• Menace Beach – Black Rainbow Sound

    September 22, 2018 - By 

    Over the last few years, Leeds has been quietly asserting its place as one of the UK’s most reliable cities for guitar music. Bands like Alt-J, Pulled Apart By Horses and Sky Larkin have consistently been putting out material that can’t help but restore people’s faith in the classic format. Within this scene, one group who’ve been etching out a serious name for themselves is Menace Beach. The punk five-piece have been dropping excellent releases without much fuss over the last six years. Their most recent releases, 2015’s Ratworld and 2017’s Lemon Memory, are excellent examples of what this group…

  • Spiritualized – And Nothing Hurt

    September 13, 2018 - By 

    Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt – Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five Spiritualized’s Jason Pierce should not be with us. After nearly 30 years in the music industry, the man has gone through so many trials and tribulations that it really is a surprise for him to be alive, nevermind kicking. Heroin addiction, suicidal despair and and cancer are tough to manage on their own, but encountering all three in such a short space is dumbfounding. Yet through all this, he’s still managed to produce some truly staggeringly good work. With Spaceman 3, you’ve got The Perfect Prescription and Playing With…

  • Blood Orange – Negro Swan

    August 23, 2018 - By 

    Looking at the decade and a half long career that Dev Hynes AKA Blood Orange, has carved out for himself, there is one word that rings above all others: chameleonic. In that time, the London-born, New York-based polymath has transitioned from noisy, DFA-influenced dance punk to baroque indie pop and then onto masterful R&B with a seemingly effortless pace, adopting each genre and its trappings with such a deft hand that it’s hard to envision him doing anything else. His Lightspeed Champion persona was so convincing that hearing that same mind compose a song like 2016’s ‘Hand’s Up’, a searing…

  • The Ophelias – Almost

    July 29, 2018 - By 

    Very occasionally you hear an album that neatly demonstrates its full mission statement within seconds of starting. The opening number is normally a musician’s calling card, but generally this takes a few minutes to let the audience in on what’s being attempted. There’s a real delight in encountering music that is so self-assured and confident that it’s willing to show all of its cards as soon as the chips are drawn. To The Ophelias credit, they give you a nice ten-second window in which to decide if this is going to be for you. If you think that a high…

  • Body/Head – The Switch

    July 24, 2018 - By 

    “Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting” – Brian Eno, Music For Airports linear notes If you’re a fan of mid 1990s, alternative rock bass players named Kim, then this year has been a real treat. Kim Deal released the wonderful All Nerve with The Breeders and now Kim Gordon, formerly of the parish Sonic Youth, has gifted us her latest broadcast: Body/Head’s The Switch. The group, completed by Bill Nace, are an experimental noise duo whose work is focused on…

  • Nine Inch Nails – Bad Witch

    June 30, 2018 - By 

    Trent Reznor has been throwing shade at practically everybody on this most recent press tour. The Nine Inch Nails frontman has railed against Trump, Kanye and the contemporary state of music. At times, there have been well-formed ideas spoken with a confidence and authority that implies a level of consideration and forethought. At others, it’s amounted to little more than “Old man yells at cloud”. With all this bluster, the release he was promoting got lost in the fold. In fact looking back at this coverage, the most interesting aspect of this current mini-album, Bad Witch, is that it was, in…

  • Angélique Kidjo – Remain In Light

    June 21, 2018 - By 

    To describe Talking Heads’ Remain In Light as one of rock music’s sacred cows would not be unfair. It’s a seminal album for a good reason. Over its eight songs, it manages to capture the best of Brian Eno’s kitchen sink experimentalism, David Byrne’s existential mania, and improbably groovy rhythms. It manages to do all of this while successfully fusing the group’s post-punk roots with a wide array of Afro-Carribean influences to create profound and stridently individual, one of the 1980s greatest idiosyncrasies. So when the Benin-born artist Angélique Kidjo announced her intention to reimagine the album and reclaim it…

  • Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds w/ Patti Smith @ Royal Hospital, Kilmainham

    June 8, 2018 - By 

    In this hyperbolic age, the phrase “gig of the year” gets tossed about far too flippantly. Every experience must be the best as anything less than perfection is worthless. The thing is though, most concerts couldn’t lay claim to that title. But very occasionally, there is a lineup that makes your jaw drop and forces you to question whether or not this could be the one. On 6 June 2018, Kilmainham played host to one of those shows: Patti Smith supporting Nick Cave. Either of these artists could have been the headliner and no one would be disappointed. They each…

  • Robocobra Quartet – Plays Hard To Get

    June 6, 2018 - By 

    Hyperbolic as it is to say, Chris Ryan might well be the most important creative voice in the city of Belfast today. This bespectacled Robocobra Quartet bandleader has been quietly releasing some of the finest broadcasts that this landmass has heard for some years now. Cuts like ’98-01′ from 2014’s Bomber EP and ‘Album of the Year’ from 2016’s groundbreaking Music For All Occasions should be used by the Council as a demonstration of how indispensable and experimental the city’s art scene is. The outfit’s truly idiosyncratic fusion of punk and jazz is the sort of stuff that music fans should be…

  • Arctic Monkeys – Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino

    May 11, 2018 - By 

    Of all the shade that can be thrown against the Arctic Monkeys, you couldn’t say they’ve rested on their laurels. At the peak of their popularity, they pivoted from the comfortable rut of their indie roots into the muddier, murky world of Josh Homme-inspired desert rock. With 2013’s AM, they wholehearted embraced sounds from 1990s R&B and throwback blues. The thing with these genre excursions though is that they’ve always retained a thread of being just four Northern boys chancing their arms. With their latest LP, Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, there’s not a shred of any previous incarnation of…