New Irish Music: June 2024

On walking around, listening with the weather, and releases from Landless, Autumns, Spit, FC Music and more

Hello!

Welcome to June’s new Irish music round-up, which I’m sharing on… 10th July. Forgive me, it’s been a busy month and, frankly, I’ve been trying to enjoy just being outside and savouring the little bursts of summer as they come.

As ever, a lot of my listening this month was done while walking about. I love allowing whatever’s going on around me to infuse with what’s happening in my headphones; it can feel like there's a sort of sensory alchemy taking place whenever you're granted that just right combination of sight, sound, scent and temperature.

These lucid moments are so brief you might forget them in an instant, but every now and then, without warning, one of them sticks, and can colour the way a piece of music resonates in your mind for years to come. Chuck on Paddy Hanna’s ‘Camaraderie’ or Beach House’s ‘Levitation’ and you’ll send me right back to one of the many anxious smoke breaks I had during the summer I worked in an ice-cream shop in Salthill. Maybe catching these moments as they come is a way of being more "present" or something? Who’s to say. To quote Marge Simpson, I just think they’re neat.

Anyway, this obviously isn't a new or unique observation, and I don't really have any hot takes to share, but it's been on my mind a bit since I wrote about something similar in relation to Seán Clancy’s Four Sections of Music Unequally Divided. It popped into my head again recently when I saw a Tweet from the music journalist Vanessa Ague – of The Road To Sound, Tone Glow etc. – in which she asked “what kind of drone is good for hot weather?” and expressed that maybe “the genre is not meant for a heat wave”. I found this funny because, not long before reading that, I’d been listening to the new solo record from Big Brave guitarist Mat Ball and thinking about how good those distorted guitar drones sounded in the heavy summer sun.

It’s a feeling I’d had before too, about the organ drones in Kali Malone’s Living Torch. Everyone’s different! But I guess it once again got me thinking about how certain types of weather (or whatever) will influence how a record sounds in a given moment. If I listen to Kali Malone in the dead of winter, will the cold, billowing textures reveal themselves more than the dense, humid ones? Will Trá Pháidín’s avant-trad-jazz-rock sound different on a bright morning to how it did when I walked to Tesco in the pissing rain with it on an hour ago? How much does this stuff ultimately feed into the ways we talk and write about music? 

Who knows, maybe I’ll write something more thought-out about all of this some day, but one thing I do know is that music has rarely sounded so good to me as it did on 8th June at In The Meadows in Dublin, a day festival curated by Lankum that The Thin Air’s Brian Coney aptly described as “a genuinely alternative proposition to the increasingly Spotify-cucked Irish festival circuit”.

On top of Lankum’s jaw-dropping headline set, the programme played out like an Irish alternative music hipster’s wildest dream. Mogwai playing the hits? Mohammad Syfkhan, John Francis Flynn, Andy The Doorbum and Tara Clerkin Trio smashing it? Rachael Lavelle covering ‘Lay All Your Love On Me’? In the sunshine? You must be joking. There’s a special shout out owed to Cormac Begley for getting a packed main stage crowd to sit in near-total attentive silence for his solo concertina set in the afternoon. Another one of those “moments” I suppose.

Right, enough preamble. Loads of music reviewed below! Hope you find something you like. I’ve also made an Instagram page for the newsletter, which I’ll be using to share a few bits and bobs during the month between publications. Give it a follow here. Sound. Until next time!

Eistigí.

Landless - L​ú​ireach [Glitterbeat Records]

Landless would have felt right at home at In The Meadows. Formed in 2013, the vocal quartet comprising Lily Power, Méabh Meir, Ruth Clinton and Sinéad Lynch have long been a fixture in Dublin’s traditional folk scene; their sparsely-accompanied renditions of timeless ballads are imbued with spellbinding power, informed by the harmonic methods of the Sacred Harp singing community. Like their first LP - 2018's Bleaching Bones - their latest 10-tracker is produced by John "Spud" Murphy, whose Guerilla Sounds studio has birthed albums from the likes of Lankum, Lisa O’Neill and ØXN. His knack for sonic immensity is felt keenly here, with each member's voice captured with such fullness and clarity that you can sense them reaching into the deepest pits of your soul.

