Supported by Small Hawk Orchestral, Dublin’s Venus Sleeps and Belfast’s TUSKS held a joint album launch at Belfast’s Voodoo on Saturday night. Photos by Liam Kielt.
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2015 has almost reached its midnight, and filthy, down-tuned rock n’ roll bands are sold in packs of six. The last five years have been particularly fertile for all things loud, heavy, and based firmly in the blues, and the excitement that would once volleyball around a new act has started to wane and sag. The summer of sludge is over. It is heartening, then, when a group self-identifying as heavy fuzz rock come around to remind you that earth-shuddering grooves are not seasonal, but all-year round. TUSKS from Belfast are one such group. Robbing the swampy casket of the late…
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From the outset, one of the elements of The Mad Dalton’s Little Belfry EP that stands out is its ability to conjure a sense of location. With its lumbering, laboured melodies and guttural sadness, the record constantly evokes images of this kind of ‘Last Chance Saloon’ in the American midwest. A darkness at the edge of town where the shallow husks of self-proclaimed saviours keep knocking back glass after glass before the sun creeps over the horizon to remind them that time is endlessly creeping forward and that the fire water won’t burn away what they’ve done. Their stories are…
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The cover stars of our final magazine issue of 2015, Girls Names have recently returned from yet another successful trek across Europe, touring their seriously accomplished new album, Arms Around a Vision. Aside from a show planned at Belfast’s Black Box on December 19, the Cathal Cully-fronted band will lay low until the New Year before setting off on another European mini-tour, culminating in three Irish dates and SXSW 2016. Tiding us over until then, the band have unveiled the Matthew Reed-directed video for ‘Reticence’, a highlight from their aforementioned third studio album in four years. Mirroring the song’s turbid bent and clanging power,…
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From the release of their BOMBEP EP back in April, unveiling double-single Iwazaru/Mizaru in October and several memorable shows in Belfast and further afield, it’s safe to say 2015 has been something of a breakthrough year for Robocobra Quartet. A quick scan through our copious posts on the Chris Ryan-fronted band – before and after featuring them as one of our 15 For ’15 – reveals that we’ve called them: chamber punk, jazz-inflected rap-punk, rapjazz-punk, jazz-rap-punk, jazz-punk and (our current personal favourite) “four-piece”. At this juncture, then, it’s say to safe we’ve reached a descriptor Endgame when it comes to even flirting with the idea of summing up…
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Set to feature on Belfast electronic imprint Extended Play’s EP50: STATEMENT OF INTENT – out Monday, November 30 – we’re pleased to premiere ‘B.K.I.T.B’ by Belfast producer Chris Hanna. Standing for ‘Broken Knuckles In The Bunatee’, Hanna said of the track: “‘Broken Knuckles In The Bunatee’ is my nod to the room in the Queens University Student’s Union. It regularly hosts Belfast’s rowdiest nights. When things kick off in the place the low ceiling always takes the brunt of it and I wanted to make something as a tribute to that exact moment. They’ve happened so frequently now they’ve started repairing…
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Four years and a string of short releases in, Belfast-based duo Dave Jackson and Fiona O’Kane AKA Runaway[GO] have cultivated a carefully considered, wonderfully delivered pop sound that has grown so innately distinctive that the release of their debut album, Alive, feels every week worth the wait. As much about poise and restraint as it is unabashed, nigh on ridiculously infectious melodic bombast, it’s a consistent and solid release (in both senses of the word) for the hotly-tipped twosome. Stream the album via Soundcloud now below.
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Currently based in Newcastle, North Coast alt-punk three-piece Good Friend have grown in leaps and bounds over the last couple of years. Having spent 2015 recording their forthcoming debut album, Ride The Storm, the Adam Carroll-fronted band have just re-emerged with ‘The Return of Fionn & The Fianna’, an equally urgent and anthemic new track that features on compilation Paper + Plastick; Welcome to the UK. Re-adapting stories from Irish Mythology to a contemporary context, it’s a strong and purposeful cut hinting at promising things for Ride The Storm. Check out the video for the track below.
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First shared last month – just over a year on from the release of the stellar Dreaming Tracks – we reckoned ‘Depth of Field’ by Belfast three-piece Sea Pinks was “yet another masterfully sanguine slice of melancholia from the Neil Brogan-fronted band, relating ambivalence and doubt in ways they mastered many moons ago.” Now the track – one of our favourite Sea Pinks’ tracks to date – has a video, which you can check out below. Sea Pinks’ new album, Soft Days, will be released via CF Records on January 8.
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Sticking to your guns and carving out your own path has many payoffs, least of all when it’s rewarded with some much-warranted recognition. Released via Lyte Records on Friday, Say & Do by North Coast singer-songwriter/ex-And So I Watch You From Afar guitarist Tony Wright AKA VerseChorusVerse and jazz maestro/drummer extraordinaire David Lyttle is a wonderfully instinctive and stripped-back collaboration that has seen the pair climb the charts this week, namely currently at 24 in the UK singer-songwriter charts, 28 in the UK new releases and no. 19 in the Irish charts. In an age when of varyingly soul-destroying, blitzkrieg-like PR campaigns, the duo’s…