Reinventing the Wheel by The David Nelligan Thing I rarely post more often than once a month nowadays, which is clearly just how it's going to be from now on. The advantage in this is knowing that when I do emerge to point towards a song and go "wow!" (which is basically what I've been doing here for the past eight years and one month), you know that the song is worth listening to. This is such a song. It spins and settles and hops about the room and, initially, seems far to cheery to sit [...]
Copper House by The Revival Hour The vocals start off a little bit shrill in this one, a ghost in a house party of night and glass and liquid and full of people, striving to have its haunt heard. The voice twists and turns, it implores for affection and vaunts its own dominance at the same time. It is two sides of a relationship. Drums break down the door like the secret police, people flee into the winter's night, and things take a fairly dramatic turn for the catchy. The song starts to collapse like a [...]
I was busy this year. I've noticed that in the same way the work you need to get finished expands to fill the time you allot to it, the music you want to listen to contracts to fit into the time you try to set aside for it. I'm sure there are things I've missed, but I'm glad I didn't miss any of these songs, each of which is honest-to-God special, and kept my world a little nicer this year. [...]
Peter Broderick - I've Tried Peter Broderick remains one of the finest songwriters that I know, and what he does here is both refreshingly new and yet, at the same time, of the same cloth as his previous achievements. It's heavy and blurry and feels a bit like wandering around in the morning, before your eyes are fully open, before the mist lifts. It's the comfort of warm clothes and heavy boots. It's the weird human desire to apply narrative, the sense of story that comes if you're there to witness a day's sunrise and [...]
I have two interpretations of this song. The first derives from the fact that the first time I heard it, I was watching the video at the same time. The video is evocative and merciless. It details the life of Terrence Bliss, in a series of excessively cruel scenes in which we see how truly clutching and self-sustaining someone's loneliness and isolation can be. Terrence displays almost no emotion, and seems to the very picture of alienated resignation. Terrence is a piece of driftwood steadily chipped and drowned and wasted and weakened and toyed with by the sea. [...]
NO are perhaps my favourite discovery of the year. They may tread on ground that has been broken by others, but what they're building there is a delight, a feast of catchy melodies and guitar lines, a creation imbued with urgent youth and city-dweller sadness. And damnit, they have great choruses. They're supporting Father John Misty in the Workman's Club tonight, and frontman Bradley was kind enough to respond to some questions over email in a very slightly tongue-in-cheek fashion. How are you? Fantastic thank [...]
The Luyas - Fifty Fifty Hallelujah, hello Luyas, I see you have a new album. It is cold and snowy and warm and brittle and wet and gentle and sweet and breathless and all the things good good music should be. It’s not the same as your last record. It has new sounds, and new noises, and it has a way of turning its neck when it looks at you like older music, wiser, less easily amused. There is just the right amount of fucking around. There are beautiful parts where Jessie’s voice careens around [...]
The Ambience Affair are celebrating the one year anniversary of the release of their debut, Burials, by making it free to download from their Bandcamp page for a limited time. This is great. The album is great . You would be silly not to avail yourself of their generosity. They're also cementing their status as one of the finest Irish bands of the moment by headlining HWCH this Friday night at the Button Factory. It should be marvellous.
Beat Radio - Dreaming Wide Awake I find it weird to live somewhere that is far from the sea. I feel at a disadvantage, like I haven't built up a relationship with that kind of world, like I'm not sure how to deal with that much land. It's not that I'm a swimmer or anything like that. I don't really like the water. But when it's not there, I feel it by its absence. I miss the ocean. It's good to have something so huge that you can't see the other side of it. You [...]
To celebrate the fifth anniversary of its release, Mumblin' Deaf Ro is offering his beautiful album The Herring and the Brine as a free download . It's well worth grabbing, not least for the stunningly wistful 'Brother Peter'. The album is a collection of folk songs that do not rely on small scale or lo-fi whimsy, but instead act like a garden pretending to be a forest. The themes are large, ranging from drowning men to failed Latin American presidents, and here, a doubtful priest. But despite this scale, it seems like an album that [...]
