• AAA: Therapy? @ Mandela Hall, Belfast

    In an AAA (Access All Areas) set Shaun Neary shoots Northern Irish alt-rock legends Therapy? before, during and after their spectacular Troublegum set at Belfast’s Mandela Hall on Saturday night as part of this year’s Northern Ireland Music Prize.

  • Interview: Paul Smith

    Maximo Park frontman Paul Smith talks to Shannon Delores O’Neill about his new, forward-thinking collaboration with Peter Brewis (Field Music) for their Frozen by Sight album, released today. Frozen by Sight has been described as a “playful departure from [both Peter’s and your] previous groups”. Do you agree? Peter and I have known each other for over a decade but we never got to formally work with each other; we’d watched each other’s bands, shared the same musical ideas and always just thought, “Will we ever get to do something?” We were then lucky enough to get commissioned work by the Festival…

  • Watch: Squarehead – 2025

    Equal parts wistful and wonderful, Dublin indie-rock trio Squarehead have unveiled the video for their latest single ‘2025’. Created by Domhnall and Brian Gleeson, the video very nicely captures perhaps the biggest of all the big questions: “Where does the time go?” It confronts it and turns it something of rare beauty – the faint sense of melancholy pales into a return to the “good old days”, and a very fun reminder of Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr’s age-old adage of “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”. It also kind of reminded us of this. ‘2025’ is taken from Squarehead’s exceptional Respect, released last…

  • The Drop

    The Drop is a good example of how short stories and screenplays are different forms with different expectations and demands. Dennis Lehane, who writes the film, translates the material straightforwardly from his 2009 story ‘Animal Rescue’, producing a low-level Brooklyn crime drama which often feels both undernourished and padded. Director Michael R. Roskam impressed in 2011 with Bullhead, a Dutch-language feature about the animal hormone underworld in Belgium, and here he finds a similar, if less complex, story about day-to-day mob operations and the guarded, tense blue-collar men caught up in them. Bob (Tom Hardy) and Marv (the late James…

  • ‘First Things First’ Exhibition @ Irish Georgian Society

    One Strong Arm is a brand new letterpress studio that uses antique wooden and metal type settings to produce beautifully original prints. The new studio, based in Pimlico, Dublin, is the brainchild of Dave Darcy. For the launch of One Strong Arm, Dave teamed up with craftsman Mick Minogue to produce a set of prints that “merge the traditional with the contemporary, through typography and illustration”. The prints pay tribute to the opening lines of some famous works of literature – from the likes of Kafka to Hunter S. Thompson. ‘First Things First’ launched in the Irish Georgian Society last night sponsored…