Dublin indie folk band Blue Fish Diamond have just released their new single ‘Free’. A stunning indie folk song that incorporates blues, folk and rock to create an unremitting rhythmic ode to life pre-COVID and a longing for it’s return. With influences ranging from Tom Petty, R.E.M and Neil Young, Blue Fish Diamond bring a new delicately harmonic and refreshing take to a staple genre.
Produced by Gavin Glass in Orphan Recording studios, Free holds a mirror to the thoughts of many of us in voicing hopes for a return to normal life.
About the song Jim Murphy says … “This last year has been a very challenging time for all of us. Thankfully there is hope on the horizon with the roll-out of vaccines, but we are still some months away from enjoying the freedoms of what was once everyday life. Our song ‘Free’ looks forward to that time, when we can embrace ‘sweet life once again”.
Formed in 2016 by Jim Murphy, Blue Fish Diamond released their debut album ‘From Dark to Light’ in 2018, which Hot Press Magazine described as “essential listening for those who like their music powerful and heartfelt”. Their music has been played on radio stations across Ireland and they’re also a staple of the Irish live scene having played Electric Picnic, Whelans, The Workmans Club and The Grand Social to name a few.
With several singles and an album planned for 2021, Jim Murphy (rhythm guitar & lead vocals), Shay Sweeney (drums), Ronan Quinn (bass), Laura Ryder (piano), Axel McDonald (lead guitar), Matilda O’Mahony (backing vocals) and Ella Ryan (backing vocals) are a band to keep a firm eye on as they are sure to rise the ranks over the coming months.
“As time wore on, we increasingly felt the need to make something that shook us out of the fog. Something rattly, loose and defiant that blew the cobwebs away. Music that we could imagine playing at a 2am festival slot.”
So say HousePlants, the exciting creative vision of two of Ireland’s most respected artists – Bell X1 frontman Paul Noonan and innovative atmospheric producer Daithí.
“Having made ‘Take The Wheel’ together for Daithí’s most recent record, I sent him a song last summer by way of a ‘Howaya?’, really, but also for his banger sensibilities!” says Noonan. “We began trading ideas with the idea that whatever we were doing was not ‘Take The Wheel’, that we go the other way and make music that was visceral and a release of sorts.”
Daithí picks up the thread. “It doesn’t feel like one of us featuring on the other’s music – it’s greater than the sum of its parts,” he says. “I’ve always worked as a solo producer so forming a band has been a lovely experience. There’s magic in seeing one of your ideas being worked on from a different point of view, sending music to someone you trust and having it return as a brand new piece of art. The more you work together on an idea, the further it goes until eventually you can’t see the seams. It’s something completely unique.”
Debut single ‘What’s With All The Pine?’ is peppered with playful observations courtesy of Noonan’s wandering mind, forever etching little mental notes during his many virtual appointments across the past year. Noonan considers the track “an attempt to speak to one of the phenomena of this time; the sometimes soul-crushing Zoom calls, the efforts to convey a certain taste or togetherness with our backgrounds – while all around us is going to shit! – having a snoop, an interest in others’ private spaces and a certain judgy-ness around it all.”
For both artists, the project represents reclamation amidst a significantly difficult era for creative souls across Ireland and beyond. “There’s a community of music makers who mainly see each other at gigs and nights like the Choice Music Prize that feels somewhat atomised in the void of lockdown,” he says. “One of the nicer things about this time is that artists have been checking in on each other. It feels like lots of people are doing what we did.”
That sense of camaraderie and community is hard-wired into the music of HousePlants. A new tribe for modern times. All welcome.
Derry’s Lavengro are back with yet another superb pop single, their new release ‘Anchors’ which will be released on May 7th 2021 across all streaming services. Get ready for a change in pace with ‘Anchors’ yet losing none of the Lavengro sound they have become known for.
Gareth, Emmet, Dave and James make the four piece Lavengro and have been riding high on the back of huge radio support from Northern Ireland including BBC ATL, Cool FM and Q Radio.
Speaking about the song, Lavengro say “ It’s a song for those who are struggling with addiction and battling their demons. We called the song ‘Anchors’ as no matter how deep you get, someone will always be there to keep you from drifting away.”
Dublin-based The Crayon Set has announced they will release their second single ‘Don’t Step Back Too Far’ taken from their forthcoming album. The second single is due out this Friday, 30th April 2021. The Crayon Set specialise in hook-filled, alternative pop and their forthcoming album ‘Downer Disco’ will be no different. The album is set for release in September 2021.
Supported by the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sports and Media.
