SONGS OF THE WEEK
Bicep - Aura
Ten years ago thee Belfast friends Matt McBriar and Andy Ferguson started a music blog. After taking on the history of recorded dance music into their brains, they began to cut their own tunes for the dance floor and people quickly took notice. Bicep have become one of the most respected and in-demand duos around thanks to their dynamic and precision-tooled electronic music. Aura, the closing track from their album due on Ninja Tune in September shows you why. This is classic dance music in the vein of the melodic euphoria of the best Orbital records.
Dark Hedges - Talking Down
A Dream A relatively new Belfast-based four-piece whose inspirations are drawn from the US alt-rock pool and include Pixies, Interpol, Silversun Pickups. Early highlight in the tunes department is the US college-rock style ear worm of Talking Down A Dream.
Otherkin - React
No-one is doing the old-school yeah-yeah-yeah rock’n’roll guitar band better than Otherkin at the moment. React arrived with news of their debut album OK on September 29th and is as slick and well-oiled as the six-stringed obsessed can be.
DJ Hell – Car Car Car (Phil Kieran's Autobahn Remix)
As the title suggests, this take on the German musician DJ Hell’s track by the long-standing Northern Irish dance producer attempts to channel the “fun-fun-fun” of the techno dummies Kraftwerk and exceeds the speed limit with flying colours, mechanical bursts of percussion and synthesizer lines that trail across the vista out of the windscreen.
Klark Cant - Future Love
As seen at Body & Soul, Klark Cant is a musician with a love of cosmic disco, science-fiction techno and IDM who has been releasing music since the close of the nineties. Future Love is a fist-pumping instrumental that could could soundtrack a retro RPG game. It’s a highlight from last year’s album Modern Sin.
NEW ARTIST OF THE WEEK
Aislínn Logan
Injecting her singer-songwriter-style tunes with atmosphere and texture, the London-based Belfast-born Logan has been developing her pop songs over the past two years. Her latest song So Loud is the culmination of the hard work, a song that rolls on an acoustically-picked guitar line and blossoms with slight touches. Logan says it’s a song about being overwhelmed by “the sensory-overload a new experience can bring.”
ALBUM OF THE WEEK
Nouveaunoise - Nouveaunoise
The duo of Conor Gaffney and Niall Conway had developed a fine line in electronic productions that used crackling samples, jazz-sampling percussion and warm melodies cajoled from organic instruments, a la Four Tet or Boards Of Canada. Last week, eagled-eyed music enthusiasts may have realised the duo have followed up their 2010 debut Paraphrase Accolade with a new full-length and not much has changed. They still excel at intricate electronica with a human heart and are still not the best at promoting their own music.
