• Inbound: Farah Elle

    December 5, 2016 - By 

    Currently writing and recording her debut album at home, Libya-born Dublin singer-songwriter, pianist and BIMM graduate Farah Elle’s decision to drip-fed her ever-growing fanbase a series of previews over the last few months has certainly worked in her favour. Blending a slick melange of hip-hop and R&B influences – with the odd rumble of ska thrown in for good measure – she has carved out a sound that is defined both by her Arabic-influenced vocals and a knack for creating songs that feel perfectly laidback without sidestepping the emotive urgency that underpins it all. Having marked her arrival with ‘Silk’…

  • Inbound: Whim

    October 6, 2016 - By 

    Whim AKA Sarah Di Muzio was born and raised in San Francisco but moved to Portland “in favour of rain and indie Pacific Northwest music”. A visit to Ireland in April 2015 saw her fall in love with Galway, probably for the same reasons, and she has lived here ever since. At only twenty years old she possesses an ability to craft clever indie-folk-pop tunes, the kind that wouldn’t seem out of place in that particularly American brand of quirky hipster rom-com. In fact, her second EP, The Funeral Guest – released in 2015 – was soundtrack to a movie…

  • Inbound: Drown

    October 4, 2016 - By 

    It’s pretty apt that this year is the 25th anniversary of Nirvana’s performance in Sir Henry’s in Cork and that Ireland currently finds its alternative music scene in pretty rude health. Leading the pack are Girl Band with their idiosyncratic and innovative post punk no doubt. However, there a slew of other equally excellent bands popping up throughout the whole island at what seems like a weekly basis. Galway’s Drown are one such group. Named after a Smashing Pumpkins song and only forming late last year, the level of confidence and familiarity they play with on their self titled debut EP,…

  • Inbound: BDBR

    September 27, 2016 - By 

    Following a several-odd year nadir for Northern Irish music, it looks once more like there’s an emergent wave of genuinely interesting Northern acts influenced by a whole new set of cult favourites. BDBR is a bedroom project and the pseudonym under which singer-songwriter Ryan Mills operates, armed only with his telecaster, pedalboard and back-of-the-throat vocal tones. So far, he’s got a five track EP of demos so far, none of which reach the 3 minute mark, recorded in his bedroom and mixed by Robocobra Quartet’s Chris Ryan. His sound, he tells us “came around through trial and error and playing…

  • Inbound: FONDA

    September 23, 2016 - By 

    FONDA are the sound of power pop having grown older and that bit more cynical: imagine Big Star replacing tickets to the dance with overpriced bars and the inevitable morning-after introspection. There’s a sense of displacement and longing that characterises the band’s music, a possible result of the group’s varying backgrounds, with band members Liam O’Connor, Laura Kelly and Patrick Burke hailing from Limerick, Galway and Glasgow respectively. The trio have been performing together since 2015, releasing debut EP Social Services that August. It’s four songs tackled everyday ennui with assured understatement, both in O’Connor’s lyrics and baritone delivery, and…

  • Inbound: Brand New Friend

    September 8, 2016 - By 

    As the seasons inevitably turn and summer ambles into autumn, sometimes you need music to augment the mood and bridge that interim between the party and the comedown; the wind-down from long evenings boozing by the canal and the sinking realisation that it all has to finish up sometime. That seems as good a time as any to welcome a brand new friend into your life – four of them, more accurately – playing a blend of sad and raucous, joyous and melancholic songs about love and other less important things. Initially Taylor Johnson’s solo endeavour, the addition of his…

  • Inbound: Rory Grubb

    September 2, 2016 - By 

    Rory Grubb may be a singer-songwriter, but he isn’t exactly the kind of artist that term brings to mind. Third album Water House, his first in seven years – apparently “pieced together in rural Kilkenny between 2010 and 2012, over two very cold winters, in buildings without insulation” but only now seeing the light of day – amplifies the idiosyncrasies of previous album Sketches From The Big Sleep and brings them closer to the surface, as he mixes acoustic and electronic instrumentation along with homemade instruments like his impressive electric ceramophone – an array of ceramic pots spanning the musical…

  • Inbound: THUMPER

    September 1, 2016 - By 

    Dichotomies can define a band or artist throughout their bodies of work, their lives and their legacies. When things beloved by musicians run in contrast, the results are often frightening, awkward, yet compelling and almost always (sometimes accidentally) in the spirit of their time. Case in point: Dublin quintet THUMPER’s most recent release ‘Magnum Opuss’, thrown out via Little L Records on that label’s customary lash of handmade tapes, as well as via Bandcamp. Sonic Youth might serve as an obvious reference point, but the no-wave tendencies are tempered by a way with hooks best exemplified in ‘Dan the Man’,…

  • Inbound: Girlfriend

    August 31, 2016 - By 

    There is an overriding sense of darkness and foreboding surrounding Dublin’s lo-fi punks Girlfriend. With song titles like ‘kill them all (your feelings)’ and ‘the stuff you think about late at night and never tell anyone about’ which adorn their debut EP 3AM rituals, it’s clear that on the surface anyway, this band have shrouded themselves in this veil of death and misery through which no light can pierce. As the four-piece say, their music is to be consumed “at 3AM while sitting in a circle of salt surrounded by black candles casting spells on enemies/friends/local fiends/lovers”. Tongues are firmly…

  • Inbound: Slouch

    August 2, 2016 - By 

    Perhaps it’s just us, but we’re noticing a serious – and welcome – islandwide resurgence on the scuzzy alternative rock front as of late, with Dublin way ahead of the pack. This month, it’s young trio Slouch, who come from Knocklyon, on the outskirts of the city, just before the mountains – and they sound like it. They released their debut EP, Feminine Elbows, last year, which boasts the sound of a desert contained within a garage in the ‘burbs. They’re carried with the just-loose-enough, gut-led rhythmic swagger of Physical Graffiti-era Zeppelin with the influences of a subsequent three decades…