New artist of the week
Maud In Cahoots
Maud and Zoe Ní Riordáin are not a brand new band but they have been biding their time while honing their craft. Their music has always been an orchestral chamber-pop take on a Scandinavian-style pop music. Think Robyn without the electro beat and the limb flailing.
Last year's concept stage show The Well Rested Terrorist in the Peacock Theatre showed that the sisters weren't shy of doing things differently. They've been joined full-time as a band by Steve Markham and Alan Conon since.
Their newest single Greatest Achievement keeps that Scandinavian pop sensibility with a a slow-motion ballad that Jessie Ware would've snapped up for her own discography.
The band have gigs upcoming in Dublin, Limerick, New York and Toronto's Canadian Music Week.
[ www.maudincahoots.comOpens in new window ]
Video of the week
Sleep Thieves – You Want The Night
Sheet ghosts, Lizzie Borden, basements, creepy old men with skulls, attic Halloween families, chrome-faced vigilantes. The video for Sleep Thieves' evocative dark album title track reads like a horror film wishlist.
Director: Mike P Nelson
Irish album of the week
Le Galaxie – Le Club
The second album from Ireland's premiere festival partystarters finds them in a pensive mood with a political agenda to the fore. Nah, I'm kidding, it's 14 songs of neon-dripped club bangers designed to lift hearts and feet. Songs like the title track, Streetheart, Put The Chain On and Humanise refine the band's retro-electro style with their own modernist approach.
Love System, their curtaincaller is beefed up with a sax solo that sounds like the music to soundtrack the end of an '80s romcom when the camera pans up to reveal a city vista from a speeding topdown car before the credits roll.
Le Galaxie have dates in May in Galway, Limerick, Kilkenny, Cork, Belfast, Brighton and Dundalk.
Songs of the week:
Gavin Glass – Better Left Alone
Did you know there's a movement of music called Eirecana? I'm not sure the musicians do either but that's one way of saying the Irish like their country and Americana music.
Glass is a studied and seasoned practitioner of both. He has a weekly show on TXFM reinforcing that fact.
He also has a fourth solo album on the way called Sunday Songs on May 22nd and the album's lead track is a lovely lilt of pedal steel, piano, guitar and Americana made on home soil.
Sinéad White – 'Better'
The Kildare singer-songwriter has been building up a reputation for her bright and melodic music and her penchant for kazoos and crowd participation in live gigs. White's debut, entitled Finally, comes out on May 30th and Better is the first single from it. The album launch happens on the same night at The Sugar Club.
EMBRZ – 'Silent'
Staying in Kildare, the young Jack Casey's evocative ambient electronic remix of Ellie Goulding picked up millions of plays and his first original track with non-sampled vocals from Amy Rose is equally redolent of slow days and summer nights.
