We took a little trip to keep up with Yeasayer’s tour as it hit Malmo and Copenhagen. A pleasant surprise was the support band, who happened to be one guy – and he was also manning the merch stand. Hush Hust – a tall and skinny, retiring, bearded type who, together with some backing…

German electronic maestro Ulrich Schnauss has been producing his own albums since 2001 when Far Away Trains Passing came out on Berlin’s City Centre Office label. Heavily influenced by My Bloody Valentine and other shoegaze bands such as Chapterhouse and Slowdive, his own output has always been every bit as atmospheric and spatial as…

The death has been reported of Mark Linkous from Sparklehorse, who apparently committed suicide yesterday, Saturday 6 March. Since 1995 Linkous has recorded as Sparklehorse as well as some producing stints with Daniel Johnston and on Nina Persson’s first solo album as A Camp. His own last album was 2006’s Dreamt for Light Years in…

State’s Faces of 2010 would not be faces at all, merely names, if we didn’t have some truly great photographers in our ranks who, out of pure passion for these bands, went out and shot them for us.
The creativity and quality of the photographs being produced by young photographers in Ireland today who…

It’s been about two years since Yeasayer released their impressive debut All Hour Cymbals, which tied psych and folk together and then threw in a sitar as well as some gospel sensibilities along the way. Basically, it was not worth categorising but broad in reach and in its musical arrangements. The band have an…

“Here, do you want to review this? Track two is pretty good.” That’s the kind of major decision making that sometimes goes on in the engine room of State but it belies the wisdom in the observation for track two, the title track incidentally, on Laura Veirs seventh studio album is magical and it…

Coming out of Canada and signed to the delicious Arts & Crafts label is Taylor Kirk, the core member of Timber Timbre. Under the guise of folk rock, the album is an acoustic blues album with a spooky malevolent streak running through it. Initially the echoed vocal sound and sparse acoustic instruments reminds you…

You know State tries to get around this global village of ours as much as we can. On our tours we have discovered that the Debaser club in Stockholm, Sweden (they have one in Malmo too) is one of the finest gig venues in northern Europe – Christ, those Scandos think of everything in…

State has been spreading the word about Alberta Cross to our mates ever since we discovered last years Thief & The Heartbreaker mini-album, and recently got presented with their strong and assured first album proper, Broken Side Of Time. In the last week our friends have reported in from gigs in Brussels, Aarhus and…

We have a delightful pair of tickets for each of this week’s Heineken Green Spheres gigs in Dublin and Cork to give away. A great chance to see the mighty White Lies deliver some beautifully monochrome British rock topped off with what sounds like Julian Cope’s voice, in the Teardrop Explodes era. Oh, and…

Sometimes the pace of everything around us take us forward so fast that we are quick to forget or even abandon items that given more time would have yielded great things. Who knows the clothes, the towns, the partners we left in the wake that would have been the warmest, most secure places to…

The band formerly known as Rachel Unthank and The Winterset have not only changed the lineup to some extent and their name but also claimed a change of mood or at least a “warmer, calmer shade of sad” on this, their third album. The last one, 2007’s The Bairns, delivered us unto a world…

Florence Welch has the best hair ever. A lovely thick mane of red, she surveys us all politely from underneath its heavy fringe. She also has some gorgeous dresses (tonight’s piece makes her look like a cross between a doll and some raven of doom) and an album of songs like a bag of…

Florence & The Machine lost all their equipment when their trailer went on fire some time before their Copenhagen gig tonight. Details are patchy but they took to the stage in the Danish capital announcing the incident and saying that everything they were playing on was borrowed. As there wasn’t a any merchandise available…