If there’s one artist that can be held up as a prime example of ignoring the lure of fame and fortune, but instead simply doing what he loves, it’s Rodney Smith.
The throaty 39-year-old MC has now relocated to Sheffield from South London and his fifth album proper sees him continue his habit of poking…

These days, the de rigueur approach to a cutting edge sound is taking pop music you adore – music that transports you to a time of young lust, sweat and R.Kelly – and digitally manipulating it into a format that, if it still existed, would have Plan B magazine fizzing all over whatever is the…

If Sofia Coppola’s woozy Lost in Translation… painted an intoxicating, melancholic picture of loneliness in a bustling metropolis then Gold Panda has now recreated that same vibe on record. This is about as emotional, timeless and narrative-driven as electronic music, or any music for that matter, gets.
The Essex-raised remix workhorse for the likes of

Sprouting from the foundations of previous underground projects [Post-Foetus] and gorgeous ambient venture Geotic, 21-year-old Will Wiesenfeld has blossomed into something with a sound so current you could stick it in a bun and complain about the spelling later.
Baths is utterly absorbing with its stomach-tingling falsettos and choppy, unwieldy sampling punctuated by outside-the-lines clatters…

Is this one of the only National Concert Hall performances where, had they opted to fill the pre- performance time with a bit of Animal Collective or Burial, most of the crowd would have whooped and hollered with bohemian delight (or secretly pleased, chin-stroking indifference)? Possibly. On a hot day in an even hotter concert…

There’s something devastating about the broken lonesomeness of Matthew Houck’s voice, the instrument that forms the fulcrum of the Phosphorescent sound.
With five LPs and one EP to his name – and showing a similar skill to Will Oldham – Houck clearly has no problem graduating from self-recorded, heart-breakingly personal work (as on 2007′s Pride…

Following the flurry of lo-fi, fuzz -n’ buzz bands that forced their way into the earholes of many a self-respecting music nerd last year – Wavves, Nodzzz, Best Coast, Crystal Stilts and others of that ilk – Whelan’s once again finds itself playing host to a painfully-hip, cooler-than-thou, reverb-drenched outfit; though Dum Dum Girls are…

Claiming Milwaukee, Wisconsin as their current base, Worrier is the kind of band that fit perfectly into the Richter canon.
There’s the de rigeur dance-rock percussion and noodling guitars alongside a smorgasbord of effects, echoes, chirps, chants, screeches, layers and erratic timing; or as an interview with Japanese magazine New Audiogram puts it: ‘While changing…

It’s unlikely that this year will see a more aptly-named musician than Gonjasufi. On A Sufi and a Killer…, Sumach Ecks AKA Gonjasufi (formerly of San Diego crew Masters of the Universe) has delivered a hugely experimental album that has something for everyone – as long as what everyone likes is crackly weed-infused mysticism,

‘Art rock’, no other term causes my heart to sink so low or my blood to boil so high. It filters through my brain in the same manner as “I don’t watch/own a television”, “Oh, that suits you but it wouldn’t suit me” or “I’ve seen U2 13 times; they’re such an amazing live band”.…

One of the more striking similarities between the apparently disparate genres of hip-hop and country- along with OCD levels of God-praising, drug-abuse and mother complexes – is the preoccupation with meeting one’s maker, settling scores and being -ready to die’, as one Christopher Wallace once proclaimed, a parallel that surely drew Def Jam co-founder and…

Listening to the music of Damien Lynch, AKA Sarsparilla, it’s a pretty quick mental (or aural) journey back to the 1980s where theme songs from M.A.S.K., Miami Vice, The Equalizer, Airwolf and the original TV show of V… (which I was never allowed to watch) featured as the soundtrack to a most-certainly-not-forgotten era.
Given our

Pre-release hyperbole can be a curse for many albums but sometimes, just sometimes, it’s not without merit. This time last year, Merriweather Post Pavilion… was being hailed as a masterwork, nay, the masterwork; the benchmark by which all future albums would be judged. Last month, sure enough, it was placed in the top three (mostly

It’s twinned with Seattle. It has given us cryptosporidium gushing from the water taps of the West. It produced the Saw Doctors – the most apposite band for a midday hangover at an open air festival you’re likely to stumble across. It’s also the city this hack calls home and now Galway gives you Dar…