• The Jimmy Cake – Tough Love

    July 13, 2017 - By 

    Ireland has had no shortage of post-rock bands, but The Jimmy Cake feel a bit like the elder statesmen. On early releases they set themselves apart from their contemporaries with a 10 piece lineup that mixed folk and orchestral instruments like banjo, accordion, brass and woodwind alongside the guitars, a sound they had perfected by the time they put out the lush Spectre & Crown. But on their return from a subsequent seven year gap with 2015’s Master they’d undergone a reinvention, those extraneous instruments all but replaced with stratospheric synths, tracks that could now last half an hour, and…

  • Art Feynman – Blast Off Through The Wicker

    July 12, 2017 - By 

    Carved into the very top of the Reviewer’s Doctrine sits a Maxim: thou shalt never admit thou are not an expert. It’s something we cite at our regular cult meetings which bring together critics of music, exhibitions and sandwiches alike. We like to think it’s our only connection to internet trolls, although some critics will gladly try to prove otherwise. Consider yourself lucky then, that in this introduction not only will I be breaking our highest Maxim, but our second one too, and use the first person. For I. Was. Wrong. Hard to type, but for the most joyous of…

  • Toro Y Moi – Boo Boo

    July 11, 2017 - By 

    Toro Y Moi’s Chaz “Bear” Bundick, having first come to prominence in association with “chillwave” in 2009, doesn’t appear to have taken a rest since. While Boo Boo counts as his fifth album proper under the Toro Y Moi banner, he also also found time for a live album, a mix tape, and several other compilations, side projects and collaborations.The musical polymath’s work to date has also drawn from an array of genres, from R&B to psychedelia through hip-hop and indie pop, seeming equally comfortable creating music using a traditional band setup or sitting in the production chair. Across Boo…

  • Lucy Rose – Something’s Changing

    July 7, 2017 - By 

    Last year, British singer-songwriter Lucy Rose embarked on the trip of a lifetime. In the space of two months she played 33 gigs in eight countries. The challenge set in this case was that the dates were in Latin America, a place where you would be hard pressed to find her music in shops and where her promoters did not believe she could fill a venue. In a move that was deemed crazy by both her label and loved ones, Rose promised her Latin American fans she would bring her music to them if they could book her venues and…

  • Haim – Something To Tell You

    July 7, 2017 - By 

    It’s been a while since we’ve heard from the Haim sisters – Este, Danielle and Alana – and they’ve marked their return with an album that takes the listener on that typical pop journey of love, loss and all the in betweens. Haim rode the waves of hype from their 2012 Forever EP, and 2013’s Days Are Gone for nearly four years by finding their niche in the pop leaning indie rock scene where female harmonies and Fleetwood Mac leaning instrumentals were in demand. With the release of follow-up LP  Something To Tell You, there’s a question mark over whether this formula…

  • Broken Social Scene –  Hug of Thunder

    July 5, 2017 - By 

    From the ambient beginnings of Feel Good Lost to the communal song-craft of You Forgot In People, through the kitchen-sink sheen of the self-titled Broken Social Scene to the stripped-down (by their standards) Forgiveness Rock Record – the Canadian collective have always appeared entirely comfortable in their own skin. Confident enough to pursue other musical projects but still check-in with each other for a new record and tour at regular enough intervals, Hug of Thunder arrives seven years after Forgiveness Rock Record – the band’s longest hiatus to date. It has no right to be this good. The listener is…

  • Nickelback – Feed The Machine

    June 30, 2017 - By 

    This review is the most recent entry in Will Murphy’s 12000 word thesis on Nickelback. He speaks from a place of knowledge, understanding and a begrudged appreciation due to stockholm syndrome. Feed The Machine is Nickelback’s ninth album. Let that sink in. Nine albums. This band has released a full-length LP as many times as 50 Cent has been shot. Given the notoriety surrounding them, it’s hard to fathom how they’ve kept on trucking all these years. The group has become more meme than band at this point. Every joke has been mined and we are all comfortable with the…

  • Lorde – Melodrama

    June 27, 2017 - By 

    Success came to Lorde after her debut album Pure Heroine injected what every youthful spirit needed: A glorious, romanticised, cathartic portrayal of the mundane life that most face at a certain time in their life. At the age of 16 she sang about the superb bland details of life such as taking buses with “the knees pulled in” and “dreams of clean teeth” underneath a blanket of tender beats and adolescence; and from that moment the world was hooked. Lorde makes her sophomore return with Melodrama, literally. The album comes as a thematically packed release, dealing with the ever-expanding house…

  • King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard – Murder of the Universe

    June 23, 2017 - By 

    To describe King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard as prolific would be an understatement. They’re the sort of band who write, record and release 6 EPs, 2 double LPs and 36 singles in the time it takes you to read this sentence. Having already released one full-length in February of this year, they’re evidently proponents of a more is more philosophy. That belief permeates to every part of the outfit. From their roster of members to the songs themselves which oscillate between folk, free form jazz, psychedelia and good old fashioned 1970s prog rock epics. So how does their second…

  • Night Drive – Night Drive

    June 22, 2017 - By 

    There’s nothing quite like an album that manages to fuse the past with the present, and even the future for that matter. Rodney Connell and Brandon Duhon, the Texas-based, future-wave duo better known as Night Drive do just that with their new self-titled, debut album. The pair first met when when the woman they were both dating died in a car crash. Neither knew the other before the accident, but from this inauspicious encounter stemmed something very powerful indeed. Their sound, a time machine of sorts, combines elements of 80s synth-pop with futuristically dynamic instrumentation, while brilliantly remaining both sleek and…