• Getting re-acquainted: Blue Öyster Cult – (Don’t Fear) The Reaper (1976)

    October 30, 2013 - By 

    A coiling guitar figure wraps itself around your consciousness, drawing tighter and tighter. And then… and then… the cowbell comes in. This, my friends, is as good as it can ever get. Blue Öyster Cult had been a rather gnarly biker-rock band, all greasy hair, leather trousers, and weird, occult imagery. They even had their own runic symbol, man. Their first three albums are packed with post-Altamont death jams, best summed up by the fantastic ‘Career of Evil’ from their third album, Secret Treaties, a song that begins with the lines, “I plot your rubric scarab, I steal your satellite, I…

  • That’s The Story of my Life – The Life and Death of Lou Reed

    October 28, 2013 - By 

    When all is said and done, Lou Reed was never the easiest figure to love. For someone who is so intrinsic to the very notion of what we consider popular music to be, for someone who tore up the rulebook so fundamentally and set us all free, it’s rarely been an easy ride. And now that he has moved on, that journey will only become more difficult. Like all the truly great artists, to be “into” Lou Reed is to be “into” a variety of different personas, of different masks, of different ideologies. The snarling twenty-something, sunglasses strapped permanently to…

  • Do You Still Want To Believe? 20 Years of The X-Files

    October 23, 2013 - By 

    Arguably, television has replaced cinema as the preeminent visual entertainment medium. Shows like Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, and The Wire have stolen Hollywood’s thunder when it comes to dynamic and progressive storytelling. It wasn’t always this way, however, and back in 1993 a strange, cultish show about two mismatched FBI agents struck a chord with the public, tapping into a throbbing vein of pre-millennial angst and paranoia. But twenty years later, just what was the impact of Mulder and Scully’s unflinching look into the paranormal abyss? They said the truth was out there, but what happened when we actually found…

  • Smoke And Mirrors: The NI Music Prize

    October 16, 2013 - By 

    Award ceremonies are a strange beast, a curious mixture of the repellently naff and the irresistibly enticing. Regardless of what they might claim, everyone loves a pat on the back, the feeling of being vindicated in front of one’s peers, and the opportunity to revel in a sense of achievement. There ain’t nothing wrong with that, and when someone wins an award, they can be humble and bashful, or belligerently arrogant, but the result is the same – you feel good. On the other hand, if you don’t win, it’s all gravy, you never respected the thing in the first…

  • Classic Album: Doll By Doll – Gypsy Blood

    October 11, 2013 - By 

    A flicker of neon light casts shadows on a wet brick wall in Soho. A man, with a special glint in his eye, a glint that suggests danger, romance, and pain, turns his collar up against the rain, and lights a cigarette. This is his time, his moment, and even if no-one ever knows it, Jackie Leven is about to make history. This is the greatest album you have never heard. Doll by Doll released four albums from 1979 to 1982, before sinking further into the obscurity they already dwelt in. Led by the tall, charismatic Scotsman Jackie Leven, the…

  • Classic album: Mercury Rev – Deserter’s Songs

    September 24, 2013 - By 

    No-one expected this. Previously, Mercury Rev had been the David Baker fronted psyche-noise outfit that was as likely to pick a fight with the audience than write a work of transcendent beauty. Records like Yerself is Steam and Boces are great fun, full of guitars that are distorted to the point where they cease being guitars, and crazy, stream of consciousness lyrics. But they certainly didn’t position the band as one of the most significant bands of the 90s, and this is exactly what Deserter’s Songs did. A couple of things had to happen in order for this change to take place, though. Baker was out,…

  • Getting Re-Acquainted: Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti – Round & Round

    September 11, 2013 - By 

    A year is a long time in the world of pop music, and it’s hard to believe that an incredible three years has passed since the release of Ariel Pink’s game-changing album Before Today. Before that, he’d been a lo-fi oddball, a seemingly deliberately obscure artist as likely to be responsible for a piece of unlistenable mucking about as he was for a warped slice of vintage FM pop music. Before Today changed all that, and ‘Round & Round’ was the moment when his peculiar genius asserted itself. Over a bed of hazy Hall & Oates-esque synths, Pink and the rest…

  • Death Of The Naturalist: Seamus Heaney (1939-2013)

    August 30, 2013 - By 

    How do you write words for the master? Is it possible to pay tribute in language to a man whose legacy is to have captured the very essence of our soul in words? Perhaps not, but for all the words that Seamus Heaney put to paper, it’s a safe bet that over ten times that will be written about him in the years to come. The Castledawson born poet has been hailed as the greatest Irish poet since William Butler Yeats, an iconic figure, sitting comfortably in a pantheon of great Irish voices alongside Beckett, Joyce, Behan, Shaw, Wilde, and…

  • REM: Maps and Legends – A Simple Case of Geography

    August 26, 2013 - By 

    The story is a sad one, told many times, the story of their life and trying times. As much as the musical climate of the times, REM are a product of geography, rooted in the landscape and traditions of the American South. In the same way that The Clash will always be intrinsically linked to London, The Doors to Los Angeles, or Joy Division to Manchester, REM could only have crawled from the South. Athens, Georgia is a college town. People come and go, some stay, some don’t. So it was back in 1980 when the four men that made…

  • Gateways To Paradise – How REM Gave Me A Music Collection

    August 19, 2013 - By 

    I was 13, living in Antrim, and it felt like the entire world was very, very far away. But then I would pick up my Walkman, slot in a copy of Fables of the Reconstruction or Out of Time, and find myself in an exotic world, a place of mystery and magic, a place where the kudzu vine spread over everything, and nights were spent by the railway line, watching the trains. To that 13 year old boy, REM were more than a lifeline; they were a life. As the years went by, my love of REM would fluctuate, their 21st century missteps leading…