• Kerrang! Tour 2016: Sum 41, Frank Carter, Roam & Biters @ The Academy, Dublin

    February 15, 2016 - By 

    What’s probably most striking about tonight’s annual Kerrang! tour performance is the absence of side fringes and panda bear eyeliner. While outside there are a plethora of young folks trying to convince the bouncer that their older sibling’s ID is their own, the crowd inside the venue seems to be within their early to late 20s. This is the Kerrang! tour; the purest distillation of angsty misunderstood youth that a €3.50 magazine can offer. So why is the crowd from Animal Collective or TV On The Radio here? Does the long awaited return of pop-punk legends Sum 41 really inspire…

  • Sunflower Bean – Human Ceremony

    February 8, 2016 - By 

    One of the inherent issues of being part of the hype machine is that your teething pains stand a good chance of destroying  you. If you don’t come out of gestation period fully formed and with the next OK Computer neatly tucked into your back pocket then it’s back to the “2PM slot on the smallest stage” ghetto for you. Brooklyn’s Sunflower Bean, hotly tipped for indie rock stardom for the last two years, are victims of their own hype. Their debut LP, Human Ceremony, is a record borne of that expectation that struggles to find it’s own feet. Clear…

  • Shearwater – Jet Plane and Oxbow

    January 29, 2016 - By 

    It’s been a long time since U2 really conjured anything other than annoyance. It’s been nearly two decades since All That You Can’t Leave Behind rekindled some of their initial spark and the group have spent the better part of that time grandstanding, bungling misjudged album launches and releasing music that limps into obscurity months after release. So with the old vanguard falling by the wayside, it’s high time that somebody took up the position and started leading the charge. Shearwater, the brainchild of multi instrumentalist and lead vocalist Jonathan Meiburg, have spent the guts of the last decade finely…

  • 16 For ’16: Shrug Life

    January 22, 2016 - By 

    Bursting into existence in mid 2015, Dublin indie rock trio Shrug Life are the latest Irish act in our 16 For ’16 feature. Convinced they’re set to go at least one better over the next few months, TTA’s Will Murphy is certainly a fan. Photo by Abi Denniston Shrug Life have done something unquestionably right: their choice of moniker. It’s one of those annoyed-at-yourself-for-not-creating kind of names that’s memorable and neatly summarizes what the band does well. On their excellent 2015 EP, The Grand Stretch, the trio offered four delightful nuggets of frenetic, pop rock imbued with profound sense of ennui.…

  • Gascan Ruckus – Narrow Defeats and Bitter Victories

    January 18, 2016 - By 

    Armagh’s Gascan Ruckus are long overdue their time in the sun having spent the better part of a decade honing their skills and carving out their place in the scene. Operating in the same range as Fighting With Wire, Twin Atlantic or Dinosaur Pile-Up and a live show that beggars belief, the group has long been teetering on the brink of mainstream acceptance. With their debut album, Narrow Defeats and Bitter Victories, they’re primed and ready to be pushed into the spotlight. Among the record’s stronger cuts are songs such as the PigsAsPeople inspired ‘Goodbye’ or the mammoth riff of…

  • Playlist: David Bowie (1947-2016)

    January 11, 2016 - By 

    David Bowie died on Monday, 11 January 2016, two days after his sixty-ninth birthday, after an eighteen month battle with cancer. He is survived by his wife of 23 years, Iman, and two children, Duncan Jones and Alexandria Zahra Jones. He leaves behind what is undoubtedly one of most prolific, exciting and genuinely inspiring legacies in musical history. How do you write about David Bowie? In the end what is to be said that hasn’t already been said in the past five and half decades. Do you talk about his string of albums between 1970 and 1981 that is, and…

  • David Bowie – Blackstar

    January 8, 2016 - By 

    If David Bowie’s The Next Day, overall an excellent record, had a killing flaw it would be a lack of experimentation and ambition. Bowie has always been regarded as a frontiersman, working on the fringes of the avant garde and reinterpreting it for the masses without simplifying it. His career has been driven by the seemingly endless drive towards the future and the new, which lent The Next Day an unfortunate overtone. Its fourteen tracks were steeped in Bowie mythology, each one acting almost as a summation of a specific part of the man’s storied career. It felt like a…

  • Hinds – Leave Me Alone

    January 7, 2016 - By 

    Welcome to 2016. It’s a new year with new opportunities to be realised, new landscapes to be traversed and new ideas to be formed. So what better way to kick off this new and exciting twelve month period than with a delightfully fuzzy throwback album that wraps itself up in the sweet sounds of the 1960s. Leave Me Alone, the debut LP from Madrid’s Hinds, is covered head to toe in a profoundly retro lustre, taking a homemade lo-fi jangle rock sound and filtering it through The Velvet Underground. While the weight of the influences can be overbearing, it is…

  • Inbound: Bagels

    January 5, 2016 - By 

    Dublin’s Bagels have got no time to waste. Having spent the guts of half a decade honing their craft, the group are ready to make 2016 their year. Having recently released their first single, The Cast of Cheers inflected ‘To An End’, we had wee sit down with the band’s own Adam Redmond to talk about influences, the trappings of youth and the group’s curious choice of name. Words by Will Murphy. How long has it been since your first started playing together? It’s been the best part of five years now. Jaysus, aren’t we old. We started when we…

  • End of Year: Best Films of 2015

    December 25, 2015 - By 

    Reflecting on the last twelve months, it is really inspiring to see the calibre of films which were released in 2015. There were duds and failures, of course, but there was much good that even this expanded list of the 25 best pictures has a few glaring omissions. Any year where the visual delights of A Girl Walks Home Alone At Midnight, the frank honesty of Diary of a Teenage Girl or humanizing power of Montage of Heck and Amy are not the best in show then it is a damn fine year. We’ve seen some of the best science fiction over…