• U2 – Songs of Innocence

    September 10, 2014 - By 

    So, straight off the bat – let’s forget about Apple, iTunes, hypocrisy, commerce, and even U2 themselves. Daunting though that may be, it doesn’t really help us when it comes to looking at Songs of Innocence, the thirteenth studio album by U2, arguably the biggest band in the world. Like looking at someone like Roman Polanski, or Woody Allen, or whomever, there comes a time when you have to separate the art from the artist, and attempt to consider that in isolation. And this time round, that’s never been more pertinent for U2.Songs of Innocence is eleven tracks of new material from…

  • Judas Priest – Redeemer of Souls

    July 24, 2014 - By 

    Judas Priest have always had a ‘balls to the wall’ sound, largely courtesy of guitarists KK Downing and Glenn Tipton. So when Downing decided to abandon ship in 2011, it was the musical equivalent of Priest losing a bollock. Kicking off their seventh album, ‘Dragonaut’ positively tears out of the speakers, leaving you in no doubt that if this is Priest on one bollock, it’s still better than most other things. Redeemer of Souls is very much Judas Priest being ‘Judas Priest’, delivering molten slabs of classic heavy metal, stories of warriors, machines, and beasts. And by adhering to the…

  • Manic Street Preachers – Futurology

    July 16, 2014 - By 

    Twenty-five years is a long time to be doing anything, especially making music. One of the biggest problems facing a group lasting this long is that of progression. Where do you go? It comes down to a simple choice: keep pushing forward or stagnate and reiterate. There are pros and cons for both. If you keep advancing you could discover new styles and sounds and be a modern 1970s Bowie but you could also look ridiculous and fail spectacularly like 1990s Bowie. With repetition you end up tying your hands behind your back and locking yourself into a single inescapable…

  • Ultramantis Black – S/T

    June 24, 2014 - By 

    Pro wrestling isn’t necessarily the first port of call in terms of informed and conscientious political and social commentary, with non-jingoistic fans for years putting up with dated “evil foreigner” gimmicks, gang-like groups repping colours and flipping hand signs, and myriad other misrepresentations of a reality from which the artform was originally supposed to provide escape. Call it a fucking huge surprise then, when UltraMantis Black, masked wrestler and staple of leading American independent company CHIKARA, broke his silence to yowl in a political straight-edge hardcore band, out of character, yet within mask, in a surreal clash of the king…

  • Fucked Up – Glass Boys

    June 18, 2014 - By 

    Fucked Up are a band living in the shadow of some powerful things. In 2008, the band released their second record, Chemistry of Common Life, an immensely satisfying and exhilarating album that challenges the very essence of hardcore and distills it into something new and exciting. In 2011, they followed it up with David Come To Life, an ambitious, grandiose concept album which explores love, betrayal and metatextual analysis in Thatcher’s Britain over its seventy-eight minute run time. These records can be mentioned in the same breath as Refused’s Shape of Punk To Come or Husker Du’s Zen Arcade as vital punk albums…

  • Tiger Jaws – Charmer

    June 9, 2014 - By 

    It would have been all too easy to write off Tigers Jaw as a forgone conclusion. In March of last year, the Scranton, PA band announced they were going on a hiatus – with three-fifths of the five piece unable to continue to be part of the band. A summer of confusion and assumptions that Tigers Jaw were done forever followed until Run For Cover Records eventually made clear to the world that when Tigers Jaw said “hiatus”, they didn’t actually mean ‘hiatus’ and that we were still going to enjoy the band’s scrappy brand of emo-punk, just now it…

  • Mongol Horde – Mongol Horde

    June 4, 2014 - By 

    Look, Frank Turner’s folk stuff is by and large really enjoyable. It’s nice, well meaning and at times quite poignant, but there does seem to be something missing. With so many songs about love, life and the road; a sojourn to the old fertile hardcore punk grounds which Turner left behind would not go amiss. A blast of 200 bpm noise to cleanse the pallet. With Mongol Horde, the big man seems to have given himself just that. Mongol Horde are a three piece made up of Mr. Turner on vocals, Sleeping Souls keyboardist Matt Nasir on baritone guitar and…

  • We Cut Corners – Think Nothing

    May 23, 2014 - By 

    We Cut Corners debut, Today I Realised I Can Go Home Backwards, was one of the great under-heralded Irish debuts. At just thirty two minutes, it flits almost flippantly between heart-on-sleeve confessional pop melodies full of wonderfully oblique imagery in ‘Go Easy’ and ‘A Pirate’s Life’, and the White Stripes-inspired tuneful thrashings of ‘The Leopard’ and ‘Say Yes To Everything’. The album’s charm fell in its balance: its thoughtful, oblique lyrics, soaring vocals and ability to be scorchingly angry and pointedly self deprecating in the same three minute period. It sounds like it would take four people to play, yet the duo reproduce it perfectly live.…

  • VerseChorusVerse – VerseChorusVerse

    May 8, 2014 - By 

    “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” So reads the opening line from L.P. Hartley’s 1953 novel, The Go-Between. Touching on the innocence of childhood and its loss, family life and more, it’s a classic in excavating the oft smoggy wasteland that is the past. For many artists, however, the most rewarding way of confronting what has come before is to delve, headstrong, into the immediate present; carefully side-stepping the grasp of nostalgia whilst following an inner path. For Tony Wright AKA singer-songwriter VerseChorusVerse, this is something that he has, for the most part, bravely and…

  • Mac DeMarco – Salad Days

    April 23, 2014 - By 

    “What Mom doesn’t know/ has taken its toll on me” sings Mac DeMarco on album number three’s lead single, ‘Passing Out the Pieces’. It’s a line that immediately anchors the listener in with what to expect from the rest of his critically praised, self-produced 2014 release, Salad Days. Remarkably the title of the album itself would be far more in line with the Mac (real name: Vernor Winfield McBriare Smith IV) of 2012; the Mac who gained a semi-cult following with some hilarious post-watershed Youtube clips and an anthemic ode to his favourite cigarettes, Viceroy. However in true Mac style…