..... merge in the run up to this year's World Cup in the form of the latest Indiecater Release! It's great to see some of our favourites amongst the 32 tracks here: Group A Cop On The Edge – Bafana Bafana Standard Fare – Vaya Vaya México! Showstar – Uruguay! The Very Most – Irlande Group B The Dirty 9s – Ballad of El Diego Grand Pocket Orchestra [...]
The bounciest little ball of fun in Irish music are back with a new single, two new members (Bobby - No Monster Club included) and a new album coming later this year. 'Basketballs' is the band's new digital-only release out on May 22nd through Pigeon Heart Records. It's 98 seconds of GPO's peculiar brand of Fisher Price Pop. Tour Dates: May 20th – Roisin Dubh, Galway May 22nd - Single launch Twisted Pepper, Dublin August 1st – Indiependence Festival, Mitchelstown [ [...]
Wounds All this week, we're having guest posts from various people involved in different strands of Irish music - record shop owners, writers, bloggers, promoters, radio presenters, bands and more, telling us what Irish bands or artists they are really into right now. Karl McDonald is the author of the excellent Those Geese Were Stupified music blog as well a writer for Totally Dublin and a sporadical presenter of The Analogue Hour on 2XM. 1. Grand Pocket Orchestra [...]
What a super line-up for this one day festival happening on March 3rd. It's €35 for NUIM students and staff and €45 for us non Maynooth students. Over 3 stages and during 12 hours of music you will hear the likes of: The View, The Magic Numbers, Duke Special, Mick Flannery, Sidney Samson, The Coronas, Saccade, Neosupervital, The Chapters, Grand Pocket Orchestra, and Mundy! When you consider the Triners is asking for €78 for this .... I think the organisers are doing a super job for The Gathering! [...]
A list of events taking place over the next seven days in Dublin. Stand outs for me this week are The Antlers (explains pic), Florence and her Machine, Grand Pocket Orchestra Floating Points and Duke Dumont. Tuesday 1st December - Julian Plenti @ The Academy (€33 ) Wednesday 2nd December - Rodrigo Y Gabriela - The Academy (€30) - Phantom Music Quiz @ The Sugar Club (€50 table of 5) [...]
This weekend is an immense weekend for Irish music in terms of the future. As we all know we can only have good independent music festivals if they have the ability to make money. Here's hoping all four festivals this weekend breaks even and continues into the future! Le Cheile - Oldcastle, Meath July 31st - Aug 2nd. There's a free gig on the Sunday featuring Funeral Suits and Neosupervital amongst many others that I'm looking forward to. I also got tickets to Heritage Centre and Ian Whitty for [...]
Isn't weird now that there are practically no outlets for Irish music videos, 2009 has seen some great homemade videos coming our way? Fight Like Apes, Grand Pocket Orchestra, Villagers and Lines Drawing Circles have all made decent forays in the visual stimulation department. The Ambience Affair's debut EP is a nice first chapter for the Meath/Dublin band. They have dates upcoming in Galway (9th), Belfast (13th), Dublin (16th) and Mullingar (28th). After the jump a video from another Irish band we haven't heard much by for a while. I [...]
(via Analogue ) Directed by Luke Franklin and Deirdre O'Toole. Grand Pocket Orchestra. If you like this try: Grand Pocket Orchestra - Make Happy War EP Grand Pocket Orchestra are deadly
While we were producing issue 10 of State, we asked the bands featured to give us an MP3 to us so we could put our money where our mouths are. So here for your enjoyment is a 13 track compilation from some of the best new Irish bands and artists (as single listening or in a ZIP) which we expect to be making a good noise in 2009. The issue is embedded below (click to enlarge) so you can read and listen at the same time. Hah - the magic of multimedia! [...]
- A while back I wrote about Autumn Owls debut EP Insomnia Lodge . A new one from them popped into my letterbox a couple of weeks ago and much of what I thought about them still holds. They remain the in thrall of Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and I don't mean that in a bad way, it's just the first point of comparison that pops into my head when I listen to them. I have wondered from time to time why a band that's both so critically loved and reasonably commercially successful has [...]
At the end of 2008 spam is making a comeback. That's the hideous and cheap meat product as opposed to the email variety (which I'm sure was never popular in the first place). I bought some recently to see what the future is going to taste like. Not good folks, not good. Here are the songs I enjoyed throughout a year full of global misery. I jigged their order around all afternoon, but in all honesty, bar one or two at the top of the pile the order means little. I can't say whether it was a good overall year [...]
