Dublin Opinion

Damn, no time now to talk about the great Final Fantasy gig last night. What made it good was seeing how Owen Pallett was able to create loops of music, making samples from a quick saw of the violin, recording it with the push of a pedal and then playing more loops (violin and […]

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Final Fantasy plays Vicar Street, Dublin tonight.
Final Fantasy is Owen Pallett, a classically trained musician (and another bloody Canadian) who, because he was not careful in the classical sense, fell lopsided into popular music’s mainstream as the string arranger for Arcade Fire and Hidden Cameras. In 2006 though he brought out his second solo album […]

 

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Last night at the Animal Collective gig, amidst the first couple of blistering, electro-heavy tracks that blended into an intriguing wall of noise, Jim asked me if I was going to write a review of the gig.
‘Nah’, I said, ‘I was going to but Nialler9 is probably going to write one and his would be […]

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I put this up here, Jed’s Other Poem (Beautiful Ground) from Grandaddy’s album “The Sophtware Slump” (2000) for no other reason than I like it so much. I came across it while having a peak at iprefertheobscureremix blog - and very nice music blog it is too.
Although I had never seen this before I […]

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About a year ago I put on a CD single that I’d bought for a euro a year before on a whim in Freebird records. I hadn’t heard any of this band’s music although the name was naggingly familiar. It was one of those promo singles that Irish distributors give to music journalists with […]

 

 Who Could Win a Rabbit: Play Now | Play in Popup

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To coincide with the European release of BeHeMe on the 14th of June last, The Annuals are touring and are due to hit Whelan’s tonight. They’ve performed here before, providing support to the Flaming Lips* back in November in Vicar Street, but only managed a short set of perhaps fours songs from their debut. Going […]

 

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I have not felt as satisfied or as hungry as when I walked out of Tripod last Friday evening, the showcase offered up by the New Mexico gang of skinny maestros was short but very sweet. The euphoria of drunken devilment washed over my gaping mouth as the harmonies, melodies, voices and instrumentation combined magically […]

 

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 Le Moribond (Jacques Brel): Play Now | Play in Popup

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So Jim and I went to the Aliens gig last night and after a late start in the ever so small Crawdaddies, the band appeared looking like they’d raided the local Oxfam shop. Lead singer Gordon Anderson wore green luminous rimmed dark sunglasses under what looked like a Disco Stu hair piece, while keyboards expert […]

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The day before Paddy’s Day, Donagh rocked my world on these very pages by casually mentioning that the scrambled brains behind the original Beta Band was now compos mentis and had formed a band with the rump of the sadly-defunct aforementioned Beta Band.
Four days later, he again rocked my world, but this time in a […]

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I’ve been listening to the new Björk album Volta of late, and I must say I like it. One of Bjork’s musical virtues is that she always collaborates with interesting musicians. She does tend to cherry pick the hottest stars who happen to pepper the edge of the mainstream in an effort to create her […]

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