• The Breakfast Club @ TBG+S

    September 4, 2018 - By 

    This Thursday you have an opportunity to beat the early morning slump, or at least delay it, if you work in or around Dublin’s city centre. Temple Bar Gallery + Studios are hosting a breakfast club as part of their making connections programme, and it kicks off at 7:30am running though until 10:00am. As well as providing an opportunity to meet and discuss art with fellow enthusiasts, you can also view the gallery’s current exhibition: Proven Answers by Stephen Loughman. This innovative event, which includes complimentary tea, coffee and pastries, is free but reservations do have have to be made beforehand, details here.

  • Giant Sand @ Whelan’s, Dublin

    June 13, 2018 - By 

    No word in the English language sums up Howe Gelb’s ever-mutating life’s work Giant Sand more than idiosyncratic. Threaded through by just one man and his broad-ranging – oft. cowpunk – plays on the idioms of Americana and the topics he’s always held dear: love, death, humour & wanderlust, never straying too far from wryly homespun existentialism. Despite a few of indefinite hiatuses in the last few years, Giant Sand’s original lineup were reconvened for a complete rerecording of their debut LP, a scattershot snapshot of 35 years ago accompanied by members of Gelb’s LA & Tuscon circles at the…

  • Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds w/ Patti Smith @ Royal Hospital, Kilmainham

    June 8, 2018 - By 

    In this hyperbolic age, the phrase “gig of the year” gets tossed about far too flippantly. Every experience must be the best as anything less than perfection is worthless. The thing is though, most concerts couldn’t lay claim to that title. But very occasionally, there is a lineup that makes your jaw drop and forces you to question whether or not this could be the one. On 6 June 2018, Kilmainham played host to one of those shows: Patti Smith supporting Nick Cave. Either of these artists could have been the headliner and no one would be disappointed. They each…

  • Watch: Bouts – Face Up

    May 16, 2018 - By 

    It’s been five years since debut LP Nothing Good Gets Away, and four since their last release, Unlearn, but back in style are Dublin indie rock Bouts, with ‘Face Up’. Influenced by the kind of breezy, hook-laden indie rock best placed to soundtrack the main stages of the Irish summer, its DIY video fittingly  papers over the malaise with emphatic optimism. Of the song, frontman Barry Bracken says: “Face Up is a no-filter, punch the air plea for staring things down and pushing on through. Some songs you write, others just materialise. This seemed born ready. Its immediacy excites us as much now as those first moments playing it.…

  • PhotoIreland Festival Launch

    May 3, 2018 - By 

     Laia Abril – On Abortion Today sees the launch of this year’s PhotoIreland Festival, with a number of events in and around Dublin to mark the occassion. The month long festival coincides with the Eighth Amendment referendum on May 25th, and this huge societal and political debate is refreshingly not absent from either the content or structure of the festival. For PhotoIreland’s duration the main hub of the foundation, The Library Project, will be taken over by the Together for Yes campaign. With this year’s main exhibitions including Laia Abril’s On Abortion and Sarah Cullen’s You Shall Have Exactly What You…

  • Hilary Woods – Colt

    April 25, 2018 - By 

    Some artists are just destined to wind up on certain rosters. One such act is Dublin’s Hilary Woods, an artist whose solo craft we’ve followed with a certain glee over the last couple of years. On June 8, the musician, ex-JJ72 member and multi-instrumentalist will release her debut full-length album, Colt, via Brooklyn’s Sacred Bones, an indie imprint whose discerning (and, so far, pretty impeccable) penchant for repping acts such as Zola Jesus, Jenny Hval, David Lynch, John Carpenter, Blanck Mass and Marissa Nadler runs directly parallel with Woods’ very own crepuscular craft. Her minimal composition & otherwordly layered atmospherics follow two acclaimed EPs and recent scoring of a horror film for IFI’s Weimar…

  • Room For Rebellion will host parties in three cities this Friday in aid of reproductive rights campaign

    March 20, 2018 - By 

    Irish “Political Party” Room For Rebellion will return this Friday 23rd March for three parties spread across three cities, all in aid of the Irish reproductive rights campaign. The parties will be held in The Black Box in Belfast, Jigwaw in Dublin and The Yard, Hackney Wick in London respectively, with each event featuring a superb line-up of female DJs. In Belfast, local DJ Venus Dupree will join Lisbon’s Violet in providing music all night long while at Dublin’s BYOB party in Jigsaw proceedings will be in the hands of Endrift, Eliza and NTS resident Moxie. For London’s party in Hackney…

  • Album Stream: David Kitt – Yous

    March 8, 2018 - By 

    Back with his first solo full length in almost a decade, one of modern Ireland’s most enduring, chameleonic songwriters, David Kitt, has just released Yous through All City Records after its preceding Still Don’t Know EP. It’s a soothing, typically stellar effort from Kitt, who, since breaking through with 2001’s bedroom indie mini-masterpiece The Big Romance, consistently remains one step ahead at every point of his musical path, with him in the running for this year’s Choice Music Prize for his electronic New Jackson project. Entirely written and produced by Kitt, aside from a cover of Fever Ray’s ‘Keep The Streets Empty For Me’, it’s a wistful, intimate release, with flashes of a JJ Cale’s Troubadour for the 21st century. As…

  • Stream: Orchid Collective – Winter’s Pass

    March 7, 2018 - By 

    Marking the onset of Spring from a long Winter, Dublin-based indie-folk quartet Orchid Collective‘s latest single, ‘Winter’s Pass’ could hardly have come at a better time. While retaining the serene, atmospheric sound they’ve been developing over the past few years through the harmony-led influence of Fleet Foxes, there’s an evolution in its composition that has, in our view, defined it as the outfit’s best work to date. A product of home recording, as opposed to more produced previous releases, ‘Winter’s Pass’ has a substantially more organic quality, without sounding in any way lo-fi. In any case, it’s a sparse and measured arrangement that subtly utilises the kind of electronic manipulation that’s seen folk music’s contemporisation in recent years, in…