If February belonged to Father John Misty, it was Sufjan Stevens who owned March; his seventh studio album Carrie & Lowell was a devastatingly beautiful retreat to the simple, stripped back folk style songs of his earlier work. Irish pop perfectionists The Would-Bes released their best song since their return after a lengthy hiatus, while fans of electronic/ambient music were well served with very fine albums from Scuba, Inventions and Errors....

The fondly remembered 12″ single – some personal favourites from the 80s.

February belonged to Father John Misty – a sell-out show in Dublin and an album that will take some beating for album of the year. Other releases worth checking out include fine efforts from Champs, electronica pioneer Dan Deacon and a sophomore release from The...

10 of the best tracks from January 2015.

Julie Bienvenu of the brilliant A Lazarus Soul picks her top ten albums of 2014.

Nostalgia trip: 10 eighties Irish bands that could and should have went on to greater things including A House, Stars of Heaven and Microdisney.

Craig Walker of Mineral chooses his favourite 10 albums of 2014. Craig is currently working on Mineral’s second album, scheduled for release in mid 2015.

Pat Barrett of the Hedge Schools picks his Top Ten albums of 2014. The Hedge Schools release their new album ‘At The End Of A Winding Day’ on the 23 January.

Ten essential tracks from Boston legends Pixies.

Let’s list again: 30 of my favourite songs of 2014.

!0 songs for Christmas. None of them are Fairytale of New York. Most of them are free of any semblance of Christmas cheer.

10 song-writers that sound-tracked the eighties.

“One chord is fine, two chords are pushing it. Three chords and you’re into jazz.” – Lou Reed     We tend to imagine that our idols are indestructible, resistant to the ravages of time and the slow and steady decline that sets in as the years roll by. We hold them in memory, picture perfect, raging with the youth and vitality that first drew us into their orbit. And so for a whole generation of music fans, the news of the sad passing of Lou Reed at the age of 71 felt like a cold, sharp slap to the face, a timely reminder that greatness confers no guarantee of immortality, and eventually, the music will fade away and die for all of us. Genius is a word often bandied about a little too freely when eulogising dead rock stars – in the case of Lou Reed, it seemed too small a word to encapsulate his talent. He was the original street poet, unflinching in his portrayal of the seedy underbelly of life and uncompromising in his approach to making music. With the Velvet Underground, he dropped a grenade into the Summer of Love – blasting the cosy psychedelia of the late sixties to pieces with a debut album that moved from tender to terrifying with seamless ease. The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967) remains a landmark record, and is arguably the most influential rock album of all time. While the Beatles and the Stones cloaked their references to drug-taking in layers of ambiguity, Reed cast a cold, dispassionate eye on the junkie experience – on the face of it, ‘Heroin’ is a song that sounds dangerously like glamourisation. Dig deeper and it becomes clear it was just Lou Reed telling it like it...