• Static Vision – What is and Now

    October 31, 2017 - By 

    We have to say – per capita, there’s no other town or city in Ireland producing DIY indie rock at the rate of Limerick. We’ve got Hot Cops in Belfast, Slouch in Dublin, but we can now happily add Static Vision‘s self-released 10-track debut to the likes of Eraser TV,  Cruiser, Anna’s Anchor, oh, and The Rubberbandits, to the city’s list of self-made accolades. Equal parts effervescent and slack, What is and Now is a stab of garage post-punk in the ’80s SST, Wipers-esque vein that could pass for an undiscovered proto-grunge gem from the midwest in 1989 fronted by a time-travelling Will Toledo, and having been…

  • The Sunshine Factory – Cruelest Animal EP

    November 6, 2017 - By 

    Cork, ever Ireland’s unexpected cornerstone of hazy psych, can boast another fine release, with The Sunshine Factory having just announced their debut EP proper, Cruelest Animal, the title track of which was released last year following a string of extremely promising demos and homemade recordings. Firmly establishing their neo-psychedelic chops with slots alongside the likes of KXP, The Orange Kyte, and tour support to psychedelic legends The Telescopes on their most recent Irish jaunt. It comes out on November 30th, accompanied by a hometown launch, through their own independent label, Sunshine Cult Records, and was recorded with Chris Somers at One Chance Out Studios. While Cruelest Animal was recorded a year ago, it seems that a healthy gestation…

  • The Tragedy of Dr Hannigan – Fawkes Ache

    October 27, 2017 - By 

    The vaudevillian, murder balladeering musical theatre of The Tragedy of Dr Hannigan sees the release of its inaugural LP, Fawkes Ache on November 24. Having first reared its curious little head back in July via the swaggering ‘Hey Little Worried One’, the collaboration is the self-proclaimed bastard child project of North Coast chameleonic rock troubadour par excellence Tony Wright and producer & multi-instrumentalist Dead Stevens AKA Deany Darko. The sonic warmth of rock’n’roll fused with the cold, hard truths of the blues, it would, in the hands of anyone else, be just about any grizzled blues-rock album. But, in the same way the genius of Nick Cave’s Grinderman lies in its total & utter…

  • Preview & Festival Mixtape: Le Guess Who? 2017

    October 25, 2017 - By 

    Laying comfortably in the shadow of Amsterdam is the chilled-out university town of Utrecht, where the red light district is gladly a distant memory, and typically Dutch architecture and culture are in great supply. While this particularly from of citywide festival can be tough to pull off, Le Guess Who? has developed and diversified every year, offering something for everyone. A holiday-planner’s dream, it boasts the artistic ambition with none of the associated pretentiousness. Many of the performances take place in the impressive TivoliVredenburg or multitude of other venues within walking distance. Most music starts after 5pm, offering the chance to visit the Rietveld Schröder House, tour the…

  • Half Forward Line – The Back of Mass

    October 18, 2017 - By 

    Power-pop act Half Forward Line are a Galway-based trio of Irish garage rock relative luminaries, spearheaded by the self-deprecative lyrical mastery of So Cow‘s Brian Kelly. Their debut album, The Back of Mass, comes out on October 27. The band also features Oh Boland‘s Niall Murphy on bass and Ciaran O’Maoláin on drums – who, incidentally, recorded the album over the course of two days in the lounge of a derelict rural Irish pub. As ever, Kelly delivers eleven tightly-woven slices of life in an increasingly-disconnected world that is modern Ireland, typically banged out in under a half-hour. Dizzying, anxious bubblegum pop and the pristine chord progressions Teenage Fanclub somehow never wrote hyperactively lay the path…

  • Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds and Patti Smith Set For Kilmainham Show

    October 18, 2017 - By 

    In what’s in no uncertain terms the finest outdoor show Ireland will probably see in 2018, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds play their first date on the isle in over a decade at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham on Wednesday, June 6. This follows a select few UK dates that managed to previously avoid us, in support of his latest album, the universally acclaimed Skeleton Tree. It was accompanied with a deeply moving documentary film, One More Time With Feeling, created to promote the album without having to talk about the tragic circumstances surrounding it. That The Bad Sees are on the bill is triumph enough,…

  • Album Premiere: Mark Loughrey – Treppenwitz

    October 13, 2017 - By 

    Translated roughly as ‘staircase wit’, Treppenwitz is a loaded word; an evocation of regret, of longing and succumbing to overanalysis of what could have been said. Best left to the overthinkers among us, the phenomena is the source of much of our great art, writing & comedy, and it’s something Mark Loughrey has mined and left to rumination across a breadth of the characters and worlds explored on his debut album. Whilst rooted in the wistful yearning of Nick Drake or Jeff Buckley and the kind of indie-folk that regularly wins the NI Music Prize, it’s propelled by a fearlessness to follow the creative impulse –…

  • Autumns – Dyslexia Tracks

    October 16, 2017 - By 

    Despite flecks of dust barely touching his debut album, Derry subgenre polymath Christian Donaghey, aka Autumns has announced yet another release on its way, in the form of his new Dyslexia Tracks EP, released on Belfast independent Touch Sensitive Records. Debut album Suffocating Brothers came out on Clan Destine Records at the end of September, with numerous remixes, cameos on specialist labels, and other releases bubbling to the top throughout this year. Autumns has never sounded as assured as he has recently, the creative trajectory approaching levels hinted at over the last few years. With his live show moving into a fully-fledged, techno-industrial piece of performance…

  • ¡NO! – Sediments

    October 9, 2017 - By 

    Dublin experimental project ¡NO! have been steadily drip-feeding us their improvised limited edition CDs and cassettes gradually over the last three years, as well as their regular Concrete Soup nights, which feature live collaborations with internationally-renowned artists. Their tenth release in that time is Sediments, released through Little Gem Records. In the same way the late ’60s & early ’70s led Berliners to fluctuate between their own interpretations of psychedelia, jazz & blues, and making experimental, deeply ambient electronic without pause to consider genre restraints and pay heed primarily to creative impulse -leading to the movement known broadly as krautrock, ¡NO! have paid similar heed to expectation and convention. Although…

  • Malojian – Let Your Weirdness Carry You Home

    October 7, 2017 - By 

    While there’s been no shortage of first-rate albums released on these shores this year, Let Your Weirdness Carry You Home by Malojian is a special kind of triumph. The self-produced follow-up to the Stephen Scullion-fronted threesome’s Steve Albini-produced This Is Nowhere, the album is a masterfully mottled effort, veering between wonderfully wistful folk tales, Motorik rhythms, found sound and a whole gamut of forward-thinking textures and ideas. And featuring the likes of Joey Waronker (Beck, R.E.M., Atoms For Peace, Roger Waters), Gerry Love (Teenage Fanclub), and Jon Thorne of Yorkston, Thorne & Khan, the collaborative backbone of the release runs parallel with Scullion’s open-ended, subtly experimental…