• Static Vision – What is and Now

    October 31, 2017 - By 

    We have to say – per capita, there’s no other town or city in Ireland producing DIY indie rock at the rate of Limerick. We’ve got Hot Cops in Belfast, Slouch in Dublin, but we can now happily add Static Vision‘s self-released 10-track debut to the likes of Eraser TV,  Cruiser, Anna’s Anchor, oh, and The Rubberbandits, to the city’s list of self-made accolades. Equal parts effervescent and slack, What is and Now is a stab of garage post-punk in the ’80s SST, Wipers-esque vein that could pass for an undiscovered proto-grunge gem from the midwest in 1989 fronted by a time-travelling Will Toledo, and having been…

  • Album Review: John Maus – Screen Memories

    October 31, 2017 - By 

    John Maus strikes you as the kind of man who would be making music regardless of whether anyone was listening or not. And for a long time they weren’t. His first two albums, Songs and Love Is Real, went by largely unnoticed. It was only on the 2011 release of We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves that critics started to really pay attention, despite a considerable and devout cult following having formed through the years. Most people would have been eager to capitalise after this new-found attention; to milk that cow for all it’s worth. But Maus is not most…

  • Watch: Thunder On The Left – National Insecurity

    October 27, 2017 - By 

    Photo by Brian Ritchie  To mark its official release, London-based grunge trio Thunder On The Left have released their new single ‘National Insecurity’. Their first new music since 2015’s  The Art of Letting Go EP, ‘National Insecurity’ is a bleak gaze into the future the band predicts for us as we become ever more hyper-dependent on technology. The single is an ambitious, riff-laden belter that seems determined to shake some sense into us. Or at least freak the hell out of us until we put our phones down for 10 minutes. Recorded and mixed along with the rest of their forthcoming debut album by the…

  • Video Premiere: Half Forward Line – Column A, Column B

    October 26, 2017 - By 

    Galway super-group of sorts Half Forward Line are set to release their debut album The Back of Mass tomorrow. Before we premiere it on this here website though, the band have been kind enough to share a video for ‘Column A, Column B’. The trio, comprised of So Cow‘s Brian Kelly on guitar and vocals, Oh Boland‘s Niall Murphy and bass, and regular TTA photographer Cíarán Ó Maoláin behind the drums, have been doing some wonderful damage on the live circuit these past few months and also unveiled one of the sweetest love songs to come out of the West in quite some time in the form…

  • Track-by-Track: Feather Beds – Blooming

    October 26, 2017 - By 

      Ahead of the release of his second album Blooming, Dublin’s Michael Orange AKA Feather Beds has been kind enough to give us a track by track rundown of the record. Set for release this Friday 27 October on Montreal-based label Moderna Records, Blooming is a dreamy alt-folk venture written and recorded when the songwriter was living in Canada. Following his debut LP in 2015, The Skeletal System, Blooming is mixed and co-produced by Stephen Shannon (Adrian Crowley, Strands) and is a dreamy, multi-layered a that evokes the likes of The Antlers and Mutual Benefit‘s Love’s Crushing Diamond in its ambient folk atmosphere, but owes just as much to the hypnotic, minimal compositions of Steve Reich and to the…

  • The Jesus and Mary Chain @ Vicar Street, Dublin

    October 19, 2017 - By 

    It seems that there’s a different vibe in The Jesus & Mary Chain camp since the release of Damage and Joy in March of this year; antagonism replaced with affability and scorn with humour. It’s in and around six months ago that the band visited The Academy with their first studio album in almost twenty years fresh off the presses, and tellingly on that outing it was Psychocandy material that made up the bulk of the setlist. Not so in Vicar Street – their seminal debut rears its head, but tonight’s is a much more rounded selection and the band…

  • Dishonored: Death of the Outsider (Bethesda, Multiformat)

    October 17, 2017 - By 

    Nobody should need a second invitation to return to Karnaca, the vividly realised fictional world where much of the action in Dishonored 2 takes place. With its disparate influences of European architecture, Steampunk machinery, Victorian science fiction, few videogame locations are quite as appealing. So, it is with no small amount of joy that we gladly accept a return ticket to this very destination, courtesy of the wizards at Arkane Studios. In Death Of The Outsider, the gamer does not play as royal guard and assassin Corvo Attano but as Billie Lurk, a badass cross between a Final Fantasy heroine and a T-1000: her mechanical…

  • Wolf Parade – Cry Cry Cry

    October 12, 2017 - By 

    There’s something so intrinsically pleasant about a group like Wolf Parade reforming despite the fact that the Montreal four-piece never really set the world ablaze with their brand of vibrant, multicoloured indie rock. After eight years they gave up the ghost and moved onto different things. Yet, seven years later here we are with same key players and a new album to boot. This kind of reunion doesn’t feel like some flagrant cash grab or attempt to milk nostalgia tendrils of listeners who are closer to forty than thirty. It feels like they came back together because they had more…

  • The World Is A Beautiful Place and I Am No Longer Afraid To Die – Always Foreign

    October 7, 2017 - By 

    Music is by its nature manipulative. Artists want to make us feel emotions or even lead us to a new school of thought. It is important never to lose sight of this. It’s all too easy for someone to trick you into thinking they’ve unearthed some great unspoken truth, when really it’s sound and fury, signifying nothing. One of the more curious revivals that our nostalgia-driven culture has bequeathed is emo. Not emo in the 2006 sense of eyeliner, fringes and being “non-conforming as can be”. More in the 1990s sincere-to-the-point-of-parody way. Basically, Mike Kinsella’s American Football. It was a resurgence…