EP Review: The Clockworks

Music Reviews Thu, Mar 24, 2022

FEW SONGS capture the flux and white noise of our times quite like ‘Endgame’, the ironically positioned opening track of the debut EP from Galway band The Clockworks.

EP Review: NOBRO

Music Reviews Thu, Mar 03, 2022

IT BEGINS with a gospel choir, all harmonies, hand claps, and finger clicks, and an immaculate delivery of the lines, “I spent my whole life running away…”

Album Review: Metronomy

Music Reviews Tue, Feb 22, 2022

NO SONG, for me, captures this post-Covid, end of almost all restrictions, return to ‘normal’ quite like Metronomy’s ‘It’s Good To Be Back’.

Album review: Alt-J

Music Reviews Thu, Feb 10, 2022

IT WAS once said of the Rolling Stones: “They wanted to be American. How British is that?” Something of the same could be said of Alt-J - at least in regards to their new album.

Album review: The Divine Comedy

Music Reviews Thu, Jan 27, 2022

FOR AN artist with a very definite, almost idiosyncratic, sound, style, and identity, Charmed Life reminds us that Neil Hannon’s influences and range are both broad and diverse.

Album review: Cat Power

Music Reviews Thu, Jan 20, 2022

IN MOST cases, a covers album is a stop-gap in an artist’s career, a point where they take stock before plotting their next move. Other times it is simply an easy way to meet a contractual obligation.

BEST ALBUMS OF 2021

Music Reviews Thu, Dec 16, 2021

1. Iron Maiden - Senjutsu (Parlophone)
Forty-one years after their debut, Maiden are still operating at the highest level. Few bands of their vintage can still create masterpieces, but with this sombre meditation on war and its consequences, Maiden deliver yet another masterwork in a discography with few equals.

Album review: Can

Music Reviews Thu, Dec 02, 2021

BY 1975, Can still had gas in the tank, but their best years were already appearing in the rear view mirror. Proof of both can be found in this live set from that year.

Album review: Oasis

Music Reviews Thu, Nov 18, 2021

IN AN era where bands like Foals and Biffy Clyro can play to large audiences, but only after many albums and many years of working their way up the ladder, Oasis in 1996 proves LP Hartley’s dictum, “the past is a foregin country, they do things differently there”.

Album review: Pip Blom

Music Reviews Thu, Nov 11, 2021

THEY LOOK as if they should be the definitive Twee-Indie band, but looks are deceiving. There is grit and heft in the songs of this Dutch quartet.

Album review: Billy Bragg

Music Reviews Thu, Oct 14, 2021

FROM HIS earliest days with ‘The Milkman of Human Kindness’ and ‘Between The Wars’, few artists have possessed Bragg’s ability to write songs possessing intelligent political commentary and a deep, humane, empathy.

Album review: Mick Flannery and Susan O’Neill

Music Reviews Thu, Sep 09, 2021

WHAT DO you get when you combine one of the finest contemporary songwriters in the country with one of Irish music’s best kept secrets?

Album review: Whipping Boy

Music Reviews Thu, Sep 02, 2021

I AM old enough to remember when Whipping Boy were Jesus and Mary Chain wannabes, and their utter transformation a couple of years later as witnessed on a grandstanding performance on The Late Late Show.

Album review: Villagers

Music Reviews Thu, Aug 19, 2021

FEVER DREAMS is expansive, ambitious, and cinematic in scope, fusing the many disparate strands of Conor J O’Brien’s music into one entity. It is also the oddest album of his career.

‘After the Movie’ - Partland releases new single

Music Reviews Wed, Aug 04, 2021

‘AFTER THE Movie’, the new single from Galway singer-songwriter Partland, is released today, Wednesday August 4, and is accompanied by a wonderful animated video.

Album review: LUMP

Music Reviews Thu, Jul 29, 2021

THE SECOND album from LUMP - singer-songwriter Laura Marling, and Mike Lindsay of folktronica band Tunng - is, as Marling says, about “desires running wild”.

Album review: David Kitt

Music Reviews Mon, Jul 12, 2021

NECESSITY IS the mother of invention, as the old saying goes, and it certainly applies to 20, what might be called a ‘new/old’ album from singer-songwriter David Kitt.

Album review: The Goon Sax

Music Reviews Thu, Jul 08, 2021

THE THIRD album from the Aussie indie-pop trio is like the child in the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem: "When she was good, she was very good indeed, but when she was bad she was horrid.”

Album review: Dani Larkin

Music Reviews Tue, Jun 29, 2021

THE LATE, great, Mary McPartlan once noted that Irish folk music must not continually rest on a handful of standards, instead new material must be added to keep the form alive.

Album review: John Grant

Music Reviews Thu, Jun 24, 2021

JOHN GRANT has always been searingly honest, often brutally so, about himself in his songwriting, but Boy From Michigan may be his most personal yet. It is certainly his most political.

E-paper

Read this weeks E-paper. Past editions also available from within this weeks digital copy.