It opens with ‘The Newry Highwayman’, a centuries-old song that recounts the life of a criminal on the eve of his execution, and which Ian Lynch also covered on his 2022 album as One Leg One Eye. Here, Meir’s voice is the mournful conduit for this tale, bolstered by her companions’ vocal harmonies, Alex Borwick’s trombone drones and creaking strings from Cormac Mac Diarmada. The Lankum string player appears again throughout the album, lending atmospheric violin, viola and banjo to a rendition of Ewan MacColl’s ‘The Fisherman’s Wife’ and the lamenting parlour ballad ‘The Wounded Hussar’. These layers of sustained instrumentation are subtle: Clinton’s pump organ drones in the ‘The Grey Selkie of Sule Skerry’ and ‘Death and the Lady’ enhance the richness of their singing without ever shifting focus away; Meir plays the shruti box softly on closer, ‘Ej Husári’, a Slovakian folk song learned from Eva Brunovská at the Rozhybkosti festival. 

As ever though, Landless’ unaccompanied pieces wield a most celestial heft; tune your ears to the harmonic precision in ‘Blackwaterside’ and ‘My Lagan Love’ and feel your spirit rewired. The song ‘Lúireach Bhríde’, from which the album gets its title, was written in 2018 with reference to the pre-Christian stories of Irish goddess Brigid, with the word lúireach taken to mean cloak, breastplate or hymn of protection. It’s a fitting word under which to hold these songs and stories; this is music that fortifies the fibres of your being, and deserves to be held close for whenever it's needed.

FC Music - Soft Hands Long Gone [wherethetimesgoes]

In wherethetimegoes’ mysterious ecosystem, Finn Carraher McDonald is a chameleonic recurring character. Lately, he’s been found behind a drum kit with the amorphous indie-shoegaze-experimental supergroup Princ€ss, whose sublime debut I wrote about back in March. As Nashpaints, he quietly delivered one of the best Irish albums of 2020 in Blindman The Gambler, a selection of emotive lo-fi dream pop, folk and ambient with a curious dub undercurrent and an evocative aura like that of evening light piercing through a bedroom window. 

Now debuting as FC Music, his sound steps out of the house and onto the dancefloor, where fans of the Wisdom Teeth catalogue and labelmate Frog Of Earth will find a whole lot to love. Buoyant percs and dubwise cello plucks echo across 'PAL', giving way to synth shimmers that dart around the mix like a multicoloured hummingbird in search of nectar. ‘Pomar Fresco’ swings on a syncopated beat in the spirit of DJ Python’s deep reggaeton masterpiece Dulce Compa​ñ​ia, upon which kalimba chimes bounce and unravel. ‘Soft Hands Long Gone’ conjures Leif’s earthy club concoctions for Tio Series and Livity Sound, its shuffling drums and otherworldly electronic flourishes underpinning a silky vocal that tickles the ear. 

On the B-Side, some of these motifs recur, stripped back, reshaped and rearranged over three iridescent tracks for the pre-dawn afterparty or the sunrise stroll home. But no matter the time, no matter the place, FC Music's debut is as mercurial as anything he's done previously, so take it for a spin whenever and see what happens.

Burning Love Jumpsuit - Hell Bank Note (1993 - 1995) [Nyahh Records]

Lori Goldston - Convolutions [Nyahh Records]

Cathal Roche - Essential Tremors [Nyahh Records]

In what’s shaping up to be a pretty big year for Nyahh Records, June saw the release of three albums that prove why it’s currently Ireland’s primary outpost for experimental music. First came Hell Bank Note, a collection of recordings made by the elusive Dublin trio Burning Love Jumpsuit between 1993 and ‘95. Comprising 22 tracks extracted from five albums, this plunderphonic mess of dodgy computer funk and oddball beats captures the early output of a group who spent ten years sculpting uncanny soundtracks out of B-movie samples and audio detritus. There are detective dialogues and distressing monologues, furious rants and unintelligible phone calls; Arnold Schwarzenegger “pumps up the votes for George Bush” and I think someone just tried to sell me anti-depressants. It all plays out over scattershot beats and strange instrumental skronk, like VHS tapes unspooling straight from a concrète mixer. 

