Blue Whale (‘Last Immediate Images’ Album Launch)

Moving On Music in association with CQAF Presents

Blue Whale (‘Last Immediate Images’ Album Launch)

The Black Box

Saturday 11 May, 8.30pm

Doors 8.00pm

£13.00 or £25 with copy of album

Buy Tickets

*Original tickets still valid

Having underscored their status as one of Ireland’s most fiercely unpigeonholeable bands on their debut album Process, Belfast quartet Blue Whale make their highly-anticipated return with their forthcoming second LP, Last Immediate Images.

Recorded and produced by Gilla Band’s Dan Fox, Last Immediate Images is a masterful expansion, and deft deconstruction, of what the Quietus hailed as their “chaotic, yet controlled experimental rock.”

Comprising guitarists Michael O’Halloran and Ben Behzadafshar, drummer John Macormac and bassist Andrew Melville, Blue Whale were a supremely shapeshifting live proposition by the time the genre-mauling Process arrived in 2018.

Andy Cairns of Therapy? was reminded of free-jazz pioneer, Albert Ayler “playing with a bunch of kids that grew up on Steve Albini records,” while The Line of Best Fit said “the mathy, jazz-flecked brew hurtles through a thorny tunnel of riffs and percussive flailing–it should be utter chaos, but Blue Whale make it honeyed.”

Fast forward to 2023 and the band’s craft is as mercurial as ever, yet elevated by taking a breather. It remains thickety and combustive in all the right places but now, Blue Whale sound like a band equally potent in restraint.

“A lot of our early stuff would jump all over the place,” adds Michael O’Halloran. “Now we have the confidence to have a central theme to a song, build around that and not feel like it has to go on a big journey. I think that’s why it sounds more cohesive.”

Lauded for evoking everyone from Deerhoof and Swans, to Slint and Captain Beefheart, all the while sounding uniquely incendiary; with a particularly fierce and fun dynamism seen on the live stage. Strain your ear elsewhere through Last Immediate Images and you might hear flickers and ghosts of ex-Tom Waits’ guitarist Marc Ribot, Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan, a slither of A Silver Mt. Zion, and the shuffle and energy of London jazz scene acts like Sons of Kemet.

“Fierce and playful, chaotic and under control” – The Quietus

“The mathy, jazz-flecked brew hurtles through a thorny tunnel of riffs and percussive flailing – it should be utter chaos, but Blue Whale make it honeyed.” – The Line of Best Fit

Tickets also available from:
Visit Belfast | 028 90 246 609
9 Donegall Square North - Open 7 days a Week

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The Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival and Out To Lunch are annual festivals of music, comedy, theatre, art and literature which take place in January and May in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

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Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival / Out To Lunch Arts Festival
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