• Thom Yorke – ANIMA

    July 12, 2019 - By 

    A potent side-effect of modernity is the prevalent disconnection we experience from our inner selves; Freud identified the basic, instinctual drive of humans as the ‘id’, Jung was interested in the ‘anima’ of man — the ‘feminine’ aspect of the brain underlying the conscious self. These concepts of double identities had been prevalent in psychology before the mass subsumption of digital technology, but have since gained a new and increasingly urgent significance. With OK Computer in 1997, Radiohead developed a seminal text reflecting on modern technological anxiety. 22 years later, Thom Yorke’s perspective has shifted from the potentiality of the…

  • Palehound – Black Friday 

    July 9, 2019 - By 

    With a warm, longing ode to a friend, Palehound’s third record opens with the kind of astutely observed, compassionately wrought sketch that we have come to expect from Ellen Kempner since her 2015 Dry Food, and indeed its 2017 follow-up, A Place I’ll Always Go. Where the former dealt largely with Kempner embracing her own sexuality, the follow-up was more mournful in tone, although encased in Palehound’s exuberant and often inventive indie rock they never felt maudlin or morose. ‘Company’, just Kempner and an organ, is the introduction to a Palehound record that, while tackling the same uncertainties of relationships as those previous,…

  • Bill Callahan – Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest

    July 5, 2019 - By 

    From his extremely ramshackle 1990 debut Sewn to the Sky up until 2013’s far more polished Dream River, Bill Callahan – better known for the first half of his career by the alias Smog – managed to maintain a reasonably prolific rate of output. Following a dub remix album in 2014, however, things fell rather silent. Had the man often referred to as the spiritual successor to Leonard Cohen finally run out of ideas after fifteen albums? Well, as it turns out, no – life merely got in the way. As Callahan found himself getting married and fathering his first…

  • The Divine Comedy – Office Politics

    June 28, 2019 - By 

    Neil Hannon has always been, rather consciously, something of an anachronism in contemporary pop – an urbane, arch throwback to suave crooners and irreverent singer-songwriters of the 1960s. In a way, this made sense in the ’90s, when The Divine Comedy were at their commercial height. After all, Britpop juggernauts Oasis and Blur were fetishists of the ’60s, lifting the Beatles’ and Kinks’ aesthetics from the middle part of that decade; Jarvis Cocker, when not drawing inspiration from Serge Gainsbourg, shared Hannon’s obsession with the wry, literary Scott Walker. But while Albarn and Cocker combined those influences with more contemporary sensibilities, Hannon was a purist –…

  • Julia Shapiro – Perfect Version

    June 20, 2019 - By 

    Perfect Version finds Julia Shapiro wrangling with the idea of the self at a tumultuous time in her life, cataloguing the period following her exit from Chastity Belt’s third album tour due to a flustered blend of relationship woes and emotional toil. Facing the mirror to see nothing, she begins to question what it means to be someone at all, to be truly authentic. ‘Parking Lot’ materialises this thought into the daily task of trying to find somewhere to park, unmasking routines as things done out of mere habit rather than because we want to, raising questions about the significance…

  • Cate Le Bon – Reward

    June 8, 2019 - By 

    The songs on Cate Le Bon’s fifth album, Reward, came about as the result of time spent in a cottage in England’s rural Lake District, where she lived for a year in almost total isolation. Retreating from several years of going through the looped motions of touring, writing, and recording, there in nature and solitude Le Bon spent her days learning how to build furniture from scratch and her nights pouring over a second-hand piano, where she found herself writing the most introspective and personal songs of her career. Unsurprisingly then, location plays a vital part in Le Bon’s writing,…

  • In Their Thousands – Acrasia

    June 7, 2019 - By 

    Donegal’s In Their Thousands are no overnight story, it’s fair to say: brothers Aidan and Declan McClafferty have been playing music with their cousin Ruari Friel since childhood, and have been performing as In Their Thousands, alongside bassist Marty Smyth, for around a decade or so. These years of shared experience permeate through, the band’s debut long player. The 13 songs collected within feel distinctly ‘lived-in’ – from the collective setbacks, small victories and long nights of the soul detailed in their lyrics, to the ease of the band’s confident, unshowy playing. The title track and lead single, a recent…

  • Junior Brother – Pull The Right Rope

    May 29, 2019 - By 

    Imagine Joanna Newsom had gorged on grainy VHS tapes of Richie Kavanagh instead of the modernist compositions of Ruth Crawford Seeger, weaving guitar stabs and tambourine whacks to soundtrack drunken treks through rural Ireland. This verdant picture, brought forward by Kerry bard Junior Brother, glistens to life on his enchanting debut album, Pull the Right Rope, released through Galway’s Strange Brew label. Born and raised just outside of Killarney, the origin story of Junior Brother, the performance name Ronan Kealy nabbed from an early 17th century play he studied in college, is equally as pristine and adventurous as his music.…

  • Fixity – No Man Can Tell

    May 27, 2019 - By 

      Cork has fostered a healthy collaborative atmosphere among its musical populace in the last number of years, with an ever-expanding community of fusion groups, side projects, one-off jam sessions and young, experimental collectives sprouting to exchange ideas, explore new creative avenues and perform one-off collaborations never to be played again. One of those at the centre of it all is multi-instrumentalist Dan Walsh, whose monthly Cork Improvised Music Club night (formerly at Gulpd café, now at The Roundy) and previous work at the helm of improvisational outfit, Fixity, have done more than satisfy Cork’s thirst for psychedelic exploration. An…

  • Bitflower Bb – Mastalgia

    May 24, 2019 - By 

    The word “Mastalgia” is a medical term referring to the heavy, dull tight breast pain commonly experienced by most women, and usually without utterance. It’s also the name of the new six-track record from Dublin’s Bitflower Bb (the side project of DJ and producer Dream~cycles.) A lush, evocative blend of electronic and organic sounds, it’s a close, intimate collection of bedroom-pop songs produced throughout 2017-2018. Simultaneously dreamy and affecting, at times Mastalgia recalls the lo-fi experimental pop of Galway-native, Dublin-based Maria Somerville or the vast soundscapes of Grouper, but overall, it’s an undeniably unusual record.  The title’s reference to a private, interior…