Author Archives: Admin

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Fight Like Apes – announce breakup and final gigs

What you may need to know…

01. Dublin indie/pop veterans Fight Like Apes announced their imminent split on social media this morning, following a prolonged radio silence. It closes a career that includes two Choice Music Prize nominations.

02. The band last year released their self-titled third album, a slightly calmer affair than its slightly overcaffeinated predecessors, Fight Like Apes and the Mystery of the Golden Medallion, and The Body of Christ & The Legs of Tina Turner, bearing an energy for which the band became infamous live.

03. Streaming above is the video for Crouching Bees, the lead-off single from the aforementioned eponymous long-player. Not to pick favourites, but it’d be silly to just horse Jake Summers into their eulogy.

04. The band’s farewell statement included the announcement of their final gigs. Write the band:

Stick a fork in us, we’re done.

We’ve been quiet for a while now. We’ve had a lot of thinking and talking to do.
We’d be here all year if we started listing the people we wanted to thank, so we’ll just do that in our own time.

You’ll see us all again under different musical guises but, these 3 shows will be Fight Like Apes’ last. We want to call it a day while we’re all still pals and are proud of what we’ve done.

And we are very, very proud.

It’s a deadly time in so many ways to be in a band; you can have so much control over your work if you’re clever; you can release it how and when you like and in our opinion, right now, Ireland is the healthiest it’s ever been in terms of talent and diversity.

But, there are massive challenges for a lot of bands, mostly financial, that make this a tough job and sadly, those obstacles have become too big for us.

I think we all know that we’re going to hear announcements like this more often. A lot of people don’t seem to understand that we can’t keep producing records if you keep not paying for them. Bands are having to sell beautiful albums for €2.99, labels can’t give you as much support since they’re losing income too and our alternative radio stations* are practically non existent now, meaning so many wonderful bands will not get a chance to get played on radio as they’ll be competing with huge pop acts.

Please buy your music in independent record stores or directly from the band.

Don’t fool yourself in to thinking that your £10 subscription to Deezer and Spotify helps us at all. It does not. Look how many bands are on there and do the maths.

Please go to gigs. Please buy merch.

Thanks to all you entirely crazy, wonderful people who have supported us and danced and screamed with us over the past 10 years. We could never thank you enough.

I still can’t believe some of the amazing things we’ve done together and how far we came.

If you want to come see us here’s how:

November 24th, The Roisin Dubh, Galway (free)

November 25th, Connollys of Leap, Cork

December 9th – back to where we had a our very first gig 10 years ago – Whelans, Dublin.

FLA out.

-MK, Jamie, Conor, Pete-

*RIP TXFM. We absolutely adore you and everything you’ve done for music in Ireland.

VERDICT: Another veteran act calls it a day in a time of transition for an active Irish music scene. They’ll be sadly missed, but this upcoming tour ought to be the New Orleans funeral that Fight Like Apes deserves.

Fight Like Apes

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Among the new emojis confirmed for the next iPhone update are two tributes to David Bowie.

Male and female emoticons portraying Aladdin Sane represent singers in a new pack of emojis representing different professions, which also include firemen, paramedics, etc.

H/T: Pitchfork

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An interactive infographic for exploring  the myriad interconnections of Europe’s royal dynasties. To wit:

Royal and aristocratic families are known for their fondness of marrying within their own clique. Restraining aggression between two families, creating a stronger front towards a third family, increasing territorial acquisitions, legal claim to a foreign throne through inheritance are some of the most common reasons. This leads to very interesting and entangled family trees which the visual tries to convey. It shows how all 10 of the current hereditary royal leaders of Europe can be connected to each other through their ancestors. We don’t have to look very far back. Even the most distant royal relatives have their shared forebears born after the year 1700.

Explore it here.

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The Nissan e-NV200 WORKSPACe, created in collaboration with UK design workshop Studio Hardie, is the world’s first electric-powered van/office.

Filled with space saving fold-away space and extendible sections, the van contains an integrated fold-out desk, touch-screen computer, wifi, Bluetooth audio, smartphone-controlled LED lights, a panoramic glass roof, a mini-fridge and a barista-level coffee maker. 

Half an hour at a roadside EV dock charges the whole unit to 80% capacity.

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Thursday November 3: DJ Shadow, Mount Kimbie, Kormac live AV @ The Shelbourne Hall, RDS(€39.50)

Nialler9 writes:

There’s lots of good music on offer of an electronic, alternative and hip-hop nature at the second annual Metropolis festival (Moderat, Clams Casino, Jessy Lanza, Sugar Hill Gang, Grace Jones, Booka Shade) but the opening party’s standalone lineup is solid with DJ Shadow headlining with a set drawn from new album and Endtroducing remixes along with UK duo Mount Kimbie and Dublin’s own DJ Kormac doing his live A/V thing.

Tickets here.

Nialler9’s Weekly Dublin Gig Guide
Nialler9’s Weekly Cork Gig Guide

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Journalists Gavin Sheridan and  Peter Geoghegan discover the secret of the US election.

Bewildered Student writes:

Irish media people realise Irish media coverage of US Elections has been as biased as US coverage….Hate that.

FIGHT!

Earlier: Leaking Support

Meanwhile…

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Tonight.

Intelligence expert Steve Piecznik outlines the ‘silent coup’ and ‘counter coup’ he claims is underway in America and how the ‘Lolita Express’ may derail Hillary Clinton’s bid for the White House.

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Galway micro-indie label Rusted Rail‘s tenth anniversary happened back in March, and the label is now taking the time to archive its trove of releases on Bandcamp, among other events to mark the occasion.

Writes label boss Keith Wallace (aka Loner Deluxe):

To mark the 10th anniversary of Rusted Rail (it celebrated its first decade back in March) I’ve been populating the Rusted Rail Bandcamp pages with the digital versions of the back catalogue.

While the physical versions of Rusted Rail releases are and always will be available from the label’s website, this is the first time much of the label’s catalogue been available in a non-analogue format.

So far there are releases from So Cow, Loner Deluxe, Phantom Dog Beneath The Moon, Music For Dead Birds, Good Shepherd, Cubs, The Driftwood Manor, The Dovetail Consort and Phosphene on the Bandcamp page and I’ll be updating it weekly until petty much everything is on there.

It’s all part of the ongoing programme of looking back at 10 years of Rusted Rail, with production of a documentary covering the first decade of the label currently in production.

Sound.

Streaming above is an early label release, Best Vacation Ever, the first full-length from Galway lo-fi pop man So Cow.

Rusted Rail

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Spotted in West Cork.

Jack writes:

A great west coast but a poor six counties…

Thanks Genny

Don’t forget. The Broadsheet Book Of Unspecified Things That Look Like Ireland, edited by Aidan Coughlan (New Island) is the perfect stocking filler. Just €5. Only a huge number few copies remain in stock.