Irish summer songs are always great in their own special, tempered way. It's like we know what a summer song sounds like, we've heard them all our lives, but we sing them from a place of cold - the same way most Christmas songs are recorded in some sweltering city studio under July sun, and that uncomfortable closeness carries over to the music. The same way people sing love songs one way until they have their heart broken, and sing them a different, better way afterwards. This is a summer song by The Casanova Wave [...]
NO - There's a Glow This is a city song that's not for city people. I guess I mean someone still young - someone who grew up looking out the kitchen window as night settled over the nothing on the land, surrounded by fields and fields where everything that happened happened over years, underfoot, out of sight. Someone who had their home there, and then found themselves in the city, where night brings harsher light and louder noise, and many intriguing brands of fun. This song is someone looking for something to hold onto [...]
This song makes me think of things that belong in dreams. Not because it is surreal or absurd or anything like that, but because it is suited to a particular mood: a Sunday morning alone, half-awake, in a dream state. Dreams are populated by the everyday, just without the basic rules of real life. I sometimes dream of a world populated exclusively by people I know, and places I've been, and it's pretty nice. This song sings that kind of waking dream, where everywhere you go is somewhere you once were, with her. Every newspaper headline you see on the [...]
2011 was a quiet year here, but that's not because I didn't have any songs to love, or didn't listen to any new music, or because I don't love you. It's just that I've been busy working on all that other stuff that has nothing to do with love and songs, and also, all that other stuff that does. This is the sixth year I've done this list, and it's a little sparser. But the songs that made it here are worth your precious ear-time, every one of them. And if you feel there's one I missed, or you know [...]
Burials starts subtly - a mist of earnest vocals, rattly drums and sweet chord swells descends before being pierced by an angular (for want of a better word) power chord riff, that bursts in right where it's not expected. This is a pretty good way to start talking about the album, I think - right from the start, it challenges expectation and description alike. I don't mean to sound hyperbolic. I love this record, and which is something I guess should be clear before I go any further. Usually when you hear about something defying description, it [...]
<a href=" http://therevivalhour.com/trac k/hold-back-3">Hold Back by The Revival Hour</a> I've been waiting to hear the final version of this song for over a year, and I'm happy to say that what I heard before, though deeply impressive, seems less definitive now, like a bud beside a blooming rose. My first response was to wonder where in DM Stith's music had this expanse come from, and where he had learned to revel in it. On Heavy Ghost, a stretching blank night looms darkly, but here it has filled with glittering stars, that shine brighter the louder he sings. He's got the night [...]
Today we are lucky, because before finishing touring and taking a break for a while, Conor O'Brien has seen fit to bestow another gently-crafted sliver of beauty upon the world, this time accompanied by an equally affecting video, by Adrien Merigeau. You can download the song over at the Villagers site . It's beautiful.
Slow Club - Two Cousins I love this song for its rainbow synths, multicoloured, and descending violently, lurching out of the sky. I love it for its heartful bellow, simultaneously "Hold on!" and "Hell no!", and the notes that beg to be held a little longer, like the warm thing struggling into your arms as you sleep, someone you realise you've always hoped to to share your bed and dreams and silly sleepy moments with. It's like that really, vulnerable yet intense, happy yet fraught with desire and insecurity. This song somehow summons all [...]
In December of last year, Arcade Fire came to Dublin to play two nights at the O2. I was there for both of them, and I remain convinced that no other band can cause the same kind of joyous riot on stage that they do. On record, the band are exquisite. Live, they're even better; a raggedy, blistering mess, all deep breaths and impulsive dancing, intense stares and musical fireworks. If you were there the first night, you may well have met me. I was one of the volunteers for Partners in Health , [...]
Sandro Perri - Love and Light It's hot outside today. Like, shimmering pavements hot, and everyone's kinda quiet, and a little shocked and awed, if you know what I mean, because it turns out the moon is a girl. A pretty girl, all subtle sway and sexy cast glances, and she's strolling around like she owns the place, which maybe she does. I mean, if it turns out the moon is someone you'd very much like to go to bed with, who knows what else might be going on. I guess this is the [...]
the torture garden
Kanye West: Capa do novo álbum / Performance de “New Slaves” e “Black Skinhead” no SNL
Lana Del Rey – “Young and Beautiful (Madeaux Remix)”
Meet The Parents
