BY: WILL RUSSELL – Hotpress, 05 Feb, 2020 Quality stuff from US Indietronica crew. “Snow falls on the tip of my tongue/ Tasting blood of the violence to come,” sings Polica frontwoman Channy Leaneagh on ‘Driving’, the opening number of the group’s fifth album When We Stay Alive. The lines prepare you for another round of Polica’s Continue Reading
Album Review: Real Estate, The Main Thing
BY: WILL RUSSELL – Published in Hotpress on 28 Feb, 2020 Excellent outing for US dream pop merchants Across their previous four albums, Real Estate artfully hid a dark underbelly beneath a conventional indie exterior. Teenage Fanclub and The Byrds have rightly been labelled as their primary influences, but Elliott Smith and The Pixies possess equal Continue Reading
In The New Issue: Ireland’s Biggest Ever Pop Star Niall Horan Graces The Cover
Check out this week’s #Hotpress where my #FontainesDC piece shared the cover with Ireland’s Biggest Ever Pop Star – #NiallHoran (I grant a small corner, but there nonetheless, a few inches from stardom, dizzy) A head of the release of his highly anticipated new album, Heartbreak Weather, this month, Niall Horan graces the cover of the new issue of Hot Press! Post-One Direction life has been Continue Reading
Fontaines DC – Live at Brixton Academy
Fontaines D.C.were incredible last night in Brixton. Check out my live review published in Hot Press Magazine – The freezing breeze sweeping the streets of London is a chilly reminder that winter is not yet over but already Fontaines D.C.’s slaying of a sold-out Brixton Academy is a contender for gig of the year. Like Oasis, Continue Reading
We Have Found Our Voice
Chuffed to see my piece on 2020 in Irish music featuring Junior Brother, The Mary Whallopers and Fontaines DC published in today’s Hotpress. BY: WILL RUSSELL In a shift that history may record as seismic, Irish singers, songwriters and bands are grappling with the big issues like never before. And they are doing it in their Continue Reading
Down All The Years, Babe
1990? Dublin? An Italian? Toto Schillaci is the next logic in that sequence. After spending the eighties slogging through the lower divisions of Italian football in the yellow and red of hardy battlers Messina, Toto hit his purple patch in 1990. He was scoring plenty of goals with the Old Lady, Juventus, and shone for Continue Reading
Once Upon A Time In Kampala
The Rise & Rise of Nyege Nyege Tapes I knew what I opened the studio for. I was looking for a higher ground, for what I knew existed in the soul of mankind.” Sam Phillips Man, there is something happening in Kampala, something really special, in a scene reminiscent of Memphis in the 1950s; Liverpool Continue Reading
Life, Death, Beauty, Melancholy
There’s a giant in my head and it ain’t me. I despise that giant. Every time I fall into the abyss, I have to fight him, he beats me, forever he beats me and then somehow he releases me and I crawl out, wasted but alive. Until the next time. Recently, I read about Leicester Continue Reading
Howlin’ Wolf
“This Is Where The Soul Of Man Never Dies” Sam Phillips Howlin’ Wolf, now there’s a handle you are always going to check out. Before I knew of the blues, I knew of Howlin’ Wolf. In the back seat, the car smelling of smoke and strong whiskey, over The Scalp, sounds of a pirate ship Continue Reading