• Savages – Adore Life

    January 22, 2016 - By 

    Revivalism – is that a dirty word? It is if you’re in a band, trying to forge your own sound while folk are sitting there spouting comparisons. As Ought have shown us Stateside, if you’re going to retread well-worn ground, you better lace up your assault boots and do so with conviction, stamping any glib reference points from the mind of the listener. Savages aren’t short on conviction. Nor are they short of muscle in the art of ratcheting up the tension within a track. Post punk was all about tension, though, wasn’t it? The London quartet’s debut, Silence Yourself,…

  • Gascan Ruckus – Narrow Defeats and Bitter Victories

    January 18, 2016 - By 

    Armagh’s Gascan Ruckus are long overdue their time in the sun having spent the better part of a decade honing their skills and carving out their place in the scene. Operating in the same range as Fighting With Wire, Twin Atlantic or Dinosaur Pile-Up and a live show that beggars belief, the group has long been teetering on the brink of mainstream acceptance. With their debut album, Narrow Defeats and Bitter Victories, they’re primed and ready to be pushed into the spotlight. Among the record’s stronger cuts are songs such as the PigsAsPeople inspired ‘Goodbye’ or the mammoth riff of…

  • The Altered Hours – In Heat Not Sorry

    January 14, 2016 - By 

    About 20 seconds into In Heat/Not Sorry, it dawns on you that you’re in for something else entirely. For a band that’s drawn with such fearless and bold strokes in previous singles and EPs, opener ‘Who’s Saving Who?’ impresses and awes with its restraint and confidence, setting the tone for the whole record. What we have here is the sound of a band coming into itself, the Cork psych-rock outfit arriving at a destination of sorts after years of exploration. Raw and feral, yet considered and focused, the album hits its stride as its opening gambit of mid-paced movers comes…

  • David Bowie – Blackstar

    January 8, 2016 - By 

    If David Bowie’s The Next Day, overall an excellent record, had a killing flaw it would be a lack of experimentation and ambition. Bowie has always been regarded as a frontiersman, working on the fringes of the avant garde and reinterpreting it for the masses without simplifying it. His career has been driven by the seemingly endless drive towards the future and the new, which lent The Next Day an unfortunate overtone. Its fourteen tracks were steeped in Bowie mythology, each one acting almost as a summation of a specific part of the man’s storied career. It felt like a…

  • Hinds – Leave Me Alone

    January 7, 2016 - By 

    Welcome to 2016. It’s a new year with new opportunities to be realised, new landscapes to be traversed and new ideas to be formed. So what better way to kick off this new and exciting twelve month period than with a delightfully fuzzy throwback album that wraps itself up in the sweet sounds of the 1960s. Leave Me Alone, the debut LP from Madrid’s Hinds, is covered head to toe in a profoundly retro lustre, taking a homemade lo-fi jangle rock sound and filtering it through The Velvet Underground. While the weight of the influences can be overbearing, it is…

  • Sea Pinks – Soft Days

    December 22, 2015 - By 

    With five albums in little over five years, Neil Brogan’s work ethic is admirable. And that’s just with Sea Pinks – add to that the albums and EPs he drummed on with Girls Names before his 2013 departure, an excellent recent EP with post-punk quartet Cruising and a low key solo EP as Winterlude early this year and you wonder where he finds the time. With more and more small bands operating part-time in today’s unsteady music business, longer gaps between releases are increasingly common, but the release of Dreaming Tracks in late 2014 still feels like only yesterday, and…

  • Wizards of Firetop Mountain – Wizards of Firetop Mountain

    December 1, 2015 - By 

    Having been a staple part of the Irish rock food pyramid for many years, gigging religiously and opening up for titans such as Boris, Sleep, and Red Fang, to name but a few, when Wizards of Firetop Mountain announced their debut LP would finally materialize this November, many would be slapping their knees and roaring “it’s about time!” The band have well proven their mettle over the last four years on the back of a demo, double-sided single, a popular Youtube video, and of course, their rise to furniture-level recurrence in music venues all around the country.  With many of…

  • Shye Ben Tzur, Jonny Greenwood & The Rajasthan Express – Junun

    November 30, 2015 - By 

    Those coming to this album as the newest project by Jonny Greenwood have been misled. He is on this album, and seems to play a vital role, but it is not his album. It has been a subtle but consistent insinuation that Junun is largely the work of the composer and Radiohead member in collaboration with a few other musicians. Clearly Greenwood’s following has been exploited to try and trump some interest into a project that may have otherwise gone unnoticed but the result may be the actual alienation of fans who would have found this album on their own…

  • King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard – Paper Maché Dream Balloon

    November 11, 2015 - By 

    Their long-winded name gives the distinct impression King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard are some whacked-out middle-aged men playing 80’s progressive rock, talking about spirituality and shit.  And on previous albums they have leaned in that direction, with sustained improvised grooves, but it has always been more in line with repetitive psych rock rhythms, than drawn out introspective jams.  On last album Quarters! there were majestically sprawling tracks, four of them to be precise, lasting 10 minutes and 10 seconds each.  They used wizardry of Gandalf proportions to instil magic in songs of that length, intricate musical patterns were weaved…

  • The Chills – Silver Bullets

    November 3, 2015 - By 

    When it comes to The Chills‘ comeback, a great many folks have been running with the return-from-the-wilderness narrative. Not surprising considering it has been 18 years since their last album proper, 1996’s lackluster ‘Sunburnt’, and the subsequent publicity fade-out. One can imagine, however, that not for one second did Martin Phillipps stop running through melodies in his head. You can also imagine that he wasn’t going to launch back into it until he was good and ready. And so Silver Bullets, the result of a recent, joyously-consistent flurry of activity, suggests there’s a whole lot to be said for taking…