When you’re done rummaging through that one, you can immerse yourself in the improvised cello and saxophone improvisations of Lori Goldston’s Convolutions and Cathal Roche’s Essential Tremors. Both live albums were recorded by Nyahh founder Willie Stewart, who organised an Irish tour for Goldston – erstwhile cellist for Nirvana and Earth – in July 2022, and captured segments of her four performances along the way. Each piece in Convolutions finds Goldston responding to the space around her and the atmosphere within it; she told The Quietus that during one particular show on a hot day, she tried to “think of how to make the music be cooling in some way”. From the winding low-end bows of ‘Several Ballads All at Once’ and ‘Cascadian Sheer’ to the free-form plucks and distorted strums of ‘Gradually, In Silhouette’ and 19-minute closer ‘The Rays Of The Sun’, this is avant-garde music at its most intimate; it reaches into its immediate surroundings and conjures something uniquely enveloping out of it. 

It’s a similar vibe to what’s produced in Essential Tremors, which was recorded in St George’s Church and Heritage Centre, Carrick on Shannon, in December 2021. Over 30 minutes, Roche’s baritone, alto and soprano saxophones reverberate through the space, seeming at times to harmonise with their own resonances as they sigh and sing. At other points they pierce the air like cracks of indoor thunder, before moments of quiet shuffling give way to spiralling melodic motifs. Essential tremors indeed. 

exmagician - Sit Tight

On a bus ride across London a few Sundays ago, I tucked into Sit Tight, exmagician’s first album in eight years. What began as an irritable, top deck rail replacement route soon turned serene as the Belfast duo’s breezy indie psych-pop mingled with the sun beaming through the window, and the city’s summertime bustle assumed a softer texture. It’s an unambiguously pleasing sound that Danny Todd and James Smith have been refining for years, first as members of the much-hyped Cashier No.9 – whose David Holmes-produced debut was released on Bella Union – and later under this guise, with an album for the same imprint landing in 2016, drawing comparisons to the likes of Beta Band and Beck. 

A lot has changed for the pair in the intervening periods: focus shifted, family life took priority, label attachments loosened, and writing music became an act of piecemeal precision; an exercise in songcraft and creative exchange without any of the pressures of careerism or external expectation. You get a sense of all this while listening to these tracks, which stitch filigreed keys and quirky studio trills through motorik beats and hazy guitars daubed with grit and delay. Hints of Rubber Soul ('Sharpen These'), Richard Hawley ('Storyline'), The Shins ('Dulliard') and Damien Jurado ('Losing My Flair') emerge as Smith and Todd trade vocals and harmonise, but their style of sweet, folky psychedelia is fundamentally their own - moulded with an easy-going patience and care. By the time standout closers 'Pistol' and 'Coast' washed over me on that bus journey, I'd forgotten what I was feeling so annoyed about. After all, I wasn't in a rush.

Autumns - Dyslexia Sound Source [Touch Sensitive]

Since debuting on Regis’ Downwards label in 2014, Derry’s Christian Donaghey has consistently sought new ways of expanding his sound. Tearing chunks from disparate styles – post-punk, dub, EBM, gothic industrial techno – and chucking them into his cauldron of distortion, his catalogue is a bubbling mass of harsh vibes, pounding beats and ominous shouts. Among EPs for the likes of Clan Destine Records, Death & Leisure and Opal Tapes, his Dyslexia releases for Belfast’s Touch Sensitive provide useful checkpoints for those charting his evolution from no-wave crooner to On U-Sound-inspired electro wizard.

Across Dyslexia Sound Source's 10 tracks, Donaghey conjures his inner Adrian Sherwood, cutting dubwise beats and bass with rusty industrial grit. Sirens, horns and howls drenched in tape delay swerve around propulsive analog drum patterns in ‘Interpretive Dance Is A Scam’, ‘Inside the Bins’, ‘Purely Reasonable’ and ‘Buy Me A Cornet’, like Phase Fatale or Silent Servant filtered through Jah Shaka’s sound system. ‘Phone Me’ and ‘Raw Product’ lean heavy on the percussion, at points evoking the brain-rearranging experiments of Jlin’s Black Origami, while ‘Digital Swing’ and ‘Just To Say You Were There’ step back into an irresistible Willikens & Ivkovic stomp. Autumns has assumed many forms over the years, but this here’s a murky high water mark. 

Spit - Suffocate Yrself

“Finding an angular and sonically off-putting sound without becoming an uber-masculine band was really important to us”, said Spit’s mononymous bassist Sarah in an interview with The Thin Air late last year. It’s an MO the Dublin noise outfit seem to have nailed already on their debut EP – a snarling counter-attack to boilerplate post-punk and the identikit dude rock du jour.

