robyn Bromfield, Jessica Kennedy and Áine Stapleton demonstrated on their debut release, Argento Nights, that they had the songs to back up the schtick. That three-track EP – as its title implied – was a louche, low-key and murky snippet of the brooding electronica that was to come on Drinking About You. It’s with the foreboding march…

  • Inbound: Flecks

    There is an intimacy inherent in Flecks’ understated, atmospheric songs – enveloping sonic warmth that’s an invitation to lean closer; to listen beyond the quintet’s instrumental weave and hear what whispered reflections await to be deciphered. The members have converged from various musical outfits and endeavours, uniting with an ease that manipulates the auditory sense; slowly coating the listener in an aural glaze like the honey that seems to glisten on Freya Monks’ vocals. Soft, insistent percussion pushes and pulls the band along – both a quickened heartbeat and a measured pulse behind the tonal undercurrents and lyrical disclosures. Their…

  • The Julie Ruin – Hit Reset

    Julie Ruin isn’t a new concept for Kathleen Hanna. The moniker has been around since the mid- nineties as the title of her post-Bikini Kill solo album, one that bridged the gap and foreshadowed what was to come with Le Tigre. That trio’s explorations with sampled music and drum machines expanded on Julie Ruin’s bedroom-recorded experiments, and the pseudonym was put to bed for over a decade, during which time Hanna’s productivity was curtailed by a long-term debilitating illness. Her struggle with Lyme disease, undiagnosed for years, is documented with stark candour in the 2013 film The Punk Singer, and it’s a topic that crops up…