• EP Premiere: Ghost Office – Desire Lines

    April 6, 2018 - By 

    Almost certainly Belfast’s most promising post-punk prospect, Ghost Office, have just made available their second EP, Desire Lines. With new bassist Carl Small in tow and new material to be unveiled in coming months showing further songwriting spark, Desire Lines is just the beginning of what will be Ghost Office’s defining year so far. With each cut an under 3 minute short burst of undistilled creative flourish, throbbing bass & jagged Fender attack the band – both live and on record – bursts with vitality, while the confluence of musical & literary influences conjure acts like Parquet Courts and Protomartr‘s knowing self-loathing, lent broader purview with vocals from former-bassist MK Maguire, and…

  • Tethers – Skinwalker

    April 4, 2018 - By 

    Lisburn-based post-hardcore outfit Tethers are set to release their debut EP Skinwalker via Swallow Song Records. While retaining the kind of pop inclination that made Biffy Clyro household names, the trio channel Derry’s Jetplane Landing, and mathier elements of the post-hardcore sound – the likes of which made Faraquet such an incredibly instinctive, yet compositionally complex outfit. Recorded by Chris Ryan, the EP gets its title from a term in Navajo folklore that denotes a shape-shifting witch, which they’re re-envisioning as ‘a future slang for artificially-enhanced humanoids’, an aspect of the band’s outlook, which – in a way that would please Philip K Dick, Neil Gaiman or Warren Ellis…

  • Lunch Machine – Alt Facts

    April 3, 2018 - By 

    Letterkenny garage indie rock trio Lunch Machine have just released their debut EP, the five track Alt Facts, produced by Fugue State & Tuath. The band is led by Jude Barriscale, whose laconic delivery recalls earlier (and best) Courtney Barnett, Barriscale’s knack for injecting personal, universal truths with a detached sincerity elevates what could be slack meanderings into idiosyncratically-woven pieces, that veer from frustration at rural isolation, political outrage and, in the evocatively smoky, poignant-in-the-AM closer ‘Obi Wan for the Road’, love and loss. Take, for example, the 7> minute highlight ‘Yellow Door’, which is, in her own words “about me being humbled by my past mistakes and about how…

  • Making It Rain: A Chat with O Emperor

    March 30, 2018 - By 

    The trajectory of O Emperor is rooted in familiar origins. They did what schoolmates do and formed a band. That band were picked up by Universal shortly after, landing them a #6 in the Irish album charts. They took their time and constructed a studio for the follow-up. here’s a point where the Radioheads & Beatles’ of this world effortlessly toe the line between artistic and commercial success, and its often the dependence and freedom of a studio itself to bring out the alchemy present in the band. Those moments where everything seems to magically synergise at once can’t be replicated…

  • Premiere: Elaine Malone – No Blood

    March 30, 2018 - By 

    Musically recalling some of Tim Buckley’s airy jazz inclinations, and the gently percussive Weltschmerz of Nick Drake, Elaine Malone‘s new single cranks tension between folk music as a vehicle for aural pleasure and folk music as a vessel for crushingly human storytelling. It’s fitting then, that this Good Friday marks the release of the vital ‘No Blood’. That ‘No Blood’ was written & recorded long before Wednesday’s Laganside Court verdict, and the fact its trenchancy of its sentiment is in no danger of fading any time in the near future is a testament to our need to collectively address & confront these issues that pervade every level…

  • Girls Names – Stains on Silence

    March 26, 2018 - By 

    It stands to reason that many vital albums come critically close to never being made. The eight-track upshot of doubt, upheaval and financial strain, Stains on Silence by Girls Names is one such release. Following 2015’s Arms Around a Vision, and the parting of drummer Gib Cassidy just over a year later, the Belfast band suddenly found themselves facing down a looming void. “There was a finished – and then aborted – mix of the album, which was shelved for six months,” reveals Girls Names frontman Cathal Cully. “We then took a break from all music and went back to full-time work. We chilled…

  • Video Premiere: Post-Punk Podge & The Technohippies – Mass Deception

    March 23, 2018 - By 

    As we’ve said plenty of times already, Limerick’s DIY scene is currently riding on the crest of a creative wave, and today, we’re delighted to deliver the latest evidence, with Post-Punk Podge & The Technohippies. As they crow flies, you could call them Munster’s Sleaford Mods – seriously, check them out live – as Podge spits post-Tiger quotidian frustration of both systematic and internal. It’s probably their Biggest Tune to date – a genuine call-to-arms with some elements of the Fall’s brief dalliances with mainstream success – produced by Cruiser’s Chris Quigley, with a fully-formed video directed & edited by Richard Holland. “Mass deception and corruption have become endemic in…

  • Doomed & Stoned in Ireland

    March 14, 2018 - By 

    Since its inception, international metal blog Doomed & Stoned has went to great lengths to appraise and give voice to the heft-inclined communities across time and space throughout its sprawling back catalogue of compilations, from obvious hotspots like Portland, to 70s proto-doom, to current day Asia. Incredibly, they’re all available on Bandcamp, on a name-your-price basis. Being one of our most fertile and certainly overlooked creative grounds, it’s vindicating then, that no less than 24 tracks from all corners of Ireland’s doom, stoner & sludge scene comprise Doomed & Stoned In Ireland, the latest in the series. Outright sludge-doom exports like Nomadic Rituals and Slomatics, who’ve played stoner Mecca –  Roadburn Festival – and beyond, are represented alongside…

  • Four Irish Acts set to play London St. Patrick’s Day Show

    March 14, 2018 - By 

    In the kind of lineup we’d kill for back home, London is lucky enough to bear witness to a St. Patrick’s Day celebration that we’d hold our watch to, packed with fiercely singular hibernophiles & noteable outsiders. It’s the first edition of the national stereotype-subverting Cushty Gamut, and takes place at New River Studios, Ground Floor Unit E on the Eade Road. Five live acts perform in the main venue, comprising four of our own who’ve made the trip across the pond. They are: Cork cosmische, drone voyagers Percolator – who released our Irish album of the 2017, Sestra. Dublin noise rock quartet Hands Up Who Wants To Die, who’ve returned recently with new frontman Rory O’Brien…

  • Video Premiere: Cruiser – Gram

    March 15, 2018 - By 

    We’ve featured a few videos from Limerick’s burgeoning DIY scene this year – notably, Eraser TV & Casavettes – that channel a very certain type of disaffection and sense of growing pains.We’re not sure whether the trend comes from pervading mood in Limerick or that connection when a music scene pulls itself together to embrace each other for the greater good, but adding to that increasingly colossal pile is discordant indie rock outfit Cruiser, with their latest single, ‘Gram’ – which is somehow not even the only wistfully uplifting 9-minute single to emerge from the city in the last half-year. The video – directed by Stephen Savage…