• The Gloaming – 2

    March 3, 2016 - By 

    We’re fast approaching the centenary of the one of the most significant events of contemporary Irish history, but we all know that with all the ceremony and pomp comes memorials for a handful of inflated personalities and footnotes for the rest. What if we dropped the politicism and the commemoration of a failed rebellion and instead focused on one of the key tenets behind the act: culture. So many of the key figures were artists, writers and poets, striving to tell the tales of the land in their native tongue and yet we’ve opted to sideline that part of the…

  • Ciara O’Neill – The Ebony Trail

    March 1, 2016 - By 

    The modern folk music scene is all too often seen as the playground of minimal imagination. In recent years it has divided opinion more than most and rightfully so, suffering as it does from sub-par input with lazy, introspective lyrics and generic instrumentation. Such is the dilution of the genre, it takes something special to stand out and demand attention. Ciara O’Neill’s album, The Ebony Trail is a largely sparkling piece of work with inventive themes, ideas and directions yet it is also an album which occasionally fails to match its own high standards. Ciara takes a worn out trope and twists it into something…

  • T-Woc – Jetstar II

    February 26, 2016 - By 

    You’d be forgiven for considering a new T-woc release to be cause for celebration. It’s not that they’re few and far between (well, maybe a bit), it’s because they’ve historically been amalgamations of a few releases rolled in to one well-contained, shimmering, sonic entity. A patchwork of styles, energies, paces and sounds are sewn together to meet the creative vision of Mick T-Woc Donohoe – the Irish Mad Professor-esque engineer behind the sound desk, cutting and pasting, layering and editing until each track becomes a juxtapositional segue to the next. As mad-cap as this approach may have played out on previous releases (see 2011’s Jetstar),…

  • Handsome Eric/Maxamillian Raxatrillion – Split EP

    February 25, 2016 - By 

    Dublin’s lo-fi wonder Handsome Eric returns with a split and brings with him the upstart from the American Maxamillion Raxatrillion. Handsome Eric brings the melancholy we’ve come to expect from him as he recounts the past year of his life. Every song is short and to the point with Stephen O’Dowd wasting no time in baring his soul and getting straight to the hook in each song. Opener ‘save yrself, kill me quickly’ is a break-up song that captures the awkwardness of feeling glad that you haven’t been strung along but also pissed off that someone can’t see how great you are. All tinny guitars, crashing cymbals and…

  • Daithi – Tribes EP

    February 25, 2016 - By 

    With each passing release in the past couple of years, Galway based electronic producer Daithi has showcased a gradual but very definite increase in competency, confidence and determination in the music he is making; overtly melodic and bubbly electronica that has never failed at being colourful. The fault with his releases up to this point however always seemed to lie in his reliance on letting the equipment claim almost total ownership of the music. While the tracks were always evidently loaded with talent and careful construction, there was often too much of a feeling that the artist was clamouring for…

  • Wolfmother – Victorious

    February 22, 2016 - By 

    Does anyone remember how Wolfmother was tipped to be the “saviour of rock n roll” about ten years ago? How they were supposed to recapture the debauchery and majesty of the halcyon days of Tony Iommi, Jimmy Page and Angus Young and take rock music back from chic indie kids. While their self-titled debut was an enjoyable romp with real barnstormers on display, by the time their follow-up rolled around the band had all but lost their momentum and stardom. You can point to a few reasons for this: loss of two-thirds of the band in between the first and…

  • Choir of Young Believers – Grasque

    February 19, 2016 - By 

    There is a deep chill at the heart of the new Choir of Young Believers record, Grasque. Falling into that same niche as John Grant or Shearwater, the group has opted to set aside their more orchestra and folkier affectations in exchange for a more detached, electronic sound. Every human element, bar the vocals, is toned down to the point of non-existence. Strings are swapped out for synths or modulated and warped into something mechanical. When the emotion finally arrives in the form of Jannis Noya Makrigiannis’s voice it’s muted and confined yet yearning like less falsetto Jonsí.  Atmospherically, it seems…

  • No Monster Club – I Feel Magic

    February 19, 2016 - By 

    Magic conjures up images of David Copperfield making the Statue of Liberty disappear, David Blaine looking off-his-face with an eye drawn on his palm and saying ‘Shazam’ into a GMTV camera or even an uncle asking you to pick a card, any card, from a messily shuffled deck. In Ireland ‘I feel magic’ is a way of saying that we’re doing brilliantly. That we’re absolutely flying. On top of our game. Although there seems to be more than a hint of irony in that title here on Bobby Aherne’s twelfth release under the No Monster Club banner. He maintains the nursery rhyme-esque beats but gone are the…

  • Mats Gustafsson – Piano Mating

    February 18, 2016 - By 

    Mats Gustafsson is a sax player who has been recording since the 1980s, but for this strange release on Blue Tapes and X-Ray Records, he’s travelling a different path. Tasked by the label’s head with making music using an instrument he’d never recorded with before, he opted for the the Dubreq Pianomate. This is an obscure machine that acts as a kind of keyboard-less synth, generally used with a piano. In Gustafsson’s case, however, he turned the machine on itself, creating sounds that are shrill, calming, enraging, all dragged out in two lengthy sides of grinding drone. Gustafsson is known…

  • Animal Collective – Painting With

    February 17, 2016 - By 

    Baltimore’s Animal Collective have spent the best part of two decades attempting to give experimental pop a good name, with mixed results: after scoring a direct hit with 2009’s critical high water mark Merriweather Post Pavilion, the hazy experimentation of 2012’s follow up Centipede Hz alienated many of their new followers, and their trend of swaying between catchy weirdness and self-indulgent noodling has been a feature throughout their discography. As a result, the news that 2016 would bring the first Animal Collective album in four years was met with as much apprehension as anticipation: for a band that on average released an album a…