• Mistress America

    August 20, 2015 - By 

    With Frances Ha and While We’re Young, Noah Baumbach had made a pretty convincing argument that the most recent act of his reasonably long career is the strongest. Both films tackled ideas of identity, maturity and creativity with a delicate hand and a great deal of profundity and it pleases me to say that his latest effort, his second of 2015, Mistress America sits comfortably alongside the calibre of his previous two efforts. The picture, Baumbach’s second with writer, star and all round charming presence Greta Gerwig, is at its heart a screwball dramedy about growing old, developing a personality and the…

  • The Flag – Heat Waves

    July 28, 2015 - By 

    One-man racket-making specialist Ted McGrath has hit on to a nice niche here. With The Flag’s Heat Waves, he’s happened onto this strange electronic hybrid. Swathes of eclectic influences, styles and instrumