• 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…

  • Girls Names – Stains on Silence

    June 26, 2018 - By 

    The fourth Girls Names full length has been a long time coming. A little under three years isn’t such a big gap between albums these days in an increasingly part-time industry, but recording updates were coming thick and fast from the Belfast band some time ago before seeming to dry up. As it turns out, an initial mix of the album was finished long ago before being shelved for 6 months and then ultimately aborted. The band then began reworking the material, taking it apart and rebuilding it with new edits and recordings. This drawn out process, as well as…

  • Melody’s Echo Chamber – Bon Voyage

    June 25, 2018 - By 

    Melody Prochet delivers her sophomore record, Bon Voyage, after a lengthy six period, refueling her psychedelic-pop ensemble Melody’s Echo Chamber. It follows a decent debut that made somewhat of an impression among critics and fans. For Melody’s Echo Chamber’s  self-titled debut, Prochet had enlisted her former-partner and Tame Impala frontman, Kevin Parker to build a wall of psychedelic sounds. On that release, the Australian held both production and co-writing credits and his distinct style is unmissable throughout that album, particularly on ‘I Follow You’, ‘Crystallized’ and ‘Bisou Magique’ and instrumentally it all sounded as though it could have featured on…

  • Lily Allen – No Shame

    June 25, 2018 - By 

    No Shame is Lily Allen’s most comprehensive album to date. What may at first, to naysayers, appear like a feeble attempt at bringing the charm of the noughties pop into the modern world, soon veers into a dark journey through Allen’s very real and personal struggles the moment you scratch the surface. The honesty portrayed in this album is far from alarming and it’s not Allen’s intention to play up to shock factor or trigger any radical change in the ethics of relationships. Instead, Lily Allen shares these jarring truths with us without shame or fear, giving herself to the…

  • Snowpoet – Thought You Knew

    June 22, 2018 - By 

    Two years on from its well-received eponymous debut on Two Rivers Records, Snowpoet returns with a sumptuous offering of sweet melodies, meditative textures and poetic lyricism. Snowpoet is now part of Dave Stapleton’s Edition Records – one of the UK’s most progressive labels, and one with for big ears for some of the most adventurous music currently produced in Europe. Essentially the song-writing vehicle for vocalist Lauren Kinsella and bassist Chris Hyson, Snowpoet has played in everything from a duo to a quintet setting, though here the duo is joined by core Snowpoet collaborators Josh Arcoleo on tenor saxophone, Nick…

  • 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…

  • Dott – Heart Swell

    June 19, 2018 - By 

    Mere happenstance it may be, but in the context of a certain momentous referendum victory and one of the longest stretches of good weather in Irish history, the timing of Dott’s balmy and conspicuously political release feels oddly significant. Heart Swell  bulges at the seams with driving garage rock riffs and rumbling basslines while sundrenched melodies and buoyant harmonies sugar the album’s impassioned politics without sacrificing an ounce of the band’s defiant verve. The surf pop inflected opener ‘Bleached Blonde’, announces itself with Laura Finnegan’s throbbing bass and frontwoman Anna McCarthy’s vocals echoing the ebb and flow of the tide,…

  • Ben Howard – Noonday Dream

    June 18, 2018 - By 

    Unusual though it may seem, Ben Howard has never been a predictable artist. The Devon born singer-songwriter first emerged onto the scene in 2011 with the timely folk-pop LP Every Kingdom, followed up three years later with I Forgot Where We Were which sounded more like James Blake than Ed Sheeran. Subsequently, after cursing some of his gig attendees out of it in Norwich and declaring “I couldn’t give a fuck” in response to a journalist who claimed Howard might fall into “the New Boring” music scene, Howard seemed to disappear off into the shadows and it was unclear when…

  • Ash – Islands

    June 14, 2018 - By 

    Ash’s seventh studio album Islands lets you listen once again to the corny soundtrack to your summer love affair. Wheeler scrapes towards the very bottom of the barrel in one final bid to transform that washing machine shift at a Gaeltacht Céilí into the idealised romanticised summer of sun, beach and surfing. Islands features a myriad of sun-soaked riffs, images of crisp, white beaches for miles and just about everything else you’d expect from an Ash album. Only this time, the summer lovin’ fallacy just isn’t working its charm the way it used to as the album falls just short…

  • Hilary Woods – Colt

    June 13, 2018 - By 

    The word colt is used to in reference to either a male foal or a young untried person. Universally, horses symbolise a spirited force and freedom without restraint. In that defiance, a passionate desire also pervades. Both The Rolling Stones and U2 sang about wild horses; Keith Richards was inspired to write a lullaby for his toddler to articulate the strain of having to leave him to tour the world. Bono pined for a “dangerous” but exhilarating woman on Achtung Baby’s ‘Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses’. On her gorgeously soothing debut Colt, Hilary Woods marries these feelings of varied…