Inspired by no-wave bands like DNA and The Contortions and experimental rock acts like This Heat, Suffocate Yrself opener ‘Pay It No Mind’ thrashes into action with discordant guitar clanks and heaving bass, underscoring Sarah’s Chino Moreno-style shriek. Guitarist Adam Skelly’s wails in blood-curdling response over drummer Connor’s deranged snare blasts and screeching distortion. 

Listening to the rest of this six-track EP (‘Pierced’ in particular), and watching the handful of live clips floating about, it’s hard not to feel the same thrill as when Gilla Band first emerged just over 10 years ago with abrasive singles like ‘Lawman’ and ‘De Bom Bom’. This is visceral, confrontational music from a young band unafraid of making an almighty racket. Hook it to my fucking veins tbh.

Oh Boland - Western Leisure [Meritorio Records / Safe Suburban Home]

There was a time when it felt like I was seeing Oh Boland every other week. In and around 2015/2016, the Tuam garage rock trio were ostensibly an in-house band at the Roisin Dubh, where we sustained ourselves on Fosters, rollies and whatever the Strange Brew bill had on offer. We’d knock pints on the floor while barking along to songs like 'Mutton Island' and 'Suntan Suite', which injected Parquet Courts and Oh Sees’ squall with a febrile jangle pop sweetness. They seemed to fully embody the anxious, fond and wayward daze that is living in Galway in your early 20s. 

It’s an energy that lingers in Western Leisure, the outfit’s third album. A lot has changed in the years since their 2016 debut, Spilt Milk. Now a solo project for frontman Niall Murphy, who left Tuam for Dublin in 2019, Oh Boland’s sound has become a more amorphous thing, incorporating elements of country and Saw Doctors-style Rock & Roll into its tuneful punk framework. The catchy, hoarse throated choruses and jagged guitars remain, but here they’re infused with pedal steel melodies, jaunty rhythmic twists (‘The Cult Of A Western Rail Corridor’) and Pavement meets Popical Island indie jams (‘(No More) Soft Talk’).

The title track leans full country as Murphy sings again of Galway – a city that can drown you, but it sure is hard to stay away: “Leisureland is sinking down to the wretched waves”, “My friends have all gone swimming, I don’t think they’ll be back too soon”, “Western leisure, it kills more than it saves.”

Tongue Bundle - Second Hand Banger [Unbend Leg Out]

It was a wet December night in 2014 when I first encountered Tongue Bundle. Upstairs in the Roisin Dubh, they were doing a free launch show for their debut album, Bungee Untold, and it wasn't long before my jaw was on the floor. At the time I remember thinking that I'd never heard anything like it - a Frankestein's monster of funk, jazz and avant-garde rock in the vein of Primus, Beefheart and Zappa but with a sort of slippery Hiberno humour that struck its own absurd chord. 

Ten years later, the Dublin outfit have assembled a selection of tracks from across their discography on vinyl for the first time, serving as a perfect primer for their strange world. Released on their own Unbound Leg Out label – also home to associated noises from Oli Ryan, Digesta, Acid Granny and more – the compilation opens with the smoky dub murk and oddball vocal theatrics of the previously unreleased ‘Boy He’, before the funk freneticism of their catalogue unravels like a funfair ride come off its hinges. From the Frizzle Fry-style frenzy of ‘Biscuit Holiday’, through the swampy psychedelia of ‘Borris-in-Ossary’ and ‘Bubble In The Lung’, to the crunchy acid house-cum-noise rock of ‘Each Other’s Mothers’, it’s a weird feast that rewards gorging. 

Ozwald - Back Of The Bus [City Imp]

Sometimes you don't know how badly you need to hear something until you do. In the case of Ozwald's Back Of The Bus EP - a five-tracker of "Irish rave music for the TikTok generation" released on Roo Honeychild’s label - I couldn't have anticipated how close to tears I’d come while listening to 'Everythings Gna B OK' on a stroll to the cornershop a few weeks ago. Out of a neon-hued fizz of filtered synths, a flailing jungle breakbeat emerges like a launchpad for Ennis artist Ushmush, whose vocals soar with pure pop emotion as Gailege – surely a first for a track like this? Its magic reveals more on repeated plays: an irresistible sweetness coursing through the system; a sugar rush of raw euphoria.

