• Lana Del Rey – Norman Fucking Rockwell

    September 22, 2019 - By 

    Norman Fucking Rockwell is a triumph in modern pop music. Lana Del Rey holds a mirror up to the fallacy that is the American Dream; the kind of idyllic, white picket fence visions of Slim Aaron and Norman Rockwell, after whom the album is named. Through the cynical narrative, narcotic-soaked sound and Del Rey’s acerbic character portraits, she warps these images and distorts the convoluted ideology that is the American Dream.  This grim satire glossed over with the subdued vocals and overall ethereal quality is an aesthetic Del Rey has been trying to achieve in her for several albums, most…

  • Iggy Pop – Free

    September 15, 2019 - By 

    At the end of 2016’s Post Pop Depression, his finest work since the 1970s, Iggy Pop tells us he’s going to Paraguay – to where “there’s not so much fucking knowledge”, “people are still human beings”, and he can “heal” himself, sick of political fearmongering, internet commentators, and cheating executives. Some took the promise of his disappearance – if not his mythical Paraguay – seriously, wondering if this was the last we’d hear from the Stooges frontman, who has now been releasing records for a half-century. Pop seems to have wondered the same himself, telling the New Yorker recently that he’d felt burnt…

  • Jenny Hval – The Practice of Love

    September 14, 2019 - By 

    On the 13th of August, Jenny Hval shared an image of herself on twitter, with the accompanying caption; “a new song is out today – High Alice. This one is a labyrinth. Link on the internet. Suggested reading list: Clarice Lispector.”  Lispector was a surrealist, mystical Brazilian writer; broadly speaking, her work centres around women suspended in a moment of spiritual or creative crisis, often on the precipice of revelation. Lispector has a knack for warping the lens through which we view everyday objects – a flower, for example, or an insect – so that what is familiar is curdled…

  • Ty Segall – First Taste

    September 6, 2019 - By 

    When prolific Aussies King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard announced their intention to release five albums in 2017, their progress was understandably followed with a great deal of hype. But a year later, Californian garage rock wunderkind Ty Segall managed to match that tally across his various projects with little fanfare. For Segall, much like Robert Pollard, such an endeavour appeared to be no cause for celebration and merely a normal day at the office. 2019 has been a little quieter for Segall though. April’s live album Deforming Lobes could be considered a gap filler were it not so excellent…

  • Jay Som – Anak Ko

    September 5, 2019 - By 

    Depending on how you want to count them, Anak Ko (released on Polyvinyl) is either Jay Som’s second album, or her third. The Los Angeles-based multi-instrumentalist, singer-songwriter and producer gained some traction in 2015 when she released a series of un-named bedroom demos online. These were eventually re-released as an official debut, Turn Into – citing influences including Tame Impala, The Pixies and Yo La Tengo. Another influence Som – real name Melina Mae Duterte – has cited is her heritage. She is the daughter of Filipino immigrants and Anak Ko is Tagalog for “my child”.  Her latest outing, Anak Ko marks an opening up for the artist  – it’s more…

  • Lighght – Gore​-​Tex In The Club, Balenciaga Amongst The Shrubs

    September 3, 2019 - By 

    Lighght is no stranger to chaos. The Cork producer’s first tape, The Skin Falls Off The Body, was, as its title suggests, an exercise in nasty, bile-dripping body horror. Recorded a full three years prior to its release last December, it represented a direct response to a very specific personal trauma in the artist’s life. It’s vulgar sound design specialised in unrelenting syncopated drums, unseemly quicksilver whirring, and serrated, industrial buzzing, a pool of emotional sludge. Though impressively visceral and absorbingly unsettling, it ultimately lacked a sense of completeness.  It also provided no indication of what his future full-length debut…

  • The Specials @ Open House, Bangor

    August 29, 2019 - By 

    In the tour-heavy years since reforming back in 2008, The Specials have continuously re-affirmed their status not simply as bona fide 2-tone legends, they have underlined their ironclad rep as one of the all-time greats. Vital and visionary in equal measure, few acts, anywhere in the world, have equally defined and transcended genre like they have, all the while keeping two eyes firmly fixed on the horizon. Off the back of the release of Encore – their first album with vocalist Terry Hall since 1981 – the band’s generation-spanning set at Bangor Seafront tonight as part of Open House 2019 only…

  • The Hold Steady – Thrashing Thru The Passion

    August 27, 2019 - By 

    Back at the turn of the decade, The Hold Steady were on the top of their game. The self-described “best bar band in the world” had four phenomenal LPs under their belt and were poised to carve out their own niche and achieve the same level of devotion of someone like Bruce Springsteen. Their sound was a fusion of classic arena rock, mid ‘80s hardcore and hip-hop inflected beat poetry about drugs, drunks, and Christianity in Minneapolis. Everything was vital and taut and elevated to these wonderful theatrical heights by off-kilter time signatures, unconventional structures and a veritable hodgepodge of…

  • Villagers @ Open House Festival, Bangor

    August 26, 2019 - By 

    Put succinctly, Villagers make beautiful music. The reason that their songs are quite so beautiful, and the reason that they connect on such a deep level with their audience, is that all of the white noise, static and blasts of Stax horns are anchored by the state of being human and all of the frailty and vulnerability that comes with it. In a scene so often dominated by archness, cynicism and borrowed nostalgia, Villagers are all about heart-on-the-sleeve sadness and fist-in-the-air joy, and this forms the core of what makes tonight’s performance so compelling, and the thread that is woven…

  • Fionn Regan – Cala

    August 23, 2019 - By 

    Wicklow boasts one of Ireland’s most varied coastlines. From Bray Head’s rocky outcrop to Brittas Bay’s rolling sand dunes, the landscape is almost limitless in its drama, and that’s before we even get to the mountains. In short, it’s the kind of landscape to leave romanticists salivating, and accordingly has been the subject of artists, musicians and storytellers for generations.  Its latest muse is Fionn Regan, who returned to the coastline of his home county for his sixth LP, Cala. Since recording his Mercury-nominated debut The End of History in Bray, it’s fair to say Regan has been on somewhat…