This year has been the strongest in recent memory for Irish music, managing so despite the dissolutions of a great many leading outfits in the community in times of yore, among them this year Fight Like Apes, Enemies and Funeral Suits.
In the eight months your writer has been doing daily explainers on Irish independent music, there’s never been a morning where we’ve been without content, a story to tell, something that’s exciting to put in post and press ‘publish’ on.
What a lot of us figured would be a passing golden era a few years back has become the foundation for something far more sustained – without so much as a look from daytime radio or television, and with minimal coverage from our country’s mainstream media (all this despite good people in each, fighting the good fight, might I add).
Ireland’s music scene is easily the equal of any other offering, anywhere in the world, and arguably, pound-for-pound, the best in terms of quality of releases.
With that being said, let’s dig in to the list.
The divisively-named Top Ten Irish Records of 2016 does come with a caveat, though – joint winners (both ranked #1, with the #2 spot vacated, for the pedants among you).
03. Streaming above is the band’s new single, Starting Out, a taster of debut album Long Gone, releasing via Dublin pop collective Popical Island in January.
04. The album launch happens at Whelan’s on the 27th. Stay tuned to the band’s social media for more info.
Verdict: Ramshackle indie of the variety that is staple to Popical Island and its attendant bockety-pop remit. Fun for fans of Teenage Fanclub and the like.
Yesterday, we asked YOU, to lay out your favourite listens from the year that’s been.
On the line was a €50 voucher (twice the usual} for Golden Discs, usable at any of its fourteen branches around the country.
We specified:
‘The best thing I’ve heard all year was___________________________’
It was a big year for music both major and independent, and we had some great suggestions. But there could only be one winner.
LiamZero takes the voucher with the The Dame’s surprise swansong from January.
“‘Blackstar’ by Bowie, because in just three days, it went from being the remarkable rebirth of one of popular music’s greatest careers to being the most astonishing, beautiful, witty, dignified, clever and heartbreaking farewell of them all, filled with lyrics that suddenly revealed their hidden truths. It’s a poorer world without him, but at least he gave us a fitting goodbye.”
In further finds from the running we have two categories:
The Best thing I heard this year from this year
Starina: “The best thing I’ve heard all year was Girl Band’s Holding Hands With Jamie. Slightly deranged, with clever lyrics and deadly melodies. We should hold them up as an example of how great Irish music really can be.”
Witty Name: “The best thing I’ve heard all year was Let Me Get There by Hope Sandoval and the Warm Invention, featuring Kurt Vile. Warm, fuzzy tune, with great guitar. American singers with a great Irish band (Dirt Blue Gene, Colm O Ciosóig). Lovely album, takes your mind off all the madness of 2016.”
Kolmo: “The best thing I’ve heard all year is Deantown by Vulfpeck. Nothing on Earth has come close to being this toe-tappingly groovy. Nothing. Nada. Nix.”
Garreth: “Nick Cave, Skeleton Tree. A hard, brutal listen, but hauntingly beautiful. Masterpiece.”
Marklar: “The best thing I’ve heard all year was (Girl We Got A) Good Thing by Weezer. Full of joy and back to their best.”
The best thing I heard this from from another year:
Ouch: “Only discovered this Bowie gem when it was re-released this year on the Who Can I Be Now box set that covered his phenomenal 1974 – 1976 period. Amazing tune and it didn’t even make the cut to be released at the time…”
Wilson-IRL: “The best thing I’ve heard all year was Farewell Sarajevo by Maybeshewill from the album I Was Here For A Moment, Then I Was Gone. The album is a couple of years old but i first heard it this year and it’s the first album that I’ve repeatedly listened to, in its entirety, in over a decade.” (Recommended – Mike)
Niallo: “The best thing I’ve heard all year was Superstition by Stevie Wonder… No, no, wait! Come back… on 10+ grand’s worth of hi-fi gear at the listening room on Wicklow Street, blew me bleedin’ socks off, you can hear the placement of each of the instruments as if you were in the studio, ’twas unreal.”
Zena: “The best thing I’ve heard all year was, Cherokee Morning Song by Walela. It was released before 2016 but it’s one hell of a song, it’s sang in Native American too, simply beautiful.”
Run the Jukes – collaborative beats via The Unscene
What you may need to know…
01. Galway beatmaker and high-ranking Street Fighter competitorJimmy Penguin teams up with Mikey B-Side, a.k.a Michael Fallon of Cork’s Cuttin’ Heads Collective. By their powers combined, they are Run the Jukes.
02. The Kralbum is the result of their collaborative labours, dropped by surprise last night via Limerick weirdo music propagation magnates The Unscene.
03. The twelve-minute, one-track mix can be streamed above, and downloaded for free from the project’s Bandcamp.
04. Other than telling us that apparently “Jukes reign supreme over nearly everyone“, there is literally zero other information on this particular project. This was an intentional move, according to the Unscene’s crack PR team.
Verdict: More handy, weirdy, noisy beats from the sweet spot of Irish hip-hop.
The first wave of acts for the third annual Quarter Block Party festival has just been announced over on their Twitter.
