L.A. indie-pop trio LANY live at Belfast’s Limelight. Photos by Niall Fegan.
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Knockanstockan have announced their second wave of acts for this year’s festival. Joining the likes of Just Mustard, Bicurious, Punk Podge & The Technohippies, Hot Cops, Cherym and Kitt Philippa, who were among the first names announced last month, include Robocobra Quartet, Slouch, Dowry, BATS, Jyellowl, Myles Manley, Rachael Boyd, No Spill Blood, Tebi Rex, Happyalone, The Wood Burning Savages and more. Returning to Blessington Lake in Co. Wicklow across July 19-21, tickets for the festival can be bought here. Watch the second line-up announcement video below.
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Stephen Malkmus will return to Dublin to play Whelans on Saturday, September 14. Set to take place almost a year after Malkmus (with the Jicks) played Vicar Street last October, the show is part of a series of solo shows in UK and Europe across September. Tickets go on sale on Friday at 9am priced €30 inclusive of booking fee. Revisit Zara Hedderman’s interview with Malkmus from October here. Malkmus recently released his latest solo album, Groove Denied. Stream it below.
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Conor Walsh’s debut release, The Front, was a glimpse of a talent in development. Though Walsh’s playing was similar to that of other contemporary minimal musicians – most obviously Nils Frahm – his experimentation with treating and processing the sound of his piano showed how he was already forging his own path away from them. His untimely death just months after the EP’s release was therefore a huge musical loss as well as a personal one, as it seemed that we would be left with only that small glimpse. But Walsh’s family, after guessing the password to his laptop, found…
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This year’s Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival in Belfast is already shaping up to be one of its strongest line-ups to date. With the likes of Echo & The Bunnymen already announced, today the festival has revealed three stellar bookings. On Saturday, May 4, Jason Pierce’s Spiritualized will play the Marquee. On May 7, Anna Calvi will play Custom House Square. And on Thursday, May 2, Scottish alternative rock heroes Teenage Fanclub will also play the Marquee. Go here to buy tickets. Take a bow, CQAF. Take a bow.
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For a film about a frustrated, unhappy child educator, The Kindergarten Teacher is surprisingly quiet. No chaotic scenes of brats in meltdowns and screaming teachers wilting with stress. In fact, New York teacher Lisa Spinelli (Maggie Gyllenhaal) seems to have lucked out. Her little ones are well-behaved and she seems to genuinely like them, navigating her classroom with that airy, benign, vaguely lupine air Gyllenhaal does so well. Her days tick along in well-observed routine: cleaning toilets, pouring fruit juice and washing dishes in tiny sink. But there is unfulfilment seeping out of her. In the downtime it is deafening. Sara Colangelo’s…
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English 2 Tone legends The Specials will play Bangor’s Open House festival in the summer. The Terry Hall-fronted band – who released their long-awaited eighth studio album, Encore, last month – will play the seafront as part of this year’s festival on Sunday, August 25. Tickets cost £45 and go on sale tomorrow (Friday, March 15) at 9am. Featuring 140 events, spanning music, theatre, comedy, books, spoken word, film, food & drink and visual art, the full programme for Open House 2019 will be announced in May. Previously announced, the Specials will also play three dates at Dublin’s Olympia Theatre across April…
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Royal Yellow is the pseudonym for Mark O’Brien, the multi-talented former frontman of post-rock darlings Enemies. After a ten year career culminating in a global tour and the release of their third album, Valuables, Enemies called it a day. This is when O’Brien went solo, charting out a course of his own drawing influence from every direction and creating something truly unique. Royal Yellow takes cues from the likes of The Avalanches and DJ Shadow, somewhere where hip-hop, jazz, rock and pop collide. After the viral release of his debut single ‘Hazeldene’ and the follow up ‘Aruba’, Royal Yellow will…
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Seventeen years after the denouement of Far Cry 5, whose narrative culminated with the detonation of an actual nuclear bomb, the fictional location of Hope County, Montana is in a period of what one might politely call “social regeneration”. Pockets of survivors are rebuilding shared communities, assisted in part by your character, a male or female cipher who goes by the moniker “The Captain”. As with all previous Far Cry instalments, your mute avatar is dropped into a nightmarish scenario, ill-equipped and lacking in the necessary skills to cope with this irradiated new world, and must subsequently complete quests to build up the…
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Jason Williamson’s response to a DWP case officer on 2013 single ‘Jobseeker’ – “I’ve got drugs to take, and a mind to break” – articulated a central anxiety in the work of Sleaford Mods: that a state of unreality, induced by whatever means possible, might be preferable to the unmediated experience of working-class life – and that the people who are supposed to help either don’t understand or, more likely, don’t care. Williamson’s lyrics have brought us to pubs, to drug-deals, to myopia and self-loathing, and Andrew Fearn’s music to what sound like some of the dingiest, strangest nightclubs in…