The rest of the release ain’t half bad either. Taking memetic cues from the label’s debut compilation – 2021’s Chancers, which featured a track that sampled that viral bat video – ‘Aoife’s Neck’ makes use of a raging leaked voice note sent by Conor McGregor’s sister (??) to her dog groomer (??), turning it into a ballroom-ready club stomper. ‘Hit It From De Back’ takes a satisfying swing at Jersey club - Geirsí club? - while 'Throw That' and 'Crack Dance' round things off on a full-pelt juke-techno tip with an added acid splash. The neeeeeeeck!

Dåser - Into Blue Sky [Reasons To Dance]

Brightly-coloured flowers, featherlight clouds and iridescent bubbles rush past in a blur; an aqueous cross hovers above a lush green field. You’re not tripping, but it sure might be nice to be. You’re just staring at the cover of Dåser’s Into Blu Sky, a five-track EP that sounds as vibrant as its art suggests. The opening title cut pits melodic plucks and glitchy vox against a nimble drum & bass beat, before ‘Lizard In The Stream’ filters equally glimmering materials through a prism of pumping percussive house. 

Taking cues from the likes of Priori, Ciel and Sleep D, ‘Juxtapositions’ feels tailor made for the most loyal members of the NRG crew; its fleet-footed pulse, wobbling bass and fluttering keys will greet sunrise dancefloors like a breeze of sweet serotonin. ‘Bubble Baile’ is the standout, with its ear-tickling vocal loops and wriggly sound designs that weave around buoyant Brazilian funk percussion. The ever-reliable Sputnik One puts his own spin on that one to finish things off, taking us out of the light and back into a basement where the drums pound and the bass shakes like a freight train.

Bill Karnation - Guided Automation [PNP]

It’s tricky to get a foothold in Bill Karnation’s “dancefloor oriented wonkatonk”. The Kerryman’s latest for Unscene Limerick’s Piss & Perfume imprint is a slippery techno six-tracker filled with rhythmic jolts, pops and jerks; the thrill is in how you catch yourself before losing grip completely. 

You can file ‘Picture Your Elbow’ and ‘Easter Wagtail’ next to Daniel Bell’s onomatopoeic Blip, Blurp, Bleep techno minimalism, or the more feverish deep cuts in Schematic Music Company’s catalogue. Remnants of Robert Hood’s taut yet tough machine funk can be felt in ‘Chromatophore’ and Bill Converse’s closing remix, but here the screws are loosened, the loops less reliable as they lurch toward the finish line. Running close to 10 minutes, ‘Not by Physical Presence’ is a slice of woozy microhouse in a mould not dissimilar to Move D and Benjamin Brunn’s collaborative albums, which have been a near-constant source of mental remedy for me this year. 

Things fly even further off the handle in ‘Uncle Tofu’ and the electro-singed ‘Joe Pineapples’, but for all its off-kilter beats and brazen attitude, this EP finds a way to make a truly satisfying clatter. Just check this clip from his Open Ear set to get a sense of how hard this stuff hits when a full room locks into its fitful grooves. The road to Farranfore from Detroit is paved with jagged gravel, but if you’re up for a bumpy ride, it’s more than worth the trip. 

Various Artists - Single Series Vol. 1 [Moot Tapes]

In the last edition of Anois, Os Ard that I wrote for The Quietus in 2022, Moot Tapes co-founder Stephen Morton described the label’s ethos as being about “documenting these very interesting sounds people make while they’re alive”. With a catalogue that’s encompassed everything from dusty breakbeat techno, doomy krautrock and twisted field recordings to crackling ambience and poetic lo-fi folk, it’s fair to say they’ve done a decent job, and it’s an endeavour that’s continued in earnest in the years since with their Signs Of Life split EP series.

This new release compiles six tracks from the imprint’s recent run of singles and, once again, it’s a mixed bag of peculiar jewels. Label regular Jellypelt bookends the project with a euphoric rave anthem of Bicep proportions and a poignant cyborg elegy a lá Oneohtrix Point Never. In between, there are billowing ambient dreamscapes from Flowers At Night and Planting, a John Carpenter-esque slice of throbbing electronics from Han, and an aqueous dub techno jam from Dear Bongo, No. Start here and work your way back through the Moot catalogue. You won’t regret it. 

That’s it for now. Thanks for reading!