“It’s amazing/ God’s gone crazy.” With this statement, The Cujo Family open their second album ‘Stories Of Ruin’. It’s certainly not the last time a higher power is evoked over the course of this release, and one rarely spoken of in exalted tones; at worst a malicious presence, at best an indifferent one. Hailing from Wicklow, the band blend country, [...]

Based in Belfast, though hailing from Derry, five-piece band The Twenty inhabit the ‘punkier end of rock’n’roll’ as they say themselves. Their debut EP ‘Camarilla’ is a no frills venture that recalls the best of the punk and New Wave bands, with a forthright lyrical slant throughout. Songs ignite, and charge towards their finale without exception, driven by a unified [...]

Lucinda Williams at Vicar Street, Dublin on Sunday 12th May 2013 Lucinda Williams has long been held in high regard among her fellow musicians and fans, and while never receiving the commercial successes of contemporaries like Emmylou Harris or Mary Chapin Carpenter, her career has spanned almost thirty-five years so far. The Louisiana songwriter’s last release was in 2011 with ‘Blessed’, [...]

It’s the end of the current tour for Fang Island, who have been doing the rounds over the preceding weeks aided and abetted by No Spill Blood. Hailing from Rhode Island, Fang Island specialise in a type of infectious, no frills guitar music that marks them out as the greatest band on earth. Okay, they’re not the greatest band on [...]

It’s now five years since actress Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward teamed up to release She & Him – ‘Volume 1’, a breezy and accomplished collection of country, retro pop and doe-eyed soul penned largely by Deschanel, with sympathetic arrangements by Ward. That release and the subsequent ‘Volume 2’ seemed at once familiar, from the Bacharach inflected lovelorn slant to [...]

The Spills hail from Wakefield, Yorkshire, but you would be hard-pressed to pin the four-piece down to any geographical location between there and the west coast of America. The band already have a few releases under their belt – ‘Smoke Signals’ in 2010, ‘Occam’s Razor’ in 2011, and a split single released last October with label-mates Runaround Kids. That single [...]

Michael Rother at the Village, Dublin on Monday 29th April 2013 Heads nod in 4/4 time and all eyes are trained on the four men at work onstage. It isn’t quite a capacity crowd for Michael Rother – multi-instrumentalist of Neu! Harmonia, Kraftwerk for a spell, and solo artist in his own right – but it isn’t far off. This [...]

Country singer, writer, raconteur, songwriter, politician and yarn-spinner par excellence Kinky Friedman – the Kinkster to those in the know – is thirty shows in with three to go on his current ‘Bipolar World Tour’. The scene in Whelan’s is intimate and relaxed – all seated, a few bodies propping the bar, another few holding up the walls, and the [...]

Our previous encounter with London’s King Charles was at last year’s Castlepalooza festival, when Charles Costa and cohorts played what turned out to be one of the most crowd-grabbing, riotous and downright fun-filled sets of the weekend. Once of Adventure Playground, a band who did the rounds with Laura Marling and Noah & The Whale, Costa then took on his [...]

Deerhunter have certainly travelled a long way from the initial dark, dense bludgeoning of their 2005 debut ‘Turn It Up, Faggot’. Sharing more in common with 2007’s ‘Cryptograms’ and the sonic wanderings of Ariel Pink, ‘Monomania’ retains the outsider edge that typifies main man Bradford Cox’s output, while stepping back from the cleaner production sound of predecessor ‘Halcyon Digest’. This, [...]