GRAND POCKET ORCHESTRA I count the odds as highly unlikely that Grand Pocket Orchestra is a band which formed through a notice in a supermarket or a guitar shop or a parish hall. It's obvious that the thing which connects this 'riot pop' quartet is not a slim field of common influences ("everything from the Foos to the Chilis!") nor an impulse to combat boredom in the suburban evenings. Instead, I can imagine the four young hooligans of the group having being beamed down from outer space like [...]
This new EP from GPO prove why they are one of the better new Irish bands around at the moment. Three reasons. They are 1. Fun. 2. Fun. 3. More fun. They write catchy indie-pop songs that are under two-minutes and feature xylophones - an instrument with a special place in my heart ever since I learnt how to spell the word from an early age. I'm really enjoying it. Thanks GPO. Grand Pocket Orchestra - Using the Body Get Make Happy War from Downloadmusic.ie [...]
Grand Pocket Orchestra - Make Happy War EP The follow-up to their 'Little Messy' single and their other EP Odd Socks, finds GPO harnessing their talents into the unique sound suggested on those previous releases. In the same way as similiarly foot-obsessed 'Odd Socks' opener 'Ballet Shoes' utilises the cuteness factor in just under two minutes. Xylophone solos and taut guitar riffs combine with the singer's distinctive shrill voice which may annoy some (as we suggested before ) but this is so playful (see 'Bite the Head Off Italy') that you could be playing [...]
I'm still recovering from the Guinness and jetlag from last weekend's HARD WORKING CLASS HEROES FEST in Dublin, Ireland, but as promised, here's a short recap on the unsigned bands and young artists that were featured. I finally got some hang time with a band I've blogged about previously, CLASS OF 1984 . Team hairdo have returned from London, back home to Cork to lock themselves away in the chicken shack again to write more demos and focus on the song craft. Their set [...]
I had no intentions of going out over the weekend but Friday somehow saw me in the sugar club at an IMRO showcase of new bands that included Betamax Format, Le Galaxie and Grand Pocket Orchestra. I've said it before and I'll say it again, the sugar club is an odd and inappropriate venue for a lot of the energetic indie-rock style acts that have recently ended up playing there. All those ascending rows of fixed tables can form a barrier between the audience and the band and lead to muted atmosphere at times, especially when the venue is not [...]
Marry the quirky melodies of Sydney's Gerling ('Get Go') with the 'where's it gone I liked that song' effervescence of Brighton's Brakes ('Radio') and you'll be at the gilded stage of Dublin's Grand Pocket Orchestra. Doesn't really matter if you've never heard of Gerling or Brakes (tut tut, you are missing out) though, Grand Pocket Orchestra have the charm and the songs to entertain you all by
... have a new EP, which is probably the most exciting six and a half minutes of EP I've heard so far this year. It's all kinds of brilliant fun, and this video for the title track 'Odd Socks' is exactly what I think the band sounds like, all colours flying about, and the good feeling of hearing a band that watched the same kid's programmes as you. Grand Pocket Orchestra - Radio They're also [...]
Hard Working Class Heroes festival 2007 takes place this weekend, in six venues within Harcourt Street's POD complex. There has never before been such an abundance of amazing Irish bands and - as many of them have yet to release albums - a festival like this is ideal for people to figure out what's awesome and what's awful. As well as showcasing hundreds of great tunes from this island, the weekend will feature a 'Scandinavian Invasion'. Although the Canadian showcase of last year's festival was of a slightly disappointing calibre, the foreign bands - probably en route to Ireland [...]
At the end of the month the sound of young Ireland will do its best to light up what has become the annual showcase of local talent known as Hard Working Class Heroes. It's quite possible that many of the acts will have ceased to exist by next year's event so over the next couple of weeks this site will try and put its money on the ones that are a good bet to succeed. First up is the trio known
2 U I Bestow
nialler9
State Magazine
Thrill Pier
Asleep on the compost heap
Hi-Fi Popcorn
FUTURE SOUNDS
mp3hugger
the torture garden
Hot Chip - Night & Day
Sleigh Bells - Demons (Official Music Video)
The Rains of Castamere by The National
A-Trak & Dillon Francis - "Money Makin'" (Official Video)
DIIV "How Long Have You Known?" (OFFICIAL VIDEO)
The Bee Gees – Tragedy (Equateur Remix)
Knickers - My Baby's Just A Baby EP review
Reptile Youth – Black Swan Born White
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The Ruskettes - Tell Me Why Review
