Posts Tagged ‘Belfast’

GIRLS NAMES – ” Stains On Silence “

Posted: March 31, 2018 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Our new album, Stains on Silence, is now available to pre-order on limited edition ultra clear vinyl, and comes with a different colour sleeve and poster. Only 200 copies.

It stands to reason that many vital albums come critically close to never being made. The eight-track upshot of doubt, upheaval and financial strain, Stains on Silence by Girls Names is one such release.
Following 2015’s blitzing Arms Around a Vision, and the parting of drummer Gib Cassidy just over a year later, the Belfast band suddenly found themselves facing down a looming void. “There was a finished – and then aborted  mix of the album, which was shelved for six months,” reveals Girls Names frontman Cathal Cully. “We then took a break from all music and went back to full-time work. We chilled out from the stress of rushing the record and not being happy with it, as well as being skint with no impending touring on the cards and constantly having to worry about rent.” 

The stumbling blocks that proved a strain became the album’s defining breakthrough. Recorded in various locations including Belfast’s Start Together Studio with Ben McAuley, Cully’s home and the band’s practice space, spontaneous creation, cut-up techniques and self-editing took centre-stage for the first time. “We started tearing the material apart and rebuilding, re-editing and re-recording different parts in my home in early Autumn last year,” says Cully. “When we got them to a place we were happier with we went back into Start Together Studio with Ben to finalise the mixes to what they are now.”

Where AAAV proved a brazen statement of intent, Stains on Silence bounds forth as its feature-length comedown. What could have seen the band buckle became an opportunity for approaching things tabula rasa. During its two-year transmutation, Cully, bassist Claire Miskimmin and guitarist Philip Quinn had a single aim for their fourth album: to make an old-fashioned record clocking in around 30 to 35 minutes in length that made the listener reach straight for repeat. From the Bang Bang bar-summoning swoon of opener ’25’ and the submerged disco doom of ‘Haus Proud’ to the rapt, dub-leaning ‘Fragments of a Portrait’, Girls Names have excelled in their goal by forging an LP of synchronous nuance and defiance. 

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Marked by the presence of drum machines and programming throughout, these eight masterfully-woven tales are once again commandeered by band founder Cully, whose words, understated yet defiant, mine purpose and meaning from the mire (“I want to bathe again, I want to swim again / In a pool of twisting bodies, blackened gold.” — ‘25’). But while Stains on Silence came critically close to never being made, having lived with it, reconfigured it, and guided its metamorphosis from flickers of inspiration and half-formed schemes, it’s both a statement of pure perseverance, and a head-on confrontation with ambivalence that couldn’t be more assured. 

Releases May 4th, 2018

The BIGGEST WEEKEND (BBC MUSIC) Titanic Slipways Belfast 25th-26th May 2018

Posted: March 15, 2018 in FESTIVALS, MUSIC
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BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN – ” Live Archive Recent Releases “

Posted: November 27, 2017 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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As Bruce Springsteen continues his sold-out Springsteen on Broadway run, he has continued to release live concerts from his archives.

Released a couple of weeks ago is Springsteen and the E Street Band live from Stockholm, Sweden on July 3rd, 1988.  This concert was part of Tunnel of Love Express tour, which was of course supporting 1987’s album “Tunnel of Love”.  What makes this concert significant, however, is that the first 90-minute set was broadcast to radio stations at the time, making it one of most known concerts in the Springsteen canon.   “Chimes of Freedom” from the show was released on an EP of the same name.  But the broadcast did not contain the full concert, which would continue for another set and three encores.  Now, for the first time, the entire concert is being officially released, remixed from the multi-tracks.

Shortly after this tour, Springsteen would disband the E Street Band.  Other than recording a couple of tracks for Springsteen’s first Greatest Hits album, the full group would not come back to together until 1999’s Reunion tour.  The concert that has just been released is the final one from the tour:  July 1st, 2000 at Madison Square Garden in New York City.  Portions of this concert were included on the Live in New York City album released in March, 2001, but this is the first time you can officially hear the entire show.  Unique tracks from this show include the closing number, “Blood Brothers,” which had never been performed on a tour before.

Perhaps to tie in with the concept of Springsteen on Broadway, another recent concert is from March 19th, 1996 in Belfast, Northern Ireland.  Falling between the other two concerts released, this concert was is support of The Ghost of Tom Joad and features a solo, acoustic set from Springsteen.  He had performed in this way before, but this was the first time he embarked on a full tour in the format.  Many of his familiar songs were recast with new arrangements to sit alongside newer material.

