• Talos – Wild Alee

    April 26, 2017 - By 

    In Wild Alee, Cork’s Eoin French, AKA Talos, has created a long player of considerable depth and uncomplicated beauty. A debut-proper, the record follows on from a series of releases that only delicately hinted at the kind of multi-tonal, meticulously constructed arrangements that French, and currently his extended Talos outfit, have now harnessed in all of their charming sheen. A result indebted, no doubt, to both the fact that Wild Alee was partly written and conceived of in Reykjavik with Valgeir Sigurðsson (Sigur Rós; Bjork), as well as in Ireland under the guidance / magic touch of Ross Dowling. From the off, it’s…

  • This Other Kingdom – Rêveur

    April 24, 2017 - By 

    It’s been two years since the release of This Other Kingdom’s debut album, Telescopic. The album slotted neatly into the top 10 in both the iTunes Irish chart and earned them a reputation among the best of Ireland’s psychedelic music scene. As such, the bar was already set quite high for their 2017 follow-up, Rêveur. A sudden, invasive intro immediately sheds all and any fears of Telescopic‘s success begin merely a case of luck. ‘Common Colours//Common Sounds’ is an aggressive lament for rebellion against conformity (“This is the system to stop you from thinking”). It pulls listeners from one realm to…

  • Count Vaseline – Cascade

    April 21, 2017 - By 

    One of the more surprisingly common risky moves in music is trying to ape the Beatles. It’s a losing battle from the get-go. No matter how shit hot you think you are, you’ll never be the celestial beings known as the fab three. You could be Ringo though. With such a high risk of failure and the rewards amounting to damning praise, why bother? The correct reason is that you can use their framework to ease the listener into the right mindset. This is what Count Vaseline has done to great effect on his latest LP, Cascade. The title track…

  • Kendrick Lamar – DAMN.

    April 20, 2017 - By 

    Kendrick Lamar has a lot resting on DAMN. He is, of course, in a “good place” artistically at the moment, to say the least: he’s widely considered the greatest rapper in the game at the minute, off the back of two instant-classic albums and frequently stunning guest verses across various musical landscapes (appearing on songs from jazz bassist Thundercat, mega-producer DJ Khaled and pop-rock also-rans Maroon 5 in the past year). 2015’s To Pimp A Butterfly‘s seismic impact created fans in David Bowie and Barack Obama and enemies in the right-wing press, and found it’s single ‘Alright’ being adopted at Black Lives…

  • Lost Avenue – Best Friends

    April 20, 2017 - By 

    Derry based punk trio Lost Avenue recently unveiled their new EP Best Friends, the latest in a series of small releases that punch well above everything they’ve done before. Something about the release threatens to get lost within itself, however, thrashing violently towards an uncertain conclusion. When listening to Best Friends, it’s hard not to get the impression that the band are aiming for something that is certainly achievable, but they’ve overcooked it, using sharp conversions and sudden alterations to an unnecessarily degree. This is likely due to some combination of self-doubt and the need to appear unique in an industry where…

  • Fionn Regan – The Meetings of the Waters

    April 14, 2017 - By 

    Capturing an image that denotes a changing phase in one’s life and making that image resonate can be a laboured and often trite task for an artist. An example: about five years ago at a Bon Iver show in what was then the O2 Arena in Dublin, Justin Vernon made a passing remark about how life’s cyclical nature can be observed in the beginnings and endings of seemingly insignificant things – in his case, tubes of toothpaste. It was a nice thought, but one that perhaps felt too individualised to produce anything more than a shrug of vague acknowledgement from…

  • Happyness – Write In

    April 12, 2017 - By 

    Let us begin with a simple, easy to follow tip. It is seldom a good idea to listen to people who take their grammatical cues from Will Smith Oscar Bait. Might seem like a wise move at first, but therein lies danger. Happyness are a decent old fashioned, fuzzed out indie band, in the American sense of the genre; their style being essentially comprised of many long, drawn out jams that stretch on into the horizon. Speed and brevity are not any kinds of priority. While this has lent to a variety of dreamy, spaced out cuts in the past…

  • Father John Misty – Pure Comedy

    April 12, 2017 - By 

    Josh Tillman is a multi-faceted character. You have to regard him as such when considering his work because what he does as a musician he does so with an elusive persona, an alter ego. There are many angles to consider when deconstructing his songwriting, which can often make for interesting debate with friends and among critics. He conjures a similar reaction to Marmite in that you either love him or loathe him. Nonetheless, he has managed to dispel the disdain his personality ignites by making his music the central element of his existence and by exercising thought provoking content throughout…

  • Future Islands – The Far Field

    April 10, 2017 - By 

    By 2014, the days of a hard-working band catching their break on late night TV were supposed to be over, at least until Future Islands proved everyone wrong. Clever synth-pop number ‘Seasons (Waiting on You)’ was elevated so much by frontman Samuel T Herring’s performance on David Letterman that they were catapulted onto another level. His hip swaying, chest beating, growling run through the song was almost comically sincere, downright bizarre, and completely captivating. It soon went viral, inspiring GIFs and blog posts aplenty. It even collected prestigious ‘Song of the Year’ gongs from Pitchfork, NME, Spin and others, while…

  • Pharmakon – Contact

    April 7, 2017 - By 

    Noise music mostly operates within the sphere of the modern avant-garde, but can be a deeply alienating experience for many; not only because of its tendency to be anti-everything – structure, melody, basic auditory comprehension – but because of its potential to generate actual discomfort in listeners. Despite this, its compositional strategies can be almost decadent in execution – when Lou Reed wanted to release his 1975 double album Metal Machine Music (mostly impenetrable but considered by many to be a pioneering Noise work), he wanted to release it on RCA’s classical arm, Red Seal. Reed, along with many proponents…