It’s tempting, when on the first listen of an eagerly-awaited album, to say that it’s the best thing a band have done. This sort of knee-jerk reaction works both ways: it can either hold up upon further listens; or it can prove to be misguided. I’ve ha …

The last time I was in Whelans, it was to see We Were Promised Jetpacks; I remark, once I get settled in for the Simone Felice Group’s show, that the atmosphere couldn’t be any more different now. For one thing, it is an all-seated gig; and for another …

  ‘Big Music’ is often used as a derogatory term, used to describe bands who write the sort of songs destined for stadia that have all been done before and mostly done better. In the case of Irish act The Plea, however, it describes their music pe …

We all have bands we loved who split. This Et Al were one of mine, and the unexpected nature of the announcement of their break-up was made all the more shocking by the fact that they had released their best material to date – the masterful Figure Eigh …

Writing music as catharsis isn’t a new thing by any stretch of the imagination, but sometimes its creators are left with little choice. Kurt Wagner was left completely devastated by the suicide of his fellow musician and close friend, Vic Chesnutt, on …

There are a lot of things I’ve done at gigs. For instance, due to me having a naturally nervous disposition, there have been a few times when I’ve almost gotten sick from nerves before going on stage. I’ve only played a handful (less than 30 or so over …

This London-based trio are very literal-minded, it seems: the band name should already attest to that. Then there’s the fact that while there are three people in the band, they’ve gone and named their second album after the Latin for a group of three. …

‘… We sequenced the entire album before I tackled the lyrics, which was a new process for us.’ This is what Cursive’s frontman, Tim Kasher, told me in my interview with him a few weeks back. ‘New processes’ are all over the band’s forthcoming seventh …

In a word, the new Cursive album is magnificent; I’m going to save my full verdict for my review next week, but first things first: a couple of weeks ago, I was offered the chance to interview one of my favourite songwriters, the (in my opinion) legend …

Four years. That’s how long we’ve waited for a proper new album from Nada Surf. Since then, the band have released one covers album, the palindromically-titled (and rather marvellous) ‘If I Had A Hi-Fi’, but the one thing everyone’s wanted the most is …

What’s in a name? Well, if the title of Casiokids’s second album is anything to go by, not all that much. The group are Swedish, and ‘Aabenbaringen over aaskammen’ roughly translates to “the revelation over the mountain;” as such, it’s a moniker more s …

Every so often, an album comes along and completely floors you. It may be because it was so unexpected; it may be because it is something that is moving on all different kinds of levels; and sometimes it may be because it is the sound of an artist’s tr …

Allow me to begin with a personal anecdote, if I may. It’s not like me to admit things like this so openly (not that I have a problem with the admission itself), but it’s rather relevant to the album I’m reviewing, and it’s this: I don’t believe in any …

There may be a few album openers from 2011 that are better than ‘About as Helpful as You Can Be Without Actually Being Any Help at All’, the wonderfully-titled first song on Dan Mangan’s latest album, ‘Oh Fortune’, but I doubt very much if they are any …

Photo by Alessio Michelini The Antlers/Little Green Cars – The Academy, Dublin, 17/11/11 Some bands don’t put very much into their live performances. Sometimes, you go to see a band and it’s almost like you should have stayed home and listened to the C …

It’s hard to get the balance right. This is something that applies to a lot of situations, and one of these is being in a band, particularly one that tries to do a number of different things, or in this case, straddle a number of different genres, all …

2011 has been breakthrough year for Benjamin Francis Leftwich. We sent our intrepid reporter Gareth O’Malley to catch up with him at his recent show in Dublin and pop a few questions about his tumultuous twelve months. So, to start with, this is the la …

It’s always worthy of note when a band member steps out on their own for a while and decides to do something different. Granted, Paul Wolinski choosing to undertake a solo jaunt at this time could have been slightly better timed, as his band, 65daysofs …

Some things aren’t meant to work together, and this is especially true in music. One would expect certain things to go well together, and others to fail miserably. A collaboration between Korn and Skrillex would be expected to be complete gash – and th …

The bare-bones approach is often a risky one. When songs aren’t embellished in any way, the results can often be underwhelming, and in some cases, flat-out uninteresting. On the other hand, however, a band’s songcraft can be easily highlighted if they …