Groove Festival featuring Primal Scream, Daithi, Katie Laffan, Hudson Taylor and more at Killruddery Gardens in Wicklow. Photos by Ian McDonnell
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Final Portrait is actor Stanley Tucci’s fourth film as writer-director and shares with Big Night, his 1996 gastro-drama debut, an interest in artisans and their obsessions; though in comparison, it’s an amuse-bouche. Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti, living in 60s Paris, explains the changes in portraiture philosophy to James Lord, a young American fan and writer who is sitting for one of his own. Portraits used to be finished articles, a frizzle-topped Geoffrey Rush explains, because the subject needed a likeness and a double; the advent of photography has erased that. His portraits are, he admits, essentially unfinished; laboured and inspired…
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Grizzly Bear are a band of individuals and this has never been as true as it is on their latest record Painted Ruins. In the five years since Shields, the once Brooklyn-based band have scattered across the east and west coasts slowly reconvening to create new music. These years have perhaps been the most formative in the band’s tenure as vocalist Ed Droste describes, “life happened”. Marriage, kids, divorce and everything in between has transformed the four indie rockers into adults, each unique in their experience of the world. And it’s with this experience that the band approach Painted Ruins.…
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In her debut album to be released through Fat Possum, Sophie Allison’s Soccer Mommy brings a new lease of life to previously released tracks, along with introducing a promising new era with two new ones. In recent years, Allison has become renowned for her lo-fi bedroom recordings, earning her quite the following on Bandcamp. Previous EPs, Songs From My Bedroom and Songs for the Recently Sad were the proud product of a simple TASCAM mic and Garageband set-up, giving her music its trademark, serene vocals and intimate charm as she shared her thoughts on young love, relationships and, more recently,…
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Far beyond providing mere entertainment, a festival has the capacity to animate everyday spaces and nudge people to perhaps see their habitual surroundings in a new light. Now in its fifth year, Open House Festival has brought Bangor’s spaces – small and large, public and private, mundane and magical – to life, via the arts in their broadest possible spectrum. The transformative nature of Open House Festival is evident in the concert of Holly Macve, the first concert held in the century-long history of the former The Good Templar Hall, re-baptized Studio 1A in April 2017, after extensive renovations and…
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Without the faintest shadow of a doubt, Dublin quartet Autre Monde are one of the very best bands in the country at the minute. A stellar live proposition to boot, the Paddy Hanna-fronted foursome funnel their myriad influences in magnificent ways; bearing the imprint of but never kowtowing or passing off bygone sounds as their own. Concluding and very nicely capping off their opening four-track offering, ‘Village of Loomers’ – a self-proclaimed “indie ballad” of sorts – was recorded with Daniel Fox of Girl Band in Spring. Here, as with their previous material to date, Hanna, Padraig Cooney, Mark Chester…
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Absinthe hour – oil on Canvas, 2017 I first encountered the work of Eleanor McCaughey in 2015 when I saw her solo exhibition Image is Everything in Dublin’s Eight. There McCaughey collated and presented an Americana she had fictionalised using found photographs that depicted American diplomats and their families during the Cold War years. In that show hints existed to the new shift in direction her practice was about to take, and in the intervening years I voyeuristically watched this evolution through social media – peppering it with real life contacts at various exhibition openings. It was at one of those recent…
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The self-titled, self-produced debut album from Wexford quartet Ger Fox Sailing is a richly-woven, nicely eclectic collection of songs from a band who have just set out their stall and then some. From the contemplative precision of ‘Nowhere Without You’ and the poppier tangents of ‘What It Is’ to blistering closer ‘Best Friend’ via a stream of scuzz-laden, occasionally prog-leaning rock, reverberations from the likes of Longpigs, Incubus, Queens of the Stone Age, Grandaddy and, in parts, Northern Irish alt-rock band Pocket Promise (though we suspect the latter is something of a total coincidence) coalesce with the band’s own brand of deft,…
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Ballymena/Belfast occult-loving stoner-doom outfit Elder Druid have announced details of their debut album, Carmina Satanae – the Latin Term for Songs of Satan. The LP was recorded live in the studio by certified heft-bringer Niall Doran at Start Together Studios in Belfast over 3 days in August. As well as inevitable genre touchstones like Sleep & Electric Wizard, the iron lungs of frontman Gregg McDowell lends it a fury matched only by the likes of Down. Eight tracks strong, two of which are fresh recordings from their prior Magicka EP, they look set to make a significant dent on the UK & Irish doom scenes, having already toured…
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We’ve still got another five months to go until the year’s end, there is a certainly a clear frontrunner for the most pleasant surprise of the last 12 months. Do you remember a nearly a decade ago when the phrase “wake up in the morning feeling like P Diddy” entered our cultural milieu? Ke$ha managed to represent an alternative side to female empowerment while also being completely unbearable. Honestly, it’s been eight years and I still can’t understand the actual appeal of songs such as ‘Blah Blah Blah’ or ‘Your Love Is My Drug’. After the initial spark and a…