• Beirut – Gallipoli

    March 2, 2019 - By 

    For a project born out of the narrow confines of a bedroom in landlocked Santa Fe, Beirut’s influences have always been remarkably far flung. Right from the off, the band’s globetrotting song titles and grand orchestrations betrayed Zach Condon’s wanderlust and romantic tendencies and allowed him to project himself out from the desert plains of New Mexico and into the imagined eastern gulags and louche European locales so central to his sound and aesthetic. At a time when indie music was more firmly rooted in a traditional band format, Condon quickly marked himself out as a purveyor of strange and…

  • Pond – Tasmania

    March 2, 2019 - By 

    Perth- based psych-rock wild men Pond return with Tasmania, produced by Tame Impala frontman (and frequent Pond collaborator) Kevin Parker. While their overlapping membership and frequent collaborations with Parker’s giants might frame them as a sort of ‘little brother’ band to Tame Impala, they’re perhaps closer in spirit to fellow Aussies King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard: prolific and seemingly existing in their own self-contained universe, they continue to grow from their garage beginnings to sounding fuller, more eclectic and more out there on each release. Tasmania, Pond’s first LP since 2017’s well received The Weather, kicks off with the…

  • The Gloaming – The Gloaming (3)

    February 25, 2019 - By 

      Virtuoso. The term has undergone somewhat of a realignment of late, thanks in part to the rate of technological advancements spawning a whole new range of art forms and instrumentation to master. Whilst the title clearly draws more gravitas in some fields than others, this hasn’t deterred the term being bandied around a bit too loosely. Timely, then, is The Gloaming’s third offering, whose five masterful musicians taught us to forget everything we thought we knew about the word and its connotations. Since their formation in early 2011, the band has drawn vast critical acclaim, selling out The National…

  • Julia Jacklin – Crushing

    February 24, 2019 - By 

    From the outside of a diary we observe nothing but casual scratches and marks of use on deep brown leather. Gently a hand moves to it, and with intention flicks to the next available blank page. A pen moves swiftly to and fro. Ink enters the page not by any requirement of physics, but seemingly through the weight of the deliberation behind it. Lines cross and titles sit unassumingly, until the sign off they reach outwards; the cover is closed and again the aged leather holds our gaze. Following up her 2016 debut Don’t Let the Kids Win, Julia Jacklin…

  • Panda Bear – Buoys

    February 23, 2019 - By 

    Panda Bear’s Buoys is a mirage of deconstructed indie governed by its uninhibited stream of consciousness lyrical style. His writing makes this one of the most vivid depictions of society in 2019 so far and a lament to a generation condemned by its own vanity. Through minimalism, Panda Bear – Animal Collective’s Noah Lennox – draws the listener’s attention solely to his sincere, reverberated vocals through which he bares a haunting portrait of the modern human psyche. Lennox succeeds in making the familiar sound unfamiliar, taking the roots of conventional tracks and scrambling them into something completely unrecognisable and unique.…

  • Cosey Fanni Tutti – TUTTI

    February 17, 2019 - By 

      Cosey Fanni Tutti’s latest LP, her first solo work since 1982’s Time to Tell, has been described by the artist as an attempt to express “the totality of [her] being”; the music here, Tutti explains, interprets “shifting perceptions of how [past and present] inform one another” – an extension of other recent projects concerned with documenting her history as an artist and provocateur. The record follows an acclaimed memoir (2017’s ART SEX MUSIC), a gallery retrospective focused on the work of her 1970s performance art ensemble COUM Transmissions, and an autobiographical audio-visual installation entitled Harmonic Coumaction scored by an embryonic version…

  • Ariana Grande – thank u, next

    February 12, 2019 - By 

    Ariana Grande’s stratospheric rise to fame – with all its adoration, chaos, and residence at the top of the Billboard 100 – has been a tumultuous one. First breaking into the public sphere through virtue of a Nickelodeon show, everything about the Florida-born entertainer seemed innocent, childlike. The fact that her first scandal involved licking a donut speaks for itself. In the past two years however, the now 25- year-old has been forced to grow-up. And unlike many of her child-star peers, she has done it with a grace and defiance that has endeared her to the world and turned…

  • Talos – Far Out Dust

    February 9, 2019 - By 

    Talos makes a quiet but triumphal return with his sophomore release, Far Out Dust, the quick follow up to 2017’s Wild Alee. Far Out Dust represents a new sense of maturity from the Cork native, with more ambitious lyrics, and a confidence that was suggested but dormant before. While Talos – aka Eoin French – still plays with the ever-presented influences of artists like Brian Eno, Bon Iver and James Vincent McMorrow, there’s a distinct ‘80s pop influence on many of the tracks here, with hints of synth-pop artists like Hurts, or Years and Years. These influences aren’t surprising, given…

  • Michael O’Shea – Michael O’Shea

    February 5, 2019 - By 

    Look at any street corner in Galway, Dublin, Cork, London or New York and chances are, you’ll be met with crooners, folksters, dancers, trad musicians and poets. Some of the world’s best loved performers came to fruition through busking. B.B King was a busking youth before starting a career in recording and performing on stages worldwide. So too were Tracy Chapman, Glen Hansard and Laraaji. On a quieter end of the spectrum falls Michael O’Shea, the compelling Irish busker who travelled Europe, Africa and Asia, crafted his own instrument and whose singular contribution to recorded music has just been re-released…

  • Machinefabriek – With Voices

    January 26, 2019 - By 

    How much does concept matter? Hackneyed as it may be, it’s a question that comes up while listening to the latest album from prolific Dutch artist Machinefabriek AKA Rutger Zuydervelt. With Voices, as the title suggests, is an album of eight tracks composed around the human voice. Heard blind, it’s a fascinating document filled with fascinating sounds that evoke a host of different moods. Reading into it and things get even more complicated or interesting, depending on your view. Machinefabriek crafted a 35-minute piece of music that was sent to the eight vocalists involved, each of whom responded in their…