Cork City’s North and South Main Streets will be taken over again from February 3rd to the 5th, for a full weekend of independent music, conversation, street art and performance, courtesy of Makeshift Ensemble and the constituents of the recently-retired Southern Hospitality Board. Events this year will take place in, among other venues, St. Peter’s Church, An Spailpín Fánach and the Triskel Arts Centre.
Announced on the music end are Limerick weirdo beats don Naive Ted, singer-songwriter Ian Whitty, psych/ambient project Sky, Horse and Death, glitchy electronica purveyor Wastefellow, and Cork improv/ambient semi-supergroup Crevice.
International dance pieces get their first Irish airing, with Melanie Jame Wolf discussing stripping and the questions around it in Mira Fuchs, while Allie Hankins explores the dissonance between love and sex in Now Then: A Prologue. Resident artists have been invited to interact with the street as in previous years: this year will feature a Poetry Machine, a ladder-making workshop, a community dinner party and a marshland nature tour.
Our own Nialler9 will be in for a live chat as part of his How Music Works series, while Cork’s GASH Collective among others will be offering DJ Workshops.
Mongoose – jazz/folk Dublanders curating special gig line-ups
What you may need to know…
01. Dublin four-piece Mongoose bring together a wide pool of influences to create folk with an alternative tinge.
02. Coming together in 2012, the release of the band’s self-titled debut album last year follows a clutch of self-released singles and extended-players.
03. Streaming above is Doing Things Wrong, a single released earlier this year in solidarity with the Repeal the Eighth campaigns.
04. They’ve recently been curating their own line-ups of musical and spoken word artists, in a series of gigs called Winter Longing. Next up: Levis’ of Ballydehob on Saturday night, with Anna Mieke Bishop and more in support.
Verdict: Solid and spirited jazz/folk with a keen melodic sensibility.
The Baubles, featuring Ballina Punx scene veteran Paul O’Driscoll (Section 4, Alps, Foreveraftermath) throw their Santa hat into the Xmas music fray with this sleigh-bell-peppered piece of power-pop.
An all-star assortment of Irish artists converge on the rehearsal spaces on Castletown Rd. in Dundalk to mark the 2017th birthday of an immaculately-conceived superdude that was his own dad *and* a spooky ghost.
Last week, we asked you for your favourite entry-level Krautrock tunes,
At stake was a mint-condition voucher for €25 to spend at any outlet of renowned music emporium Golden Discs.
You entered in your dozens.
But there could be only one Führer
Optimus Grime wins the voucher with this simple yet precise offering.
To introduce the uninitiated to Krautrock, I would play the subtle 10 minute opus Hallogallo by Neu!, for that quintessential feeling of cruising along the autobahn at top speed, in some finely tuned, precise German engineering.
UPDATE! The Broadsheet Competition Regulatory Authority has ruled in favour of extra runners-up this week, following heated discussions in the comments.
Ploppy: “When introducing the delicate beauty of Krautrock to the uninitiated, I always play Vitamin C by Can because if Jaki Liebezeit’s propulsive, decades-ahead-of-their-time cyclical drum rhythms don’t get your blood pumping, then it’s already too late for you, as you are most likely clinically dead.”
Dudley: “The full on bananas version of Mother Sky by Can, has it all,amazing riff, motorik drums, goes on for days.”
Pat Walsh: “When introducing the delicate beauty of Krautrock to the uninitiated, I always play them something by Kraftwerk and, in particular, Autobahn, because it motors along quite nicely.”
Starina: “I always go with Der Tod Ist Ein Dandy by Einstürzende Neubauten. It’s not technically “krautrock” but as it’s German and it’s rock and it’s seven-and-a-half minutes of wonderful white noise and the screeching howls of industrial pixie Blixa Bargeld, I think it fairly qualifies. This was the first Neubauten song I heard when I was 16, sent to me on a cassette mixtape, and it definitely changed something in me forever. Krautrock’s avant-garde elements played heavily in Neubauten’s early deconstructions, played with literal industrial instruments – wrenches, sheetmetal, chainsaws, etc – all wrangled into something delicious that walked a fine line between pure nihilistic noise and beautiful melody.
And when I introduce someone to Neubauten, I always mention Blixa’s second job as guitarist for Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds – it’s his jarring noise and deep German voice you hear on the first few albums – and how he famously quit the Bad Seeds during a recording session of a cover of some godawful blues standard, throwing down his guitar and declaring, “I didn’t join this band to play this awful shite”. (quote approximate) Legend.
If I win the voucher, I shall be ordering in the vinyl of the album this came off of: Halber Mensch.”
Lorcan Nagle: “When introducing the delicate beauty of Krautrock to the uninitiated I always play Die Interimsliebenden by Einsturzende Neubauten. I was introduced to Neubauten by Der Tod ist Ein Dandy via mixtape, but Interimsliebenden is by far my favourite track of theirs. There’s an incredible amount of intricacy in the music, especially when you consider how it was created.”
Mr. P: “It can be no other than Peter Schilling – Major Tom. It has everything…the drama, the tension, the excitement, the fantastic 80’s reverb… 4-3-2-1…”