Speaking about their new single, Robert explains “I was pleased when this song came along – I think it helped signal a new direction for the band. It had more of a groove to it – and it had a melancholic atmosphere that drew you in. Lyrically it is about feeling down and losing a sense of yourself and your role in the world. It probably inspired the ‘Downer Disco’ album theme – a bit depressing, but you could dance to it…”
Also speaking about the upcoming album ‘Downer Disco’ Robert describes “The idea behind the band, as the name suggests, was for it to incorporate different ‘colours’ i.e. musical styles and influences, for it to be diverse and not to be confined by any boundaries. So, I think it will be a life-long project and it means it can continue and evolve even if some members might come and go over the years. But I am very reliant on the other crayons adding their magic.”
The first line-up of The Crayon Set released their eponymous debut album in 2013 – it was recorded with Nick Brine (Teenage Fanclub, Super Furry Animals). It is filled choc-a-bloc with infectious, uptempo indie pop songs. The Irish Times described it as “as catchy as a virus”. It’s follow-up ‘Lost Languages’ was recorded with Gavin Glass (Lisa Hannigan, Villagers) and released in 2017 and featured Kate Dineen on guest vocals who later became a permanent member of the band. The album was in part a tribute to many of their favourite ‘Americana’ artists such as Tom Petty, R.E.M., Wilco & Neil Young. The music website Musician.ie made it their Irish album of the year.
Their new album ‘Downer Disco’ is due for release in September 2021. . It was recorded with producer Stephen Shannon at Experimental Audio in Dublin in 2019.
The Crayon Set are an exciting live band and have played many of the top Irish venues and festivals. Their dynamic live shows feature tight vocal harmonies, instrument swapping and occasionally some giant inflatable crayons …
After only a couple of rehearsals, Landers decided to record a live session in a large warehouse known as KAOS in the outskirts of Berlin with their friend Aidan Floatinghome (works with Perlee, Wallis Bird, Hundreds). The upcoming release is the fourth and final installment from the session, celebrating the end of a two year journey for the band.
Their first 3 singles ‘Clear Blue Sky’ (released April 17th 2020), ‘Just Thinking’ (released November 6th 2020) and ‘Washing With Water’ (released February 12th 2021) received warm reactions by the press and public. All three tracks were repeatedly played on An Taobh Tuathail (the flagship alternative radio show on RTÉ Irish Radio), curated by Cian Ó Cíobháin.
Tom Miodrag from Irish Culture Berlin had this to say of Landers third single ‘Washing With Water’: “Tapping into our need for release, renewal and escape, the song undulates with unhurried grace, before being borne on the wings of Breiting’s sensitive bass playing, and von der Goltz’s understated drumming.”
This latest release is under the title ‘Daily Life’. It features one track from the KAOS session and another one that was recorded in January 2021. The last installment is setting out to create a grounding experience and to wrap up the four KAOS releases for the band.
The two tracks delve into feelings one experiences when confronted with truth. ‘Daily Life’ and ‘Eyes Closed’: dissolve and acceptance.
The title track ‘Daily Life’ is balancing essential elements of life: stagnation and forward movements, while ‘Eyes Closed’ is a minimalistic ambient track, creating a vast and wild landscape of sound for the listener to get lost in.
‘Daily Life’ features German violinist and composer Maria I.J. Reich. Maria’s performance adds a distorted quality to the harmonically grounded song, adding a tense “uncomfortableness” to an otherwise balanced piece. ‘Eyes Closed’ is an exception to the previous releases. Created earlier this year to deliberately cap off the whole KAOS session experience, it reflects the recent musical ideas and experiments of the band, pointing towards an ambient/noise direction. The piece was improvised and recorded live in a very collective way and it, therefore, becomes hard to tell which instrument creates which sound.
This final package brings together elements from the band’s past and present. A perfect way to celebrate the end of a chapter and to give hints towards the next chapter that awaits them.
All four releases are available on hand-made limited edition tape cassette, designed and crafted by Berlin-based artist Daniela Elorza.
Landers are an experimental folk band currently based in Berlin. After they met each other by chance in 2019, the band quickly realized they shared a common drive to make music that felt honest and true to their hearts. Dazed and excited about creating something of their own, they started putting pieces of songs together from scraps of poetry and old lost demos.
“I’m on my time with everyone.” The opening line of Nirvana’s ‘Pennyroyal Tea’ and a line that has taken on a whole new meaning over the past months. Three Underneath have, like many other bands, been at the mercy of the restrictions. With little opportunity to write, rehearse and collaborate, Daragh Murray recorded much of the new material in his home studio.
The combination of isolation and loss of income, no longer rehearsing, performing and meeting people has been a large factor in the rise of anxiety in the industry.
