• Album Stream: Careerist – Weird Hill

    November 15, 2019 - By 

    It’s been a long, weird (sorry) trip up to this point, but the debut album for Belfast’s slickest indie rock trio Careerist (fka Hot Cops) is upon us. Weird Hill‘s nine tracks manage to slink through any number of influences and curveballs without losing coherence, clocking in at just under a half-hour. The wry smirk of Pavement can be glanced through buoyant, Deerhunter-sized melodies and slaloming Spaghetti Western guitar work, while the trio’s distinct, jerking sense of otherness remains consistent throughout. The LP was recorded & produced by Robocobra Quartet’s Chris Ryan, who does justice to the band’s reputation as one of Ireland’s tightest, most…

  • Conor Walsh – The Lucid LP Launch @ The Sugar Club, Dublin

    March 17, 2019 - By 

    Conor Walsh’s debut release, The Front, was a glimpse of a talent in development. Though Walsh’s playing was similar to that of other contemporary minimal musicians – most obviously Nils Frahm – his experimentation with treating and processing the sound of his piano showed how he was already forging his own path away from them. His untimely death just months after the EP’s release was therefore a huge musical loss as well as a personal one, as it seemed that we would be left with only that small glimpse. But Walsh’s family, after guessing the password to his laptop, found…

  • Blue Whale ‘Process’ Album Launch @ The Menagerie

    September 21, 2018 - By 

    Belfast experimental rock quartet Blue Whale are finally set to launch their highly anticipated debut album Process, which reins the satiating havoc of their live show into a slightly more ordered studio format. The havoc, however, will come to the Menagerie on November 9, where its launch is hosted by Moving On Music. With an aim to always been to veer away from the trappings of the traditional guitar-centric four-piece, they have experimented heavily with unconventional scales and time signatures. Their cadenced, angular and atonal compositions tread fine lines between dance and discord, chaos and intricacy, with the resultant aural tension unique in its capacity to simultaneously provoke mental…

  • Blue Whale – Process

    September 21, 2018 - By 

    At long last, one of our favourite bands in Ireland are set to release their debut album. Alluding to their deconstructivist tendencies, Belfast-based experimental rock band Blue Whale release Process on November 9. Recorded with Ben McCauley at Start Together Studios, lead single ‘Shortbread Fingers’ has recently premiered over at The Quietus, and ‘Coitus‘ featured on Irish independent compilation A Litany of Failures: Volume II. Their carefully-constructed chaos has led to a considerable live portfolio, where their potency is as undiminished on the dancefloor as it is with Can’s Damo Suzuki as improvised sound carriers. Oft-compared to Swans, Captain Beefheart, King Crimson and Slint, we’ve described them as “one of the country’s most thoroughly…

  • Buí – Eugene

    November 20, 2017 - By 

    There’s not much to beat a cathartic wallow from an earnest dose of honest-to-goodness indie rock, so if that’s what you’re after, look no further than Eugene, the album that emerges from singer-songwriter Josh Healy, aka Buí. Released on November 27, accompanied with a launch show, the LP was recorded at Earth Music Studios by Vic Bronzini-Fulton, and features appearances from a range of local names like Joel Harkin, and members of Colonel Chocolate & the Justice Triangle. Healy is also, in this project, joined by Eoin Johnson & Rónán McQuillan of his previous project, Josh The Human. Written throughout 2014-2017, Eugene is dripping with emotion, sincerity and character;…

  • Rory Nellis – There Are Enough Songs In The World

    October 31, 2017 - By 

    One of the country’s finest songwriting voices, Rory Nellis, releases his second album, There Are Enough Songs In The World on November 11. The frontman of deeply-respected Belfast power-pop outfit Seven Summits, his 2015 debut LP Ready For You Now was followed by a string of numbered singles, drip-fed to us over the space of 18 months in a typically curated fashion, to make up There Are Enough Songs In The World. It’s an approach, as we’ve already said, has served to isolate each song in its own right, building up and developing a narrative that is clearly threaded throughout the release. A collection of parables, ruminations, and the many suspects of the…

  • Album Premiere: Mark Loughrey – Treppenwitz

    October 13, 2017 - By 

    Translated roughly as ‘staircase wit’, Treppenwitz is a loaded word; an evocation of regret, of longing and succumbing to overanalysis of what could have been said. Best left to the overthinkers among us, the phenomena is the source of much of our great art, writing & comedy, and it’s something Mark Loughrey has mined and left to rumination across a breadth of the characters and worlds explored on his debut album. Whilst rooted in the wistful yearning of Nick Drake or Jeff Buckley and the kind of indie-folk that regularly wins the NI Music Prize, it’s propelled by a fearlessness to follow the creative impulse –…

  • Rusangano Family @ The Sugar Club, Dublin

    April 11, 2016 - By 

    There’s been something special brewing in Ireland for the last year or so. If you’ve been lucky you’ve caught glimpses of it here and there, or heard the rumours; something big from the Mid-West. Something new. But after nearly a full year of hor d’ouvres in the shape of feverish shows and tantalising single track releases one of Ireland’s most exciting bands finally has a full album to offer. And while it’s justifiably whipping critics and fans into a frenzy, many know that for the full Rusangano Family hip hop experience you’ve got to see it live. So while the…