• Tiger Jaws – Charmer

    June 9, 2014 - By 

    It would have been all too easy to write off Tigers Jaw as a forgone conclusion. In March of last year, the Scranton, PA band announced they were going on a hiatus – with three-fifths of the five piece unable to continue to be part of the band. A summer of confusion and assumptions that Tigers Jaw were done forever followed until Run For Cover Records eventually made clear to the world that when Tigers Jaw said “hiatus”, they didn’t actually mean ‘hiatus’ and that we were still going to enjoy the band’s scrappy brand of emo-punk, just now it…

  • Röyksopp & Robyn – Do It Again

    June 5, 2014 - By 

    The coming together of Röyksopp and Robyn on Do It Again is a pretty perfect collaboration that seems like such a natural progression for the two acts. The sound they produce as a unit is quite different from what they create as separate acts. Combined, they have made something altogether new, that could best be described as a melding together of electro, dance and a little pop thrown in for good measure. Röyksopp and Robyn previously worked together in 2009 on the track ‘The Girl with the Robot’, and this five track mini album is just the right length for…

  • Mongol Horde – Mongol Horde

    June 4, 2014 - By 

    Look, Frank Turner’s folk stuff is by and large really enjoyable. It’s nice, well meaning and at times quite poignant, but there does seem to be something missing. With so many songs about love, life and the road; a sojourn to the old fertile hardcore punk grounds which Turner left behind would not go amiss. A blast of 200 bpm noise to cleanse the pallet. With Mongol Horde, the big man seems to have given himself just that. Mongol Horde are a three piece made up of Mr. Turner on vocals, Sleeping Souls keyboardist Matt Nasir on baritone guitar and…

  • We Cut Corners – Think Nothing

    May 23, 2014 - By 

    We Cut Corners debut, Today I Realised I Can Go Home Backwards, was one of the great under-heralded Irish debuts. At just thirty two minutes, it flits almost flippantly between heart-on-sleeve confessional pop melodies full of wonderfully oblique imagery in ‘Go Easy’ and ‘A Pirate’s Life’, and the White Stripes-inspired tuneful thrashings of ‘The Leopard’ and ‘Say Yes To Everything’. The album’s charm fell in its balance: its thoughtful, oblique lyrics, soaring vocals and ability to be scorchingly angry and pointedly self deprecating in the same three minute period. It sounds like it would take four people to play, yet the duo reproduce it perfectly live.…

  • Coldplay – Ghost Stories

    May 23, 2014 - By 

    Setting aside the fact that their sixth studio album coincides particularly poignantly with a very public ‘conscious uncoupling’, from the opening notes you are left in little doubt that Ghost Stories is Coldplay‘s ‘break up’ album. This is an album that is, if you will pardon the pun, haunted by failed relationships. When you are eating ice cream by the pint and stalking the Facebook profile page of the one who broke your heart, this album will certainly provide the appropriate soundtrack. A deeply personal, introspective and at times, self-indulgent record, Ghost Stories comes prepared to offer you music to…

  • Swans – To Be Kind

    May 21, 2014 - By 

    In 2012 something quite extraordinary happened. After reforming his band Swans following a hiatus of over thirteen years, Michael Gira and his select group of musicians released their masterpiece: The Seer. Hailed as their finest work by many, it was a colossal piece of music spanning over two hours, an extended exploration of the unknowable obscurities and mind-numbing repetitions that had become synonymous with the Swans name. But it was much more than that – it was an evolutionary step into uncharted territory for the band, and for contemporary rock music as a whole. In an age where the synthesiser…

  • The Horrors – Luminous

    May 16, 2014 - By 

    It’s safe to say most of us are probably glad The Horrors have, over time, evolved towards the more psychedelic end of the spectrum of nonchalance. Looking back to their 2007 album Strange House, it’s as though they are a completely different band. What we see now is a fully developed group without the trappings of their earlier (one would hope) record-label-enforced Goth gimmickry. Their career is almost a reflection of the transition from one’s adolescence to one’s mid-twenties (or am I projecting?). Strange House was full of blatant attitude, angst, hair-dye and eyeliner; and if you listen carefully, amid…

  • VerseChorusVerse – VerseChorusVerse

    May 8, 2014 - By 

    “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” So reads the opening line from L.P. Hartley’s 1953 novel, The Go-Between. Touching on the innocence of childhood and its loss, family life and more, it’s a classic in excavating the oft smoggy wasteland that is the past. For many artists, however, the most rewarding way of confronting what has come before is to delve, headstrong, into the immediate present; carefully side-stepping the grasp of nostalgia whilst following an inner path. For Tony Wright AKA singer-songwriter VerseChorusVerse, this is something that he has, for the most part, bravely and…

  • Kelis – Food

    May 1, 2014 - By 

    Kelis Rogers has always been somewhat of an enigmatic figurehead for the fringes of popular music. A sonic siren, her brand of off-centre RnB has historically enjoyed success with club-goers, channel hoppers and with those who just enjoy a bloody good hook and the occasional raucous holler or two. ‘I Hate You So Much Right Now,’ for instance, her 1999 vocal assault on a cheating spouse, provided Rogers with an opportunity to change the way RnB was to be perceived – it could be powerful, visceral even, but retain the soulful and jazz-influenced backdrop that many of Rogers’ contemporaries exploited…

  • Elastic Sleep – Leave You E.P.

    April 29, 2014 - By 

    The first thing that slaps you about the face about the debut E.P. from Elastic Sleep, is not the shimmering, foggy beauty they can conjure, hinted at in their dream-pop debut bijou, ‘Anywhere’, but the weight and conviction behind its execution. Cork shoegazers with a serious pedigree gleaned from their time in popgaze supermachine Agitate the Gravel/Terror Pop and synth-poppers Superblondes, the band’s collective experiences, disappointments, and refined vision have crystallised here in the form of six tracks that quickly embody a wide palate of influences, that not so much form the next stage of an ongoing evolution for the…