• Exploding Eyes – Exploding Eyes

    January 16, 2017 - By 

    With an eye cast to longer days, warmer weather, and the promise of a new year, the self-titled debut LP from Dublin’s gritty blues- rock trio Exploding Eyes greets you with a welcoming invitation to something a little less serious and a lot more fun. The album is scattered with callbacks to some of the more classic and legendary rock outfits from the golden age of blues pop culture, such as Cream, Janis Joplin, and even some Lynyrd Skynyrd in some of their softer tracks. Opening up the album in stellar form is the single ‘We Need Love’ – a track…

  • Robocobra Quartet – Music for all Occasions

    November 15, 2016 - By 

    Take some seedy post-punk jazzy brass, heavy anchored basslines, sporadic nuanced drum fills, and the expressive vocal stylings of the beat generation’s slam poets and you’re left with a vaguely accurate depiction of Belfast’s own Robocobra Quartet. Music for all Occasions is a fascinatingly fierce attack on the Irish music scene. The nine track collection is refreshingly ambitious and entirely bold throughout, with wandering variations of song length, style, and approach. It’s a very complete record designed to be listened to and appreciated from beginning to end. Lead single ‘Correct’ opens the record and immediately sets the tone for everything…

  • So Long, Leonard Cohen

    November 11, 2016 - By 

    To suggest that the life of Leonard Cohen was anything short of remarkable would be an understatement by anyone’s standards. Poet, songwriter, accidental fashionista, Buddhist monk, wheeler and dealer, lover and friend, forever a gentleman, and never far from the sharpened edges of comedic wit, the man lived as great men do – with a profound love for the beautiful things, an acceptance of the inevitable, and an enthusiasm to share it all with a world in desperate need of something with which to relate. Leonard Cohen has been known as the songwriter’s songwriter since his debut release Songs of…

  • Leonard Cohen – You Want It Darker

    October 26, 2016 - By 

    After 82 years of experience, a hundred thousand cigarettes later, and more than a few near-perfect words of love, life, death, and every notable human occurrence between, Leonard Cohen has returned with You Want it Darker – the 14th studio album from the “Godfather of Gloom”. Regardless of the album’s suggestively bleak title and the monicker the poet and author established for himself back in ‘71 with his controversially downbeat yet critically acclaimed album Songs of Love and Hate, this record as a whole is actually more sombre and settled. It sounds entirely certain of itself. The songs are notably sparse in their…