SONGS OF THE WEEK
Bantum & Loah – Take It
The Cork musician Ruairi Lynch's debut album
Legion
a couple of years back introduced many to his guitar-lead electronic alt-pop compositions. When not performing those songs live behind a sheet, Lynch was also found lashing out live edits of his favourite artist Prince. For his return to record, Lynch has called on the smooth soulful tones of Sierra Leonean singer Loah, who takes advantage of the cleanest synth production in the Bantum discography to date.
Rejjie Snow - Keep Your Head Up
There's a straight-up Dilla
Donuts
vibe to the new track from Irish rapper Rejjie Snow via a production by Linden Jay.
Keep Your Head Up
arrives just a week after the 10th-anniversary of J Dilla's passing and the song looks forward too with its summery haze of a chorus.
Jealous Of The Birds - Goji Berry Sunset
When a song is good, it's worth doing right. Thankfully, Armagh singer-songwriter Naomi Hamilton aka Jealous Of The Birds has done the right thing and re-recorded the song that got heads turning in the first place last year.
Goji Berry Sunset
is a whistling-featuring indie-pop song featuring lyrics like “your name fizzes on the tongue” and “maybe you're my favourite, I like the beard don't shave it.”
t-woc - Black On Black
Longstanding DJ and producer has been making electronic music in some form over the past 10 years and recently his “dubby electronic hip-hoppy shit” has been delivered with a tropical flavour. This week on the second volume of his Jetstar II EP, the producer delivers six tracks of beat productions, the highlight of which is the freaked dub of
Black On Black.
RELEASE OF THE WEEK
New Pope - Youth LP
David Boland made his first public forays into music with the short-lived Galway band The Depravations, a band who looked to the west coast of America for its summer folk sound. Boland's short seven-track solo LP opens with a song called Onwards, Westwards and the words “to be young / to live by the ocean / to be young / to be no-one,” casting a decidedly more sombre tone of folk. What follows is an accordion-assisted collection of wistful music delving into young love (“ I loved you the best / and for a while you loved nobody else” ) past memories of Donegal and Amsterdam, and the highlight Christopher, a Bright Eyes-esque folk number
.
NEW ARTIST OF THE WEEK
Beauty Sleep
Beauty Sleep are a new Belfast three-piece made up of Ryan McGroarty (Wonder Villains / A Bad Cavalier), Cheylene Murphy (also of the rising Pleasure Beach) and Aimee Williamson. The trio's debut single
The Dark
sounds like a mix of Phoenix and Beach House and occupies the dreamy end of the guitar-pop spectrum.
MIX OF THE WEEK
Solar Bears - Boiler Room mix
Taking the retro bucolic synthesizer stylings of the Irish duo and roughing it up into a sinewy analogue beast, this new mix of largely unreleased material has us salivating for the forthcoming third album Advancement out in March. This 50 minutes is the toughest and most danceable that we've got from Solar Bears yet, all recorded in a live process that allows them to improvise new music and create completely new versions of older songs. Listen and download: https://boilerroom.tv/upfront/054-solar-bears/
