• Terry Riley & Gyan Riley @ The Sugar Club, Dublin

    October 3, 2018 - By 

    “We’ve heard the bar will be closed during this performance, so this might be a long 45 minutes. But we’ll suffer through it together.” Gyan Riley is sat across from his 85-year-old father, Terry, on-stage at Dublin’s The Sugar Club. Before them, watching on from tiered cinema seating and plush velvet banquettes, is a small sea of muted smiles that strong suggest that sufferance – or anything resembling it – is far from on the cards this evening. Hosted by the city’s perennial gatekeepers of good taste, Choice Cuts, it’s the first of a two-night residency from The Rileys and the…

  • A Star Is Born

    October 3, 2018 - By 

    A Star Is Born is unstoppable. It’s got audience affection and Academy respectability in its sights, and it barrels straight at them. Produced, directed, written and starring Bradley Cooper, this is the Hangover star’s leap for high populist acclaim and he doesn’t take any chances, fashioning, alongside brilliant co-star Lady Gaga and mother! DP Matthew Libatique, a swelling, soapy, lens-flare multiplex ballad. While you’re busy tapping your foot, it eats your heart.  A Star Is Born’s primary achievement is how it escapes the orbit of well-thumbed, downright cliched, material through sheer performative will. Cooper is Jackson Maine, a damaged classic rock…

  • Anna Calvi @ Empire Music Hall, Belfast

    October 3, 2018 - By 

    Anna Calvi is a musician who seems deeply invested in the art of the crescendo. Blessed with a gargantuan set of pipes, she can veer from a hushed mumble to clarion operatic tone in an instant, archly imbuing her music with shade and suspense and conjuring up bombastic, room shaking coups de grace that punctuate her grand musical statements. Tonight Calvi’s darkly theatrical persona will dominate The Empire’s striking Victorian music hall, an ideal setting for her apocalyptic brand of cabaret which promises to bombard the audience with head spinning guitar pyrotechnics, dramatic key changes and thrilling, shrieked finales. Stepping…

  • Wild Nothing – Indigo

    October 2, 2018 - By 

    It’s difficult to listen to a Wild Nothing record and not think of Gemini, Jack Tatum’s 2010 debut. Not simply for nostalgia-induced reasoning, though the record’s dreamy ambience may lead one in that direction. Rather, Tatum himself won’t let us forget Gemini. While there’s nothing wrong with self reference and a narrative of progression throughout an artist’s lifetime, Indigo and the previous two Wild Nothing releases – Nocturne and Life of Pause – are overshadowed by that charming debut and Tatum does himself no favours in trying, quite half heartedly, to move on. When Gemini was released to the world,…

  • Dublin Feminist Film Festival 2018

    October 3, 2018 - By 

    Celebrating their fifth year, Dublin Feminist Film Festival will return to the city across November 20-22. With its theme of Reframe/Refocus, Generator Hostel and will host the launch of the festival, alongside other events, on Tuesday, November 20. Screenings will then take over Light House Cinema from November 21-22. Organisers said, ‘Rather than foreground particular topics, our programme this year will feature films not only directed by women, but also featuring women cinematographers, producers, DOPs etc. We hope to broaden the notion of what the “by” means in “Films by Women,” while also raising questions about whether and how films…

  • Premiere: Documenta – Lady With the Ring

    October 2, 2018 - By 

    A break from their planned trilogy of Drone Pop albums, ahead of its final chapter, Documenta will release their first music since 2015’s Drone Pop #1 through Belfast’s Touch Sensitive Records on October 12. Titled Lady With The Ring, it’s the story of “lived once, buried twice” Margorie McCall, who lived in rural Ireland in the early 18th century. She succumbed to a fever and was hastily buried in Lurgan’s Shankill cemetery. Her grave was visited by “a tramp of disreputable character with a reckless and thieving disposition” who drew blood as he tried to prise the ring from her finger, awakening the dead woman who subsequently lived…

  • Max Cooper – One Hundred Billion Sparks

    October 1, 2018 - By 

      There are few artists who occupy the middle ground between music, science, art and technology quite like Max Cooper. The Belfast-born producer’s repertoire often portrays complex scientific theory through the medium of sonically beautiful shapeshifting electronica. Shaped by his studies in computational biology and genetics, One Hundred Billion Sparks is his first full length album since Emergence in 2016, and documents Cooper’s search for artistry amongst the mechanisms, emotions and constructs which yield identity and experience. Crudely put, individuals are distinguished from one another by their differing combinations of one hundred billion neurons, each of them capable of creating…

  • Malojian announces Let Your Weirdness Carry You Home Deluxe Edition

    October 3, 2018 - By 

    The latest NI Music Prize-nominated album from Stephen Scullion, aka Malojian is getting a much-deserved deluxe edition. Released through Quiet Arch Records on November 30, it’s his fourth solo album, and his strongest collection of songs to date, injecting the golden era of 60s pop melodicism he’s known for with the perfect power-pop of Teenage Fanclub & Grandaddy, as well as a more experimental, psychedelic edge than we’d seen from him until this point. Recorded in a lighthouse on NI’s Rathlin Island – in contrast to its Steve Albini-recorded predecessor, it features guest performances from a pedigreed cast of collaborators – Teenage Fanclub’s Gerard Love, Beck/R.E.M./Atoms For…