In addition, Springsteen has also released the concert from December 8th, 1978 in Houston, Texas.  This show first appeared in The Promise: Darkness on the Edge of Town boxset in 2010, but this is the first time it has been available separately.  All proceeds from the sale of this concert will go to benefit MusiCares Hurricane Relief Fund.

All three newly released concerts have been mixed by Jon Altshiller and mastered by Adam Ayan at Gateway Mastering.

All the shows are offered in a variety of formats: Direct Stream Digital or DSD (with 64 times the sampling rate of CD), MP3, FLAC or Apple Lossless, HD-Audio (24 bit/192 kHz, FLAC-HD or ALAC-HD) and CD-R ($26.00).  A CD-R plus MP3 package is also available for each.

All previous ten volumes of The Bruce Springsteen Archive Series are available at Springsteen’s official live store for download and physical purchase.

A special reminder: all titles are on sale today for Cyber Monday (25% off CDs, 50% off downloads)!

VAN MORRISON and THEM – ” The Complete Them 1964-1967 “

Posted: December 10, 2016 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Complete Them 1964-1967

In 2015, Legacy Recordings acquired (most of) the catalogue of Van Morrison, releasing his library digitally and introducing a volume of the long-running Essential series.  But the most exciting release from the Morrison/Legacy union so far is this this 3-CD, 79-track anthology dedicated to Morrison’s first band, Them.  The Belfast-formed garage rockers’ complete discography was compiled along with a full disc of demos, session material and rarities, adding up to the first look at Them that can be considered truly exhaustive.  The icing on the cake?  Van the Man himself supplied the detailed liner notes, expressing a sometimes-surprising fondness for his earliest musical endeavors.

The new 69-track, 3-CD set from Legacy contains all of the group’s released recordings together with a disc of rarities and unreleased material.  Much of this material has been anthologized in the past, including on Deram’s 1997 compilation The Story of Them Featuring Van Morrison (although that release had some mono tracks rechanneled into stereo and did not have the complete recordings.) We’ve got Legacy’s press release below together with the full tracklisting and discographical information.  If you’d like to explore some of Van Morrison’s earliest work,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0aHmMfZTEw

GIRLS NAMES – ” Revisionism ” EP

Posted: September 23, 2016 in MUSIC
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On September 16th, Girls Names will release Revisionism, a 5-track EP of remixes featuring Mikey Young from Total Control, Broken English Club, Shift Work, Group Zero, and Tom Furse of The Horrors, 

The Belfast quartet Girls Names will release Revisionism, a collection of remixes of their work by other musicians and producers, this Friday and you can listen to all of the remixes above right now.

The remixes capture the bleak essence of Girls Names‘ music and transform the five songs into pieces for the dance floor. While Mickey Young of Total Control has turned ‘Zero Triptych‘ into a synth-driven, almost vaporwave-indebted, jam, Broken English Club goes for a fully fledged acid-electro attack on ‘A Hunger Artist’. The Group Zero makes ‘Malaga’ sound almost like it was recorded by Factory Floor and finally, The Horrors’ Tom Furse finds a way of reducing ‘I Was You’ to its barest, droning remnants.

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SEA PINKS – ” Green With Envy “

Posted: January 14, 2016 in MUSIC
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Green With Envy” by Sea Pinks (2016, from the album Soft Days).
Sea Pinks is a low-fi indie/jangle-punk trio from Belfast. Their new album is their fourth, but from what I’ve read, it’s the first thing they’ve done with the mindset of a trio. The band started off as a solo project for Neil Brogan, who was playing drums for Girls Names at the time. That new Girls Names record made my 2015 Honorable Mention list, which you can see here. Because I like Girls Names, I knew about Sea Pinks, but I’d never heard any of their stuff until I got their new record the other day.

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They say they’re influenced by “beach glass, bleached grass, and ghost guitars”. I’m not sure what any of that means, but it sounds like something that might have been on Slumberland or K Records back in 1995. It’s a little surfy, a little DIY, a lot cloudy and cold. Although I said it has that Slumberland ’95 feel, or the K Records ’95 feel, there’s certainly no mistaking that this is not from this side of the Atlantic.

