When Jackson Browne came calling in 1975, LA singer/songwriter Warren Zevon had just about given up on his musical dreams, having relocated to Spain with his new wife. All that was to change, however, with this Jackson-produced album the following year, which established Zevon as one of the finest songwriters of his generation (finally…

Describing music as being like Chinese water torture usually isn’t a good thing, but in the case of NYC, the fourth collaboration between Four Tet’s Hebden and classic jazz drummer Reid, conventional wisdom is turned on its head. This the six-track, 42-minute album builds and builds, each song being allowed to gain in momentum…

Very much from the Alanis Morissette / Fiona Apple / Avril Lavigne school of North American singer-songwriters, Katy Perry rose to prominence through breakthrough single, ‘I Kissed A Girl’ and that song perfectly encapsulates all that’s good and awful at the same time about the Californian pastors’ daughter’s brand of teen-punk. Ostensibly a heavily…

BAND OF HORSES have the unenviable task of coming on after MGMT, but the South Carolina-based six-piece seem totally unfazed by the experience. Sauntering on stage with minimal fuss, Ben Bridwell & Co. could easily be appearing on a Texas bar-room in 1978, such is the timeless, old school nature of what they do: but they do it so well.

VAMPIRE WEEKEND are a perfect festival band, treating a stuffed Green Room to a rip-roaring set that has the entire tent dancing, arms in the air. The New Yorkers seem to be having just as good a time as their fans, and that’s saying something.

After a ridiculously easy entry to the Punchestown site from State mansions in downtown Dublin we arrive with one minute to go to launch and manage to wind our way through strange cocktail stalls and Europop-blaring amusements over to the O2 stage to catch local openers FUTURE KINGS OF SPAIN.

With the release of Cómo Te Llama?, The Strokes guitarist has extended his solo output to two albums. Here we reveal all the juice that wouldn’t fit into the latest issue of State.

Neil Randall has it all: a beautiful wife (Bello), a lovely daughter and a well-paid job with one of Chicago’s biggest advertising firms. Unfortunately for him, his whole life comes tumbling down around his ears when Pierce Brosnan, playing against type as a villain, takes an unhealthy interest.

Written and recorded in a log cabin in Northern Wisconsin at the end of 2006, For Emma, Forever Ago, the debut album from Bon Iver (Justin Vernon) was initially released in a limited edition of just 500 copies. However, word-of-mouth saw the American indie-folkster striking a collective nerve (probably just below Devandra Banhart’s elbow),…

Legendary German director Werner Herzog chose to make his first English language movie about a subject he’s already tackled in his acclaimed 1997 documentary, Little Dieter Needs To Fly. It’s the true story of German-born, American-raised pilot Dieter Dengler (Bale), whose plane was shot down over Laos in 1965, while on a black ops mission to North Vietnam.

Nobody could ever accuse Elbow of over-immediacy. That said, having taken years over their debut album, Asleep In The Back, they’ve spat out the following two at two-year intervals and the title track of 2005’s Leaders Of The Free World hinted at a newfound sense of purpose.

You could be forgiven for expecting Falling Off The Lavender Bridge, the debut album from Lightspeed Champion (aka Dev from noisenik experimental terrorists Test Icicles), to be a prog-ish mosh-fest. You’d be very wrong indeed. But then nothing about this 21-year old multi-instrumentalist is conventional.
In person, Dev – Devonte Hynes to his mum…

You’d imagine it would be hard to lose something that has 18 legs, a combined weight of over 80 stones and more instruments than the Moscow Symphony Orchestra , but Dublin’s finest avant-garde instrumental music collective The Jimmy Cake have been conspicuous by their absence for half a decade.
Sure there was the odd…

Yet another young British soul diva, this time from Wales, 23-year-old Aimee-Ann Duffy has already been heralded as this year’s Amy Winehouse..