Inside every festival line-up – nestled amid the heavy-hitting headliners, homegrown heroes and cultish favourites – is what we’ll call the ‘hidden gem’ band. Ergo: the newish, obscure-ish act that play on a small stage at a non-descript time, that will doubtless graduate to bigger things. The act destined to be referred to as ‘oh,…

Last week British deputy PM Nick Clegg admitted that he regularly cries when he listens to music. Most of us have known for a long time that music has the power to reduce folk to a wibbling mess. Even so, to find yourself not just swelled of spirit but positively moist of eye at an…

Proof positive that ‘word of mouth’ is not just a pipe-dream of marketing (mad) men: Caribou’s set at Electric Picnic’s Body & Soul Arena. As a few hundred devoted attendees quickly spread the word about Dan Snaith’s wee-hour electronic blitz, the lore seemingly became airborne. This is perhaps why tonight’s Button Factory show, moved some…

Ah, the unfortunate lot of the singer-songwriter. One minute, you release a debut album packed with deliciously plaintive, heart-on-sleeve moments; the next thing, everyone has you pegged for an out and out melancholic soul.
‘People expect me to be a bit sad, but I’m not really,’ observes James McMorrow from the stage of a packed-to-the-proverbial-rafters…

Far more than a mere musical footnote, for the decade between 1993 and 2003, No Disco was required viewing for Ireland’s quality-starved music fans and manna from heaven for local acts.

Orbital are one of those outfits that are a great many things to a lot of different people; ambient music with personality for those with an ear for pop. Sufficiently cerebral noodlings that appeal to those with a penchant for classical music. Punk-pop for dedicated electro fans. Anthemic, Kraftwerk-infused techno that indie kids can get…

What does a drummer use for contraception? His personality. What do you call someone who hangs around with musicians? A drummer. What do you call a beautiful woman on a drummer’s arm? A tattoo. Never let it be said that there’s a dearth of drumming jokes in the world. Sticksmen get a bad rap; correspondingly,…

As far as live music is concerned, there are special occasions…and then there’s the divine marriage of a sublime venue and suitably magnificent act. Such are the acoustics and visual accoutrements of St. Canice’s Cathedral – the second largest in Ireland, so I’m told – that the likes of 2 Unlimited could feasibly walk in…

Before Oxegen there was Witnness. Before Witnness, well before Witnness there was the on off story of Féile. If you’re of a certain age, you have most likely consigned band names like Flowered Up, Power Of Dreams, Energy Orchard and The Mock Turtles to the dustiest recesses of the back of your mind, where hair…

There are hot tickets; oftentimes, there are molten, white flamed, scorchier-than-the-sun tickets. And then, there are the tickets for tonight’s Animal Collective gig, which cannot be found for love nor money. Indeed, while some of Dublin’s great and good have been left outside the venue in the melee, tonight’s crowd is a curious breed indeed.…

Question: what’s the quickest way to discombobulate a group of chin strokers intent on immersing themselves in a swathe of expansive post-rock? If you’re Stuart Braithwaite & co, you’ll throw a raucous, breakneck goth/metal band onto your bill for good measure. It could well be that fellow Scots Desalvo are on hand for simply warming…

If hot cakes had been baked by the fair hand of Elvis himself and embedded with solid gold flecks, they’d hardly have sold out faster than the tickets on offer for each of this year’s Other Voices: Songs From A Room gigs. Even those with an innate talent in fastest-finger-first were left bitterly disappointed as…

The less said about Irish winters, the better. After what has felt like an eternity of cloudy, rainy and severe weather, we need all the shimmering, sun-drenched spring soundtracks that we can get our hands on.

Never let it be said that Hot Chip aren’t averse to sexing up a dancefloor every once in a while: think, if you will, of the sun-drenched, sensual sheen of the breakthrough track ‘(And I Was A) Boy From School’, or the hypnotic, snake-hipped single ‘Over & Over’. However, it transpires in our exclusive Irish chat with vocalist/keyboardist Alexis Taylor that he’s very much a ‘lights out’ kind of guy.