Friday
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Dott mark a year in business this January with this show, a handy place to showcase their well-chosen lane of scrappy indie pop. It’s one of Ireland’s most fruitful genres and would be our biggest export if there was a market for that sort of thing, but the Galway group cut through the pack (and the strumming) with twin female lead vocals and a delicate sense of melody.
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Tandem Felix straddle the line between experiment-friendly Broadcast or Portishead type sultriness and a more conventional Radiohead approach and — again bearing in mind the ‘they might blow up’ implication of this little festival — they’re clean-looking guys. Expect sincerity and a deliberate attitude to eking out well-considered arrangements, a tasteful approach to something that hints at but never quite reaches post-rock.
Saturday
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Dogs “make music with computers and guitars”. Sometimes that can imply a sort of James Murphy-derided attempt at being different, but it’s clear that with Dogs, it’s wedded from the ground up — more an electro band with a guitarist than the ubiquitous regular-band-with-a-Micro-Korg. Their style is at the line between sad and blissful, a fuzzy end-of-the-night type of music that’s simultaneously affecting and rousing.
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Skelocrats are a supergroup, if you can be a supergroup in a scene where everyone is in everyone else’s band (Land Lovers, Groom, Grand Pocket Orchestra and Land Lovers all feature here). They make noisy indie-pop, unsurprisingly given their provenance, but their duty-switching and sense of fun make them an inevitably compelling live band, always just on the right side of chaotic.
In general
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We can’t really point you to Ginnels any more after putting them fifth on our end-of-year list (above, say, Frank Ocean, Chromatics, Dirty Projectors and a hundred popular acts our hip young tastemakers decided to ignore after 30 seconds of one song) and inviting them to play our 100th birthday party, but you should see them. The same goes for Croupier, fronted by our film editor.
