A scan of the Vicar St. floor revealed an impressive variety of age and gender, from teenage girls to 70-year-old men. It’s hard to think of a recent concert in Dublin that could have brought together so diverse a demographic spread and no other show could have delivered such a staggering amount of quiffs.
Even…

The grounds of Malahide Castle weren’t so much bathed in purple on Saturday night as they were lightly speckled with maroon: if nothing else, you won’t see a larger gathering of Galway GAA shirts in a Dublin park this summer.
Prince’s first visit to Ireland in nine years, following the last-minute cancellation of his Croke…

The Irish summer’s Murphy-like tendency to throw up the worst weather at the most inopportune moment led to the calculated gamble of hosting this summer’s Marlay Park concert series under cover of a marquee tent. With the sun splitting the rocks all day on Saturday, it’s only natural that many would forego the pleasures of…

The Whatmans started out as a covers band in Navan before making the leap to original music, and their humble beginnings are clearly evident on their debut release, Fire Up the Masses…. Each of the album’s 10 tracks sounds familiar, from the John Squire-like guitar melodies that populate just about every track to the

If ever there were a conclusive argument against the focus group approach to making pop music, it’s laid bare with ‘Run the World (Girls),’ the first single from Beyoncé’s handily-titled fourth album, 4…. In theory, the single should have been a surefire hit: it borrows the irresistible dancehall beat and hook from Major Lazer’s

There is a tendency within rock music circles to unquestioningly applaud the creation of a concept album, a sort of goodwill that doesn’t quote seem to translate when an artist attempts a disco crossover or a duet with Fergie. 45 years on from Sgt. Pepper…, the rock concept record is still considered a uniquely

Eyebrows were raised and re-raised in January when Essex singer-songwriter Jessie J landed the top spot on BBC’s Sound of 2011 poll. While the poll is more an educated guess than a sound bet – previous winners included such underwhelming talents as The Bravery and Mika – it was still unusual that it should be…

It’s always a big event when Gogol Bordello roll into town. The transatlantic folk punks – whose membership is derived from seven different countries, centering on New York City, with mainman Eugene Hutz hailing from Ukraine – tend to skip these shores on their rare trips across the pond. One performance at Oxegen (in 2007)…

Outside the realms of hardcore punk and hip hop, band names are rarely supposed to be taken literally. So it’s not terribly surprising to learn that Noah and the Whale aren’t exactly the trans-species minstrel duo their title might suggest. What is surprising is that – at least for a band consisting primarily of humans…

Mere hours before they take to the stage in Dublin’s O2, bassist Mikey Way and guitarist Frank Iero of New Jersey punk-pop icons My Chemical Romance chatted to State about the inspiration behind their fourth studio album, Danger Days: the True Lives of The Fabulous Killjoys…. Though the gig itself was far from

Though his debut album is only now seeing light this side of the Atlantic (Doo Wops & Hooligans… was released stateside in October), fellow Gleeks will by now be well aware of omnipresent Hawaiian pop mercenary Bruno Mars. Doowops’s lead single ‘Just the Way You Are’ and album track ‘Marry You’ were the showcase

Dubliner Stefan Murphy, better known as The Mighty Stef, could hardly have timed the release of his latest single with any more precision. ‘We Want Blood,’ the lead track from his third album TMS & the Baptists…, dropped in mid-November, just as Europe and the markets finally called time on the government’s attempted recovery.

There has always been an element of melodramatic theatre in My Chemical Romance’s music – their very first album opened with a rickety recording of the Spanish classical piece ‘Romanza’ – but it only became readily apparent to most with the release of The Black Parade… in 2006. The sprawling, macabre-themed concept record was recorded

Cee Lo Green’s been at this juncture of popular music before. The ubiquity of ‘Fuck You’ mirrors his success with Gnarls Barkley’s ‘Crazy,’ the 2006 leftfield hit whose infectious melody and razor-sharp electro-soul production masked a dark and troubled lyric. ‘Fuck You’ is nowhere near as subtle – and is explicit in every sense of…