EXMAGICIAN – ” Job Done “

Posted: January 8, 2016 in MUSIC
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exmagician

Danny and James last broke cover as the songwriters behind Cashier No.9, whose lush, David Holmes-produced album To The Death Of Fun (Bella Union) brought them critical acclaim (Best Album at the NI Music Awards, shortlisted for Best Album of 2011 by the Irish Times), strong radio support from BBC 6 Music, Radio 1 and Radio 2 and a string of sold-out club dates and major festival appearances across the UK and Ireland.

 

Since then the pair have moved on and returned with something new. Self-written and produced with the help of Rocky O’Reilly (And So I Watch You From Afar, General Fiasco, Mojo Fury), their first EP as exmagician leaves behind the Laurel Canyon sheen of Cashier No.9 in favour of something louder, fuzzier and grittier, born of a playful attitude, greater confidence and a load of new pedals and synths. “It’s the dirt under the fingernails,” says Danny with a smile.

EXMAGICIAN is the collaboration between longtime friends Danny Todd and James Smith. The Belfast duo released their self-titled debut EP ‘exmagician’ on Friday 20th November via Bella Union.

The musical reinvention is apparent from the very first seconds of opening track Kiss That Wealth Goodbye, which steams in with a filthy riff, the product of a guitar and a synth melding together so you can’t tell which is which – a feature of the album. “It’s like early Beefheart meets Add N To X,” says Danny – a measure of just how broad the duo’s influences are. “David [Holmes] lent me a Korg MS-20 and then I bought one myself. That synth shaped a lot of the record.”

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CRUISING – ” The Spectacle ” EP

Posted: August 12, 2015 in MUSIC
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The band Cruising unites some of Dublin and Belfast’s finest indie groups: Girls Names, September Girls, Sea Pinks and Logikparty. The quartet have been together since 2013, releasing the odd track and playing occasional, chaos-filled gigs between their endeavours with their main bands, but now they’re sharing something fuller in the form of their debut self-titled debut EP. Cruising’s debut will be released by Tough Love on 14th August 2015 in a limited edition of 300 units on 12”, with the first 100 on hot pink vinyl (sold out). A leather jacket with the band’s name written in studs adorns the record’s sleeve, and its contents are full of spiky tunes to match. Opener ‘The Spectacle’ is howling post-punk in the vein of Savages, ‘Lifting’ blends dashes of psych into their shadowy sound, and ‘Woman’ softens singer Benni Johnston’s snarl with a poppier sheen. In short, ‘Cruising’ is equal parts brooding and buoyant, and one not to be missed. Cruising are a four piece made up of Benni Johnston (Vocals), Claire Miskimmin (Guitar/Bass) Neil Brogan (Guitar/Bass) and Sarah Grimes (drums). With previous/ongoing experience in bands such Girls Names, September Girls, Sea Pinks and Logikparty, Cruising began in 2013 as a side project for all four. Named for William Friedkin’s gay exploitation shocker from 1980, the debut single You Made Me Do That (taken from the killer’s line in the film) dropped in early 2014 on Soft Power records and was recorded live as it was written. Practicing sporadically and playing a string of incendiary/chaotic live shows when schedules allow, CRUISING have now miraculously recorded their debut EP proper for Tough Love. Recorded in two days in a freezing railway arch studio (Dublin’s Guerilla Studios) in January 2015, and mixed at Belfast’s Start Together, the self titled EP shows the band in various guises, morphing between popper’d up Agit-Punk (the re-recorded You Made Me Do That, Woman), psyched out post-punk (Lifting), and riff driven bangers (Safe Corridor, Cutlass, The Spectacle).

GIRLS NAMES – ” Reticence “

Posted: June 11, 2015 in MUSIC
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Northern Ireland’s Girls Names return this autumn with their third full-length album, “Arms Around a Vision”, due for an October 2nd release via long-term home, Tough Love Records.

Pre-order LP, CD or limited edition cream vinyl
smarturl.it/GirlsNames.ToughLove

“We look to Europe for inspiration. For romance. For the idea of a better life,” says the band’s frontman, Cathal Cully, when discussing the album. “For me, living in Belfast just makes you focus on your own art.”

Girls Names formed in Belfast, but they’ve long considered themselves a European band. The distinction is important – their vision of Europe is one of weird, labyrinthian histories, blackest-ever-black coffee, and long drives to dismal places. Romantic notions for those of a certain disposition, but behind the thousand-yard stares they’ve always been a soft-hearted lot. As the title of Arms Around a Vision would suggest, they’re all set to let love in.