“Three Underneath were already taking time off in 2020. The songs were starting to feel stale, we weren’t making any money and we were starting to sort of hate it.
But the combination of already being on a break, just as the pandemic happened, meant that one of our biggest support networks just wasn’t there at all. It was very weird. I was still chatting to Liam obviously, but mostly on family Zoom chats.”
Featuring lyrical themes in quite a similar vein to The Beatles’ classic “Help”, Three Underneath ‘Tell Me It’s Okay’ seeks reassurance from anyone willing.
The music video features special guest appearances from Trevor Hutchinson, Neil Forrester and band photographer and tour manager Jessica Forrester.
‘Tell Me It’s Okay’ is out Friday 30th of April 2021.
Recorded between Vienna and Dublin, ‘New England’ is the third single from Shane Ó Fearghail’s new album ‘Born From Tradition’. Self penned the song is a ballad of reflection. Written from the perspective of a boy who looks back across the waves of time and tide in search of understanding, ‘New England’ is an honest historical account of a shared history.
The catalyst for writing ‘New England’ was the Grenfell Tower disaster. Brexit was its motivation. The history of colonial imperialism its driving force. As controversial as the song might sound, it feels like it captures the Zeitgeist.
‘Born From Tradition’ is Shane’s fourth album. An Irish folk album in mirth and measure, it is a fine collection of old and new traditional styled songs, that comes back to that idea of home and roots.
Shane is an Irish Singer-songwriter based in Vienna. An animator by trade, from Dublin his musical style fits neatly into the Irish Indie Folk box. Likened to, REM, Neil Finn (Crowded House), Rufus Wainright III, Glen Hansard and Ron Sexsmith, it is easy to see where his songwriting loyalties lie. Irish music however, is his first love.
In his first release since his debut album in 2019, Wicklow based singer-songwriter and producer David Boland brings through a sweet indie-alt-pop sound in his latest single ‘6 String’. The tune was inspired after listening to Novo Amor’s track ‘Opaline”‘ on loop for hours at a time, but is also influenced by artists such as Bon Iver, The 1975 & Jeremy Zucker.
‘6 String’ marks a momentary departure from the folk driven acoustic sound that defined his acclaimed album ‘Learning To Breathe’ in 2019, incorporating elements of sound design and expansive production in the track.
“There’s definitely more folky stuff in the pipeline but as my writing process and influences continue to change, I’m having a lot of fun exploring different genres too. Everything comes back to a guitar and vocal at the end of the day for me but producing a track takes me and the songs to unchartered territories and I love it!”
It’s the first of several tracks that the artist will be rolling out throughout the rest of 2021.
One of Ireland’s most interesting talents to emerge in 2020 is Seba Safe, who follows the success of his single ‘In Waiting’ on Paragon Records by releasing his debut EP the ‘Map Runner’ EP (02/04).
Writing candidly and honestly on personal relationships, love, loss and change, Seba Safe’s
pertinent lyrics are wrapped in a sound that combines Pop, Folk, Dance and R’n’B with inspirations spanning from the sparse folk pop of Maggie Rodgers, Big Thief and Julien Baker to the more modern production of Dermot Kennedy and Lil Peep.
With an artistic range that saw him collaborate with Æ MAK on ‘I Dance In The Kitchen’, the track saw heavy radio and DSP support including being named ‘Track Of The Day’ on KEXP.
2021 sees Seba Safe securing solid DSP editorial support across his releases to date, selling out a second headline show in Dublin’s The Grand Social (20/11/21), and garnering significant airplay support from BBC 6 Music, RTE 2FM (including Record of the Week from Tracy Clifford), RTE Radio 1 playlisting amongst many others.
“The ‘Map Runner EP’ was written and recorded at a time where I wasn’t confident in my music or myself. I had just gone through a significant break up and I was really struggling with the fact I hadn’t done anything with my music. The aim of this release is to celebrate growth and to acknowledge the past. These songs might not necessarily be my current sound or represent the person I am now but they are a huge part of my journey and I feel proud to finally release them. I owe this release to the version of myself who went through everything it took to write. These songs used to make me feel sad when I listened to them but now I understand their value and their importance to my personal growth.This EP for me is as much about moving on now as it was then. I hope you enjoy the songs.
P.s Things get better and life goes on.” – Seba Safe
LIVE
Seba Safe, The Grand Social, Dublin, November 20th 2021 (Headline show with MCD)
For the fifth and sixth singles of her new album and video series ‘The St Buryan Sessions’, Cornwall-based singer-songwriter Sarah McQuaid honours two musical giants, both of whom have produced albums for her in the past. ‘Time To Love’ is a co-write with Irish singer/songwriter Gerry O’Beirne, while ‘Rabbit Hills’ — which unlike its predecessors in the series is one she’s never recorded before — was written by legendary English guitar maestro Michael Chapman and originally recorded by him on his 1970 breakthrough album for Harvest/EMI, ‘Fully Qualified Survivor’.
