Side 4 Collective – Cold Front
The third single from Dave ‘Hingo’ Hingerty’s new project sees the former Frames drummer team with some of the best musicians around, including guitarist Conor Brady (The Blades, The Drays) and bassist Robbie Malone (David Gray’s band).
But the star of the show here is singer Carol Keogh (The Plague Monkeys, Autamata), top, whose lead vocal is vibrant and intriguing.
Keep an eye out for the album, due later this year.
Nick says: 5 stars for Side 4
Sean OB – Get My Shit Together
The new video from Tallaght troubadour Sean O’Brien is a stirring call to action that fuses hip-hop with The Clash for this tale of life in modern day Dublin. “Don’t mean to drag it down but I fucking love this town,” sings Sean.
He says:
“If I can get just one sentence that I feel like someone else would sing to me… I take a lot of happiness from that.”
Nick says: We think Sean’s cracked it.
Fontaines DC – Big
Fontaines DC – the band this country has been crying out for – have been receiving ecstatic reviews for their brilliant new album ‘Dogrel’. And proper order.
If The Fall and The Strokes had had a lovechild born in the Rotunda, then it might have sounded something like frontman Grian Chatten’s crew.
Now they’re taking things to the next level with the news that they’re set to gatecrash American living rooms from sea to shining sea when they appear on CBS’ ‘The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon’ next Wednesday.
Tickets for their UK tour in November are selling like extremely hot cakes and their two Dublin shows in Vicar St in December have long since sold out.
Nick says: Onwards and upwards, lads.
Counter Intelligence – Pounded
And now for something completely different.
Suggested to me by ‘sheet reader/contributor James M Chimney, this is the first single from a pioneering new Irish-Italian combo who sound a bit like The Specials on acid.
‘Pounded’ is culled from their upcoming debut album ‘Adapt And Evolve’ which is available from the usual online sources from May 5.
We’re digging the psychedelic trippy visuals too, courtesy of Linn Hansen.
The band members call themselves Major, Zar, Ghost and Mountain and have named their sound Transversal Rock.
Nick says: Beam me up, boys.
Dermot Kennedy – Lost
Internet sensation Dermot has just ‘dropped’ the video for his new single ‘Lost’ on Vevo ahead of his four sold-out dates in the Olympia Theatre next month.
The Dublin-born singer/songwriter shot to fame last year when his song ‘Power Over Me’ racked up serious Spotify action, leading to invites from American TV chat show royalty Ellen DeGeneres and Stephen Colbert.
This led everyone from MTV to the BBC pegging Dermot as one to watch for 2019. Delivering on this promise, the 27-year-old has crafted another intense, highly emotional modern power ballad.
Dermot says:
“Lost is a song I wrote about resilience and reliance. Bad things can happen and when they do, when you’re tested; you’re going to need the love and the shelter of certain people to hold you up and guide you through whatever storm you find yourself in. It’s about holding each other up through bad times.”
That’s the spirit.
Gavin James plays the first of three sold-out shows tonight in Dublin’s Olympia Theatre.
To mark the inexorable rise of the kid from Tuam, County Galway, a repost (above) of what is surely one of the best videos ever made by an Irish artist.
The promo for ‘Glow’ (from the album ‘Only Ticket Home’) originally ‘dropped’ last Autumn but it already feels like a timeless classic up there in the hallowed company of Phil Lynott’s ‘Old Town’, Sinead’s ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’, U2’s ‘Sweetest Thing’ and The Pogues’s ‘Fairytale Of New York’.
It opens with Gavin strumming his acoustic guitar in The Old Storehouse pub before he leads a motley crew of mime artists, jugglers, construction workers, hen parties, flower sellers, drag queens and dancing guys ’n’gals through the sun-kissed streets of Temple Bar. Until they disappear like a fevered dream…
It’s full of colour and joy, and for four minutes makes the heart of Dublin look like the centre of the universe.
FIGHT!
Sara Ryan & Steo Wall – ‘Rise Up’
A remarkable collaboration between Newbridge, County Kildare-born, Cork-based chanteuse Sara Ryan (top right) and Dublin singer/songwriter Steo Wall (left) ‘Rise Up’ unapologetically tackles the hot topic of our time – our collective response to the international refugee crisis.
The single is taken from Sara’s forthcoming album ‘Breathe’, released in the autumn.
Steo, meanwhile, has a fan in kindred spirit Damien Dempsey, who invited him to be the opening act for his shows in Vicar St. Dempsey also joins Davey Spillane and Luka Bloom as special guest collaborators on Wall’s debut album ‘Where I’m From’.
Nick says: The contrast between Ryan’s silky smooth tones and Wall’s take-no-prisoners rap is striking – a steel fist in a velvet glove.
Laoise – Mad
Galway’s electro-pop princess knocks it out of the park with a gutsy new single fusing the sass of Kesha with the emotional ache of Robyn.
Of the video (above), featuring an agitated Laoise fighting for her sanity, she says:
“It’s playful and crazy at the same time. Smashing up the set felt cathartic.”
Laoise will be playing various festivals this summer including Body And Soul, Indiependence, Lollapalooza and Kaleidoscope. Her next show is as special guest of Ruth Anne in Whelan’s, Dublin, on April 27.
Camille O’Sullivan and Aiden Gillen – In Dreams
The duet of Roy Orbison’s ‘In Dreams’ in aid of homeless charity Focus Ireland by real-life couple Camille O’Sullivan and Aiden Gillen has just ‘dropped’ and is available to purchase here.
The torch singer and Game Of Thrones star are set to perform the song live at the Sunday Independent’s Rock Against Homelessness concert in aid of Focus Ireland at the Olympia Theatre, Dublin on April 23.
Also appearing on the night will be Finbar Furey, Duke Special, Tommy Fleming, The Celtic Tenors, Natty Wailer, Jerry Fish and Pat McCabe as well as comedian Deirdre O’Kane.
Camille says:
“You see someone sleeping in the street every few metres almost, in Dublin. It is heartbreaking, awful. I am now seeing children and I am seeing women who are vulnerable. When did we become so cold? People are passing these people by like they do not exist. And when I hear of children not having a house, that kind of shocks me.”
Tickets here
The Loafing Heroes – Stairs
The first single and video from multi-national, Lisbon, Portugal-based band led by Irishman Bartholomew Ryan (top) .
From debut album ‘Meandertales’ which is launching this Saturday in the Bello Bar, Portobello, Dublin 2 at 9pm
Sez Frank:
The Loafing Heroes are a cosmopolitan, morphing, dream-folk band. The project conveys a subversive idea of ‘loafing’ (in slowness, wandering, and perhaps even as an art of living and seeing).
The band’s vision of entanglement, transformation and subversive joy responds to the technological overload and ecological catastrophe of our troubled times….
