• Santigold – 99¢

    March 7, 2016 - By 

    Lousy Smarch weather! We’ve got Baltic temperatures, snow and whole host of other Winter wonderland treats that we were supposed to piss off back in February that have opted remain, ratcheting up the March misery. It’s cold and overcast and what we need is some good straightforward fun; fortunately, Philadelphia’s Santigold has kindly provided her new album, 99¢, to help get us through this tough time. The album offers up twelve slices of delightful poppy, reggae-tinged electro-pop songs that help to blast away remnants of the winter blues and, except a handful of cuts which should have been culled, the…

  • Exodus w/ Lost Society @ Limelight, Belfast

    March 4, 2016 - By 

    Anyone who thinks that thrash metal is in any way obsolete or past its best need only to have peeked into Belfast’s Limelight on Monday February, 29. Inside, you would have seen a sea of long hair, patched denim vests and old school metal t-shirts – oh, and heard one of the best metal gigs of the year, as well. As if to prove that point, support act Lost Society, despite having recently released their third album Braindead, are still a young band (as in ‘barely allowed in a pub’ young), but are carrying the thrash torch with unbridled enthusiasm…

  • Girls Names w/ Gross Net @ Cyprus Avenue, Cork

    March 4, 2016 - By 

    “It’s one thing to spend a long time learning how to play well in the studio, but to do it in front of people is what keeps me coming back to touring.” It was Rush’s Neil Peart who said that. But what happens when you have to perform in front of hardly any people at all? This unenviable position is precisely what Gross Net, nom de musique of Philip Quinn, is faced with as he begins his supporting set for his other band Belfast post-punks Girls Names in front of a sparse crowd on a rather nasty, wet Friday night…

  • Choice Music Prize 2016 @ Vicar Street, Dublin

    March 4, 2016 - By 

    The Choice Music Prize celebrates the diversity and talent present in the Irish music scene. Tonight’s show in particular shows the vast range of bands and artists, both up-and-coming and those who have already well and truly made their mark. Whilst there may only be two awards up for grabs – Song of the Year and Album of the Year – the 12 bands that perform illustrate the real reason why we’re all here. Before announcing the winner of the former prize, there are performances and interviews for Today FM. Although the interviews fall slightly flat at times (simply because the crowd talk…

  • 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…

  • Zlatanera w/ Slomatics & Bad Boat @ Limelight, Belfast

    January 2, 2016 - By 

    Hail Satan! After four years, Belfast’s premier groove/stoner devil-worshipping metal band Zlatanera have finally put together their debut album Lergerdemain (literally ‘sleight of hand’, or trickery) and of course launched it in fine fashion in their spiritual home, the Limelight in Belfast. Both they and their two support acts also rather brilliantly showcased the many facets of stoner metal to boot. First of these supports is Bad Boat, who have been kicking around the local scene for the last fourteen years (“we should probably get an album together ourselves” quips frontman Tom Clarke). Tonight they are in outrageously superb form…

  • 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…

  • The Altered Hours w/ Girls Names & Gross Net @ Roisin Dubh, Galway

    February 29, 2016 - By 

    Should post-punk still be allowed to be a thing? Is post-punk bloody revival still a thing? Like, is it not the case that by now the innumerable expanse of bands that exist under that vague banner have managed to forge something unique and individual from those initial influences? I don’t know what we’ll call it instead. Does it matter? It’s just that it is concerning that many acts seem to bear the weight of that label, being painted with a brush that has been in need of replacing for quite some time. Some seem so ready to slump tiredly into…

  • 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…