O’Beirne has toured both as a solo artist and as a band member with The Waterboys, The Sharon Shannon Band, Patrick Street and Midnight Well, but is perhaps best known for his much-loved original songs (‘Western Highway’, ‘The Holy Ground’, ‘The Shades Of Gloria’, to name a few), which have been covered by the likes of Maura O’Connell, Mary Black and Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh amongst many others. He produced Sarah’s first three albums in addition to co-writing songs with her for the most recent three.
“Gerry is the kind of songwriter that I’ve always aspired to be,” Sarah states in an introductory video for ‘Time To Love’, “which is to say that you probably know a bunch of songs that he’s written without even realising that he wrote them. And I don’t know if I’m ever going to get to that level of … immortality, if you like, but I do know that co-writing with Gerry has generated some of the best songs I’ve ever written, even if it can be a little bit of a fraught process at times.
What usually seems to happen is that we find ourselves in vehement disagreement over a word here, or a note there, and eventually Gerry just throws up his hands and says ‘Okay, have it your way, but I think you’re wrong.’ And I say ‘Well, I know I’m right,’ and then I go into the studio and I start trying to record the song, and I realise that Gerry was right. And I change the song to the way he wanted it, and it becomes a much better song.”
Chapman and McQuaid struck up a friendship after meeting at the Village Pump Festival in 2014, and he produced and played on her 2018 album ‘If We Dig Any Deeper It Could Get Dangerous’. Last year, Sarah was invited by Michael’s wife Andru to contribute a track to a privately released album commemorating his 80th birthday, consisting of recordings of Michael’s songs by various artists he’s worked with over the years, including Lucinda Williams, Thurston Moore, Kurt Vile, Meg Baird, Steve Gunn, Bridget St John and other equally illustrious names.
“I was so honoured to be asked to be part of it,” Sarah recalls, “and I immediately asked Andru if I could do ‘Rabbit Hills’. It’s such a beautiful song, both melodically and in terms of the lyrics, which are incredibly poetic, and the imagery they evoke — when I listen to the words I have a perfectly clear picture in my mind of this place “where the water meets the trees / and the long grass turns to sand” — and for a long time I’d had a notion that it would be a lovely one to cover eventually.
I was terrified that she was going to say somebody else had already bagsied it, but she emailed me straight back saying ‘It’s yours, go for it,’ and the first thing I thought was that I’d really like to write a piano arrangement of it, rather than trying to emulate Michael’s guitar which was obviously always going to be impossible as well as pointless. And then when the St Buryan Sessions project came up and I knew I was going to have access to that gorgeous grand piano, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to do it.”
The piano in question belongs to the St Buryan Male Voice Choir, which kindly gave permission for Sarah to use it, but resides permanently in the stunning medieval church where ‘The St Buryan Sessions’ were filmed and recorded last summer after Sarah’s gigs and tours were cancelled due to COVID-19.
“We set her up as if it were a regular gig,” explains Sarah’s longtime manager and sound engineer, Martin Stansbury, who produced, recorded and mixed the project. “No flash studio mics, just the same touring PA and monitors she’d walked onstage to a thousand times, so it would be truly home territory.”
Martin also placed ambient microphones around the soaring space to capture its natural acoustic and intensify the listener experience of “being there”, while Cornish filmmaker and director Mawgan Lewis of Purple Knif (who worked previously with Sarah on videos for ‘If We Dig Any Deeper It Could Get Dangerous’) and Eden Sessions veteran camera operator John Crooks were able to take full advantage of camera angles that would not have been possible if audience sight-lines had been a consideration.
“I’m totally thrilled with the result,” says Sarah, “and I’m so glad that we were able to do it in a place that’s been so special to me on a personal level – plus, the church itself had a huge impact on the overall sound, as well as on the visuals.”
‘Time To Love (The St Buryan Sessions)’ and ‘Rabbit Hills (The St Buryan Sessions)’ will be available for streaming and download via Spotify, iTunes/Apple Music, Bandcamp and other services from April 23 and May 14, respectively.
Videos of each song will be premiered the day after release in live “watch party” events on Sarah’s YouTube channel, with Sarah on hand in the chat to answer questions and respond to feedback. The roll-out of singles and videos will continue throughout the year, and Sarah plans to release the full 15-track, 72-minute album on CD and limited-edition double LP on Friday October 15.
