• Hinds – Leave Me Alone

    January 7, 2016 - By 

    Welcome to 2016. It’s a new year with new opportunities to be realised, new landscapes to be traversed and new ideas to be formed. So what better way to kick off this new and exciting twelve month period than with a delightfully fuzzy throwback album that wraps itself up in the sweet sounds of the 1960s. Leave Me Alone, the debut LP from Madrid’s Hinds, is covered head to toe in a profoundly retro lustre, taking a homemade lo-fi jangle rock sound and filtering it through The Velvet Underground. While the weight of the influences can be overbearing, it is…

  • Sea Pinks – Soft Days

    December 22, 2015 - By 

    With five albums in little over five years, Neil Brogan’s work ethic is admirable. And that’s just with Sea Pinks – add to that the albums and EPs he drummed on with Girls Names before his 2013 departure, an excellent recent EP with post-punk quartet Cruising and a low key solo EP as Winterlude early this year and you wonder where he finds the time. With more and more small bands operating part-time in today’s unsteady music business, longer gaps between releases are increasingly common, but the release of Dreaming Tracks in late 2014 still feels like only yesterday, and…

  • TUSKS – Embers

    December 4, 2015 - By 

    2015 has almost reached its midnight, and filthy, down-tuned rock n’ roll bands are sold in packs of six.  The last five years have been particularly fertile for all things loud, heavy, and based firmly in the blues, and the excitement that would once volleyball around a new act has started to wane and sag. The summer of sludge is over. It is heartening, then, when a group self-identifying as heavy fuzz rock come around to remind you that earth-shuddering grooves are not seasonal, but all-year round. TUSKS from Belfast are one such group. Robbing the swampy casket of the late…

  • The Mad Dalton – Little Belfry EP

    December 2, 2015 - By 

    From the outset, one of the elements of The Mad Dalton’s Little Belfry EP that stands out is its ability to conjure a sense of location. With its lumbering, laboured melodies and guttural sadness, the record constantly evokes images of this kind of ‘Last Chance Saloon’ in the American midwest. A darkness at the edge of town where the shallow husks of self-proclaimed saviours keep knocking back glass after glass before the sun creeps over the horizon to remind them that time is endlessly creeping forward and that the fire water won’t burn away what they’ve done. Their stories are…

  • Wizards of Firetop Mountain – Wizards of Firetop Mountain

    December 1, 2015 - By 

    Having been a staple part of the Irish rock food pyramid for many years, gigging religiously and opening up for titans such as Boris, Sleep, and Red Fang, to name but a few, when Wizards of Firetop Mountain announced their debut LP would finally materialize this November, many would be slapping their knees and roaring “it’s about time!” The band have well proven their mettle over the last four years on the back of a demo, double-sided single, a popular Youtube video, and of course, their rise to furniture-level recurrence in music venues all around the country.  With many of…

  • Shye Ben Tzur, Jonny Greenwood & The Rajasthan Express – Junun

    November 30, 2015 - By 

    Those coming to this album as the newest project by Jonny Greenwood have been misled. He is on this album, and seems to play a vital role, but it is not his album. It has been a subtle but consistent insinuation that Junun is largely the work of the composer and Radiohead member in collaboration with a few other musicians. Clearly Greenwood’s following has been exploited to try and trump some interest into a project that may have otherwise gone unnoticed but the result may be the actual alienation of fans who would have found this album on their own…

  • King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard – Paper Maché Dream Balloon

    November 11, 2015 - By 

    Their long-winded name gives the distinct impression King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard are some whacked-out middle-aged men playing 80’s progressive rock, talking about spirituality and shit.  And on previous albums they have leaned in that direction, with sustained improvised grooves, but it has always been more in line with repetitive psych rock rhythms, than drawn out introspective jams.  On last album Quarters! there were majestically sprawling tracks, four of them to be precise, lasting 10 minutes and 10 seconds each.  They used wizardry of Gandalf proportions to instil magic in songs of that length, intricate musical patterns were weaved…

  • Floating Points – Elaeina

    November 6, 2015 - By 

    A couple of years ago, a friend dragged me to see Sam Shepherd (AKA Floating Points) DJ in a relatively small venue that normally hosted jazz and blues bands. There was my first clue. At the time, my knowledge and appreciation of “dance music” was speculative at best, if not completely grounded on naivety. I had only the most basic idea of what a DJ actually did, let alone having any notion as to what separated a good DJ set from a good one. My club experiences to that point had been based purely within the realm of four to…

  • Cheatahs – Mythologies

    November 9, 2015 - By 

    Mythologies is an appropriate name, with the London-formed Americo-Germanic-Canadian quartet Cheatahs once more harking back to subgenre worship of their indie rock, psych, Krautrock and, most prominently, shoegaze forefathers. Not even two years removed from the last record, things are getting more ethereal, with the emphasis on the psych and Krautrock, drastically reducing their tendency towards the more straightforward rockers. Mythologies’ level of gratification, as opposed to the instantaneity of their eponymous 2014 debut, comes in – appropriately enough – gushing waves. A lush production with a greater grasp on dynamics, it’s a record as much about textures as songs, even moreso than…

  • The Chills – Silver Bullets

    November 3, 2015 - By 

    When it comes to The Chills‘ comeback, a great many folks have been running with the return-from-the-wilderness narrative. Not surprising considering it has been 18 years since their last album proper, 1996’s lackluster ‘Sunburnt’, and the subsequent publicity fade-out. One can imagine, however, that not for one second did Martin Phillipps stop running through melodies in his head. You can also imagine that he wasn’t going to launch back into it until he was good and ready. And so Silver Bullets, the result of a recent, joyously-consistent flurry of activity, suggests there’s a whole lot to be said for taking…