New Zealand folk singer-songwriter Hannah Sian Topp aka Aldous Harding playing one of the gigs of the year, live at Vicar Street in Dublin. Photos by Leah Carroll.
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Sigrid live at 3Arena in Dublin. Photos by Kevin Hennessy.
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Since launching back in 2014, Mature Cheddar has steadily held its reputation as one of Belfast’s most beloved club nights. With a very admirable emphasis on not taking itself too seriously (and, let’s face it, where’s the downside in that?) it proudly spins the very best in the ’80s and 90’s cheese every Saturday, upstairs in Voodoo on Fountain Street. But what sets it apart from other nights of its ilk? Why should you check it out? And what does the future for the night hold? We donned our favourite spandex and caught up with main man Niall Kennedy – also of And…
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English neo-psych maestros Temples will play Dublin in the spring. The trio, who released one of the albums of the year in Hot Motion in September, will return to the city to play the Button Factory on 2nd March 2020. Tickets cost €18.50 and go on sale on Friday at 10am.
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DIY LK‘s resident emos-in-chief Casavettes round out a year that’s seen them tour the length of the land on the back of their debut album, Senselessness. One of the most prolific acts in the most prolific music city on the island, they’re back with new single ‘Imposter Syndrome’ – a 2nd wave homage which firmly posits them as potentially the finest of their ilk in Ireland. Like Senselessness, the single was engineered and produced by Mícheál Keating of Bleeding Heart Pigeons. Artwork comes from Eilis Mahon (Girlfriend/icebear). Frontman Diarmuid Ó Sé told us more about how the track came together: “I started writing it directly after the album…
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“If you watch modern music documentaries, you have all these talking heads who explain it and lead you by the hand through the whole thing, but in this, the music envelopes you, there’s no chat.” These words by Joe Boyd, one of the producers on Aretha Franklin concert film, Amazing Grace, sums up, with incision and pure, matter-of-fact concision, what sets it apart in one fell swoop. Originally directed by the Oscar-winning Sydney Pollack, and later predominantly realised by producer Alan Elliott, it is an experience that is revelatory in all the right places. Capturing the Queen of Soul as…
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Belfast post-punk trio Ghost Office are set to release their effervescent, jerking new single ‘Cereal Café’ tomorrow, December 6th. Their first release since 2018’s excellent ‘Here Come The Elders!‘, it was written in a half hour frenzy, voicing, through Stewart Lee-tinged wordplay, drummer/vocalist Richard Bailie’s dismay at realising, finally, “that they have opened a cereal cafe in London, selling all the milks.” Almond milk, regular milk, and so on. ‘Cereal Café’ is their “grand anti-gentrification anthem”. “Listeners will perhaps question whether they are several years too late, especially considering the flagrant gentrification of the Ormeau Road area of Belfast [“Catch it,before the gentrifiers come“, as the Guardian recently, tardily ordered],…
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In our role as a music & culture outlet, we realise the importance of uncovering the profound truths of the everyday. So, with great joy we’ve decided to premiere the first episode of Dear Drinks Man, a soft drink review webseries filmed live on location, in the internet, from Music Hall Pictures. Often inconspicuously, yet invariably-placed; promoter, publisher & man about town Saul Delmore Philbin Bowman is to Dublin gigs what expensive American imported soft drinks are to its convenience stores. Its name came from a moment when host Saul’s local shopkeeper saw him in his shop one day and exclaimed “If it isn’t the [colloquial definition] Dear Drinks Man.” The video…
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Is this film a Ford, or a Ferrari? Le Mans ‘66 (titled Ford v Ferrari in other territories) is pretty clear about which one it would like to be. Ford is ugly; Ferrari is beautiful. Ford spits its cars out with production-line urgency, in drab plants overseen by Henry Ford II (Tracy Letts), a wounded capitalist nursing second-generation anxiety, whose generous girth symbolises his enterprise’s quantitative bloat. Ferrari’s vehicles, on the other hand, are products of artisanal care and Mediterranean exuberance. Ford is efficiency; Ferrari is eros. James Mangold’s film sides with the dreamers. It opens with a quasi-mystical voiceover…
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Wallis Bird with support from Aidan Floatinghome, live at Vicar Street in Dublin. Photos by Niamh Finnegan