• Video Premiere: Malojian – Let Your Weirdness Carry You Home

    October 24, 2017 - By 

    Released last week, Let Your Weirdness Carry You Home by Stephen Scullion’s Malojian is a record firmly rooted in place and visual memory. With the seeds of this latest outing being sown when BFI and Northern Ireland screen approached Scullion about playing a show at a coastal location with coastal-themed visuals from their archive to be used as a backdrop, Scullion soon took to the idea of recording some new material to go alongside those visuals. Teaming up with long-time collaborator, Belfast filmmaker and photographer Colm Laverty, the videos for LYWCYH’s lead singles ‘Some New Bones‘ and ‘Ambulance Song‘ presented symbiotic visual narratives that…

  • Premiere: Bear Worship – Frequency

    October 20, 2017 - By 

    Back in June we were very pleased to premiere one of our favourite Irish albums of the year, WAS by Dublin’s Karl Knuttel AKA Bear Worship. A release we called “a prismatic traipse of melodically rich, compositionally ambitious alt-pop” the album peaked on various tracks, not least new single ‘Frequency’. Backed by b-side ‘Post Geographical Orientalism – a beautifully woven, Grandaddy-esque effort – the single is a layered, synth-washed gem that sees Knuttel’s beatific vocal take centre-stage. We’re all over this, and you should be, too. Frequency/Post Geographical Orientalism by Bear Worship

  • Interview: Come On Live Long

    October 18, 2017 - By 

    Ahead of playing the final RHA Hennessy Lost Friday on the year on Friday night, we talk to Louise Gaffney from Dublin indie/alternative-pop maestros Come On Live Long about progression, perfectionism, influence and the importance of enjoying the moment. Go here for more info about the show. Hi, Louise. Your second album, In The Still, was released back in May. It’s right up there with the best Irish albums of the year. How was the songwriting process for this one? The songwriting process for In The Still was a little different to how it had been for the previous record. The…

  • Half Forward Line – The Back of Mass

    October 18, 2017 - By 

    Power-pop act Half Forward Line are a Galway-based trio of Irish garage rock relative luminaries, spearheaded by the self-deprecative lyrical mastery of So Cow‘s Brian Kelly. Their debut album, The Back of Mass, comes out on October 27. The band also features Oh Boland‘s Niall Murphy on bass and Ciaran O’Maoláin on drums – who, incidentally, recorded the album over the course of two days in the lounge of a derelict rural Irish pub. As ever, Kelly delivers eleven tightly-woven slices of life in an increasingly-disconnected world that is modern Ireland, typically banged out in under a half-hour. Dizzying, anxious bubblegum pop and the pristine chord progressions Teenage Fanclub somehow never wrote hyperactively lay the path…

  • Album Premiere: Mark Loughrey – Treppenwitz

    October 13, 2017 - By 

    Translated roughly as ‘staircase wit’, Treppenwitz is a loaded word; an evocation of regret, of longing and succumbing to overanalysis of what could have been said. Best left to the overthinkers among us, the phenomena is the source of much of our great art, writing & comedy, and it’s something Mark Loughrey has mined and left to rumination across a breadth of the characters and worlds explored on his debut album. Whilst rooted in the wistful yearning of Nick Drake or Jeff Buckley and the kind of indie-folk that regularly wins the NI Music Prize, it’s propelled by a fearlessness to follow the creative impulse –…

  • ¡NO! – Sediments

    October 9, 2017 - By 

    Dublin experimental project ¡NO! have been steadily drip-feeding us their improvised limited edition CDs and cassettes gradually over the last three years, as well as their regular Concrete Soup nights, which feature live collaborations with internationally-renowned artists. Their tenth release in that time is Sediments, released through Little Gem Records. In the same way the late ’60s & early ’70s led Berliners to fluctuate between their own interpretations of psychedelia, jazz & blues, and making experimental, deeply ambient electronic without pause to consider genre restraints and pay heed primarily to creative impulse -leading to the movement known broadly as krautrock, ¡NO! have paid similar heed to expectation and convention. Although…

  • Malojian – Let Your Weirdness Carry You Home

    October 7, 2017 - By 

    While there’s been no shortage of first-rate albums released on these shores this year, Let Your Weirdness Carry You Home by Malojian is a special kind of triumph. The self-produced follow-up to the Stephen Scullion-fronted threesome’s Steve Albini-produced This Is Nowhere, the album is a masterfully mottled effort, veering between wonderfully wistful folk tales, Motorik rhythms, found sound and a whole gamut of forward-thinking textures and ideas. And featuring the likes of Joey Waronker (Beck, R.E.M., Atoms For Peace, Roger Waters), Gerry Love (Teenage Fanclub), and Jon Thorne of Yorkston, Thorne & Khan, the collaborative backbone of the release runs parallel with Scullion’s open-ended, subtly experimental…

  • The Bonk – The Bonk Seems To Be A Verb

    October 7, 2017 - By 

    Having released a string of stellar singles over the last two years, Dublin & Cork-based experimental, orchestral, psychedelic garage rock project The Bonk released their debut LP, The Bonk Seems To Be A Verb, on October 6. Recorded over the last few years while the outfit have been together, it’s released on cassette through Drogheda arts & culture collective Thirty Three – 45. Although the project is based around the compositions of frontman Phil Christie – of O Emperor, the substantial cast of musicians credited on the album includes some of the island’s most respected artists & virtuosi: Phil O’ Gorman – Guitar Brendan Fennessy – Drums Jim…

  • Stream: Wyvern Lingo – Out Of My Hands

    October 6, 2017 - By 

    We’ve watched the rise and rise of Bray trio Wyvern Lingo with absolute glee over the last couple of years. As well as announcing their first Irish show of 2018 at Number Twenty Two at Dublin’s Grand Social on February 23, the trio have just unveiled the masterful ‘Out Of My Hands’. Brimming with the band’s increasingly inimitable brand of harmony-driven alt-pop, it is also the band’s most political effort to date. Speaking about the track, Karen from the band said, “’Out of My Hands’ was inspired by a man I met in a pub, the night of the Home Sweet…

  • Stream: A.S. Fanning – Never Been Gone

    October 6, 2017 - By 

    Self-produced and recorded in his current home of Berlin, Dublin singer-songwriter A.S Fanning will release his debut album, Second Life, via Proper Octopus Records on October 13. Having made a dent via his debut single ‘Carmelita’ back in late 2015 – a carefully-crafted, almost Cohen-esque track we said “harked back whilst preserving a very present-day resonance” – new single ‘Never Been Gone’ is a deceptively refined effort, whose lilting folk-pop effulgence blends organ, fingerpicked guitar, a sweet little whistle solo and more over three minutes. Few artists can make music with two chords go a long way – Fanning makes…