• ‘That Is Horror Already’: Aislinn Clarke on Magdalene Laundry Frightener The Devil’s Doorway

    July 11, 2018 - By 

    Earlier this year, the announcement of The Conjuring spin-off The Nun prompted movie site ledes about how scary nuns are the new scary clowns. But for Irish readers, Mother Superior’s terrors are nothing new. The trauma of the Magdalene Laundries — the island-wide network of religious asylums where vulnerable and ‘wayward’ women were imprisoned and forced to provide unpaid labour —lingers in Irish cultural memory. Peter Mullan’s The Magdalene Sisters (2002) is the most well-known dramatisation of life in the institutions — the last of which closed in Belfast in only 1996 — but is being joined by new genre work. Premiering this week in New York…

  • Eugene Onegin @ The Grand Opera House

    July 11, 2018 - By 

    ‘Where are they now, those golden days of my youth?’ The past hangs over the characters in Pyotr Illyich Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin like a veil. The folly of youth and the burning shame of costly pride are not dimmed by the passage of time, but are instead, only magnified. Early in Scottish Opera’s vibrant production there is a potent sign that the bucolic surroundings of harvest time and the budding spirit of spring love might soon be dispelled.  As Madame Larina (Alison Kettlewell} and Nurse Filipyevna (Anne-Marie Owens) reminisce about the courtships of their youth, and as the matriarch’s daughters…

  • Stream: Arvo Party – Tired Eyes (fear. LARKS)

    July 10, 2018 - By 

    Ahead of making his solo debut performance at Mandela Hall’s curtain call on July 27, Belfast musician and producer Herb Magee AKA Arvo Party is back with collaborative new single ‘Tired Eyes’. Featuring sublime guest vocals from Fiona O’Kane AKA LARKS, it’s a first-rate, FM-flirting electro-pop gem that not only confines within its unfurling four minutes Magee’s keen versatility as a producer – it doubles up as a stop-gap ahead of the release of Arvo Party’s second album, which is pipped for release next month. Details to be announced. In the meantime, give this a blast or two.  

  • Naive Ted drops fierce new Magazines mixtape: Stream

    July 9, 2018 - By 

    Naive Ted is nothing if not one of Ireland’s most prolific and criminally underrated artists. Last year, for example, we were blown away by the Limerick-based scratch master and frenetic, experimental hip hop producer’s MuRli featuring The Minute Particulars // Episode I – The death of my trust is sincerely yours album and its subsequent instalments. Now, the masked producer has returned with yet another mixtape. This time, available for free via Soundcloud. It’s, as expected, absolutely buck wild. Wielding a sort of hectic poeticism throughout, Ted’s frenetic beats, sampling and machine bashing make for a chaotic but constantly exhilarating listen. You can also download the release…

  • Eels @ Iveagh Gardens, Dublin

    July 9, 2018 - By 

    With the World Cup, the glorious weather and the afterwork buzz there is sense of anticipation around Dublin’s Iveagh Gardens on this balmy Friday night. It’s a beautiful part of the city and it is wonderful walking through the trees to see the food tents and all the happy faces of this vastly mixed crowd. The four man band of Eels take to the stage just after 8.30pm.  They take no prisoners by lashing into it some cover versions of The Who classic ‘Out In The Street’ then rather strangely and brilliantly ‘Raspberry Beret’, by the one and only Prince.…

  • Interview: Chelsea Wolfe

    July 9, 2018 - By 

    Currently on tour in Europe, the bewitching force that is Chelsea Wolfe will play Belfast’s Limelight on July 23 and Dublin’s Tivoli Theatre on July 24. Ahead of those shows, the Californian goth-rock artist talks to Jack Rudden about new music, her country music background, the ideal breakfast and more. On your latest release, Aaron Turner of Post Metal icons ISIS featured on the track ‘Vex’. What was it like collaborating with Aaron  and have you any plans to collaborate with other artists in the near future? CW: I also collaborated with Troy Van Leeuwen of QOTSA, and my longtime bandmate…

  • The Coral Set For Belfast and Dublin Shows

    July 6, 2018 - By 

    Set to be return with their ninth studio album, Move Through The Dawn, on August 17, English indie rock five-piece The Coral will stop off at shows in Belfast and Dublin in November. The James Skelly-fronted band will play Belfast’s Limelight 2 on Wednesday, November 21 and the Academy in Dublin on Thursday, November 22. Tickets are priced at £20 and €25 and go on sale on Monday at 9am. Directed by James Slater, check out the video for the band’s brand new single ‘Sweet Release’ below.

  • Dublin Oldschool

    July 6, 2018 - By 

    It’s hard to picture Dublin Oldschool on the stage. Emmet Kirwan’s 2015 poem-play of the same name, which ran at the National Theatre and won the Stewart Parker award, finds rushing, thumping life on screen, with Kirwan staying on to screenwrite and star, joined by first-time feature director (and co-writer) Dave Tynan. Set free from its theatrical box, Oldschool is a film that never sits still for long. Set over the course of one druggy, downey, uppey bank holiday weekend in the Irish capital, Dublin Oldschool has a compellingly mobile energy. It snakes through Dublin’s streets and backalleys, across its…

  • Watch: VerseChorusVerse – Category

    July 5, 2018 - By 

    Just last week, we shared news about outro, the new third album from Belfast-based singer-songwriter Tony Wright AKA VerseChorusVerse. Now, the musician and and former And So I Watch You From Afar riff-slinger is back with the video for the release’s lead single, ‘Category’. Shot on location and “on a whim” in the beautiful commune of Casalattico in Italian region of Lazio, it features a solitary Wright mirror this wonderfully carefree, sun-tinted effort, all while offering up some contemplative lyrical subtext: He said, “The lyrics are a meditation on contradictions and the restrictive construct nature of labels in this age of fluidity, masked…

  • Let’s Eat Grandma – I’m All Ears

    July 5, 2018 - By 

    Those who find themselves in their orbit have been quick to describe Let’s Eat Grandma’s rawness and genre-agnosticism as otherworldly. This is probably a fair assessment: Their experiments are, on the surface, unrelentingly other, as much as they are worldly. Up until now though, this is a space that these childhood friends have constructed and conjured for themselves. The beatific mini-universe that first emerged on their 2016 debut, I, Gemini, flooded with vibrancy, uninhibited imaginations and shared experiences — It was the kind of world energised by sugar-rushes and spurred on by way of red-eyes glued to early-morning cartoons. A…