• Beach House – 7

    May 15, 2018 - By 

    Fewer bands have so aggressively etched their niche as deeply as Beach House. Whilst aggression certainly isn’t a term usually associated with this century’s finest purveyors of lofty, emotionally-charged dream pop, the Baltimore based two-piece have certainly found their comfort zone and busied themselves deep within it. over the past 14 years. Typified by Victoria Legrand’s omnipresent keyboards and Julee Cruise-esque vocals, Scally’s reverbed guitar and a handful of simplistic drum loops, the band have been stuck in a beautiful, glorious rut creatively almost since their inception back in 2004. Fewer ruts have bought so much glory and critical acclaim,…

  • Ben Folds @ Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival, Belfast

    May 14, 2018 - By 

    Ben Folds is a consummate master of contrast. Equally adept at playing plaintive ballads as he is at belting out looney tunes rock and roll, he comes across as a younger, only slightly less grizzled Randy Newman. Folds’ lyrics certainly have the same bite, and are similarly coupled with ear-worm melodies that belie the sardonic nature of the subject matter hiding in plain sight. So, during this evening’s lengthy set the audience is treated to particularly poetic versions of ‘Still Fighting It’, a beautiful tableau of a father-son relationship, and ‘Fred Jones Part 2’, another of Folds’ character studies whose…

  • The Go! Team @ Custom House Square, Belfast

    May 11, 2018 - By 

    This evening sees Brighton based musical magpies The Go! Team bring their kaleidoscopic, crate digging pop to Custom House Square as part of the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival. With a stellar archive of hits at their disposal, a crack nine piece band and high energy support from dance pop chameleons The Correspondents, tonight’s performance promises to kick the weekend off with an amphetamine rush of sound and colour. Purveyors of the much-maligned dance subgenre ‘electro swing’, The Correspondents are prone to mixing campy cabaret stylings and big band samples with pummelling drum and bass work outs which could well make…

  • Arctic Monkeys – Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino

    May 11, 2018 - By 

    Of all the shade that can be thrown against the Arctic Monkeys, you couldn’t say they’ve rested on their laurels. At the peak of their popularity, they pivoted from the comfortable rut of their indie roots into the muddier, murky world of Josh Homme-inspired desert rock. With 2013’s AM, they wholehearted embraced sounds from 1990s R&B and throwback blues. The thing with these genre excursions though is that they’ve always retained a thread of being just four Northern boys chancing their arms. With their latest LP, Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, there’s not a shred of any previous incarnation of…

  • Frank Turner – Be More Kind

    May 9, 2018 - By 

    With an uninterrupted streak of 20 years in the game, Frank Turner is undeniably an institution. Over that time, he’s tried on a number of different guises and styles with the most explosive being the proselytising political polemics of his earlier work. While over the last five years, the focus has been more on the introspective and personal, there was always a hope that the man would turn his acid tongue back to the multi-headed hydra of contemporary society.  With his latest effort, Be More Kind, those hopes seemed to have been fulfilled. This is a socially conscious and politicised…

  • Iceage – Beyondless

    May 4, 2018 - By 

    “Beyondless is the 4th LP from Iceage. This record radiates joy.” So claims Daniel Stewart, frontman of fellow post punk outfit Total Control, in Matador’s press release for the new Iceage record. As one would imagine from an album that owes it’s name to Samuel Beckett, this isn’t exactly true: frontman Elias Bender Rønnenfelt still snarls his way through tales of heartbreak, war and suicide, with a lurking, gothic menace underlying the band’s attack. They have, however, embraced a fuller and more emphatic sound, bringing in horns and further exploring the Americana elements of 2014’s Plowing Into The Field OF…

  • Ulrika Spacek – Suggestive Listening EP

    May 3, 2018 - By 

    For most bands, the EP format proves a useful starting point, a way of getting their earliest tracks out there when not in possession of enough money, time or material for a full LP, while also functioning as a low stakes release while they find their feet, not yet ready to commit to that ultimate statement of “the album”. Others though, like Ulrika Spacek, arrived so fully formed that work on an album was the first port of call, and indeed their 2016 debut release The Album Paranoia is still their strongest work to date. After last year’s quick follow…

  • Drinks – Hippo Lite

    May 2, 2018 - By 

    Drinks, a collaboration between Welsh experimental-pop musician Cate Le Bon and Californian sonic-chameleon Tim Presely of White Fence (and The Fall for a brief period), have returned with their sophomore record Hippo Lite. Its creation stemmed from the following activities and amenities or lack thereof: No Wi-Fi, a month in an old mill, river swimming, night sounds. It is by their interpretation, “An album made for each other by one another with no piercing the bubble, the opposite of a typical recording experience”. While it may have been made for each other though, Hippo Lite will, if there is any…

  • Grouper – Grid Of Points

    May 1, 2018 - By 

    Recording as Grouper, Liz Harris has been alchemising ethereal and enigmatic albums for over 13 years, combining her gossamer voice and sparse instrumentation with seemingly bottomless layers of tape hiss and static to craft richly detailed and emotionally resonant worlds of sound. With her latest release, Grid of Points, Harris’ spartan musical palette has been pared back even further, dispensing with the looped guitars and fuzzed out atmospherics of her earlier albums to create a pristine and glacial piano and voice record filled with space and extended moments of silence. In lesser hands, the album’s extreme economy of sounds could…

  • My Fellow Sponges – My Fellow Sponges

    May 1, 2018 - By 

    Having met through performing drama in university, Anna Mullarkey and Donal McConnon are the creative forces behind Galway act My Fellow Sponges. It’s no surprise then, that among the influences of jazz, folk, pop and rock in their music, one finds a wealth of theatrical experience. Accompanied by David Shaughnessy on drums, Sam Wright on bass and a flurry of instruments, this often unusual, yet carefully constructed combination is the band’s unique selling point. Following success in both music and theatre shows in the time since their last record, the Galwegians have now released their self-titled outing. Where 2015’s debut Bonne Nuit…