• Hotline Miami (Dennaton Games, PS3/PS Vita)

    Most videogames, whether or not they choose to profess it, are rooted in violence. And we’re not just talking about bête noires such as Manhunt, Call Of Duty or Carmageddon. Something as innocuous as Super Mario Bros. involves jumping on enemies’ heads to make them disappear, and at the end of each final stage the big boss plummets into a fiery pit. Space Invaders is all about the shooting. Street Fighter requires beating your opponent into submission. Even Tetris involves making harmless blocks disappear. Call it “deleting” or “subtracting” if these euphemisms make the killing and destroying more palatable. There is no doubt that to progress in any videogame you must be…

  • The Last Of Us (Sony, PS3)

    There is an infamous moment in The Happening, M. Night Shyamalan’s justifiably maligned vision of the apocalypse, in which Mark Wahlberg talks to a plant lest it get angry and secrete a neurotoxin which hastens his madness and eventual suicide. The scene is as ridiculous and cringe inducing as it sounds, and illustrates how in the wrong hands a concept can be totally bungled. The link between this box office disaster and The Last Of Us, the most accomplished and original videogame to be released this year, is that when nature turns angry it can be very deadly indeed. The simple yet…

  • Sigur Rós – Kveikur

    Allow me to tell you a true story. Many moons ago I purchased a Sigur Rós album on a whim, the one which is entitled with a neat pair of symmetrical parentheses and whose tracks are similarly oblique. It was only a year or so later – after many listens along moonlit country roads and empty motorways – when I discovered that the album I was listening to was not in fact the album I thought I was listening to. The record shop clerk had mistakenly slipped the wrong disc in the sleeve and, given a bum steer by the…

  • John Grant – Pale Green Ghosts

    What happens to the elephant in the room when somebody talks about it? Contrary to popular opinion, it does not vanish in a puff of grey smoke. Rather, everyone is abruptly made aware of said elephant as it crushes their toes, pokes them with its tusks and snuffles about in their pockets for polo mints. And nobody appreciates the impact of proverbial elephants more intimately than John Grant, once of The Czars and Midlake, whose penchant for revealing his most secret desires and guiltiest pleasures knows no bounds. Infamously, at last year’s Meltdown Festival he announced onstage that he had…

  • The National – Trouble Will Find Me

    There’s a famous Edward Hopper painting, simply entitled ‘Gas’, in which a solitary, dapper figure stands in the centre of the canvas, almost obscured by a cherry red petrol pump. On first glance its meaning is immediately apparent: it’s either a character study or an elegy to those charming locations found off the beaten track. However, this simplicity is deceptive – as simplicity often is. Look to the right of the frame, where a particularly vicious darkness is bleeding from an obscured road into the forest. One wonders where this path leads and what is to be found there. The…

  • Adam Buxton, Best of Bug – Odyssey Cinema, Belfast

    There’s a crucial moment during this evening’s multimedia shenanigans when an entire cinema auditorium chuckles in unison at the sight of a LEGO David Bowie explaining the inspiration behind his new persona “Cobbler Bob”. At this point the audience have fully plugged into BUG, Adam Buxton’s deliberately random selection box of music videos, skits and winding anecdotes about earache. And that’s part of the joy of BUG: the not knowing what glittery video or deranged cartoon is going to pop out of the indie rock super collider next. Essentially, what we have is an assortment of music promos glued together…