The band initially came together as a relatively lean two-piece back in the summer of 2010, but over the course of a handful of EPs and three very different albums, they’ve grown in number and ambition. Their last album, The New Life, was an unexpected underground hit in early 2013, taking the band around the world and garnering much critical praise, culminating in nominations for both the Northern Irish and Irish Music Prizes. Emboldened by the reception to that record, in March they returned with an 11-minute single that was played in full on Radio 1 and, typically, does not feature on their new album. Girls Names like to do things a little differently.

On Arms Around a Vision, they’re more widescreen than ever but also more direct and aggressive. The bass, drums and guitars are still there, but so are saxophones, organs, detuned broken guitars and pianos, and even sheets of metal assaulted with hammers. Conceptually, Arms Around a Vision acts as a love letter to European elegance – Italian futurism, Russian constructivism, Germany’s Zero Group and both Neubaten and Bowie’s Berlin.

Love and pain, romance and fucking. It’s all in there somewhere. Grand claims, perhaps, but in an ever bleak world, why not skygaze? The album opens with ‘Reticence’, a song in two parts that’s half metallic knockout, half midnight swagger. It sounds unlike anything they’ve ever done before, and is a perfect primer for an album that treads a course between Eno-era Roxy sleaze, Birthday Party dissonance and M.E.S’ three R’s: repetition, repetition, repetition.

As confident as it sounds, hardship has equally played a role in shaping Arms Around a Vision. “I’m not starving or anything, but I’ve practically been living hand to mouth since I was 22,” confirms Cully. “Most guitar music now is just a playground for the rich middle classes and it’s really boring and elitist. We’re elitist in our own way, in that we’re on our own and you can’t fuck with us when we’ve nothing to lose”. The near-6 minute ‘A Hunger Artist’ tackles that subject full on, addressing that age old adage of suffering for one’s art.

While the songs aren’t narrative-driven as such – the band still generally favour abstraction and ambiguity – there is a consistent underlying message: “We’ve got nothing. We’ve never had anything. And we don’t expect to. The only person I ever wanted to impress was myself. I’ve never got anywhere close to succeeding in doing that until this album. I’m proud of it. I think I can start saying I’m a musician now.”

Tracklisting:

1. Reticence
2. An Artificial Spring
3. Desire Oscillations
4. (Obsession)
5. Chrome Rose
6. A Hunger Artist
7. Málaga
8. Dysmorphia
9. (Convalescence)
10. Exploit Me
11. Take Out the Hand
12. I Was You

THEM – ” Them “

Posted: February 9, 2015 in MUSIC
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Them were a Northern Irish band formed in Belfast in April 1964, most prominently known for the garage rock standard “Gloria” and launching singer Van Morrison’s musical career. The original five member band consisted of Morrison, Alan Henderson, Ronnie Millings, Billy Harrison and Eric Wrixon. The group was marketed in the United States as part of the British Invasion.

Them scored two UK hits in 1965 with “Baby, Please Don’t Go” and “Here Comes the Night”. The latter song and “Mystic Eyes” were Top 40 hits. Them came from Belfast and they were tougher than most. They played r’n’b with a bristling, raw edge. Fronted by Van Morrison you knew they meant business. There was a rasp in Morrison’s delivery that defined ‘hurt’ and ‘pain’, he was unquestionably the real deal.

This was Them’s debut release and it still sounds as vital as it did when it was released. Direct and hard nosed this is every bit as vibrant as the debut albums by The Stones, Who or Kinks. The potential is all here. Anger truly was the energy. Van Morrison quit the band in 1966 and went on to a successful career as a solo artist. Although Them had a short-lived existence, the Belfast group had considerable influence on other bands, such as The Doors.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0aHmMfZTEw

Them were together with The Rolling Stones and The Animals the greatest British R&B band in the 60’s, although they were very underrated. They played a raw and tougher blues than Rolling Stones and Animals. They had some hits like “Here Comes The Night”, “Baby Please Don’t Go”, “Gloria” and “Mystic Eyes”. Them (f. Van Morrison) had only two albums: “Them” and “Them Again”.

This album contains the hits and Morrison originals “Gloria” and “Mystic Eyes”, some blues standards and other wonderful songs like Morrison’s “You Just Can’t win” and “I’m Gonna Dress In Black” (reminds me of “House Of The Rising Sun”) Buy this album (and also Them Again) if you are a fan of the 60’s white R&b or if you are a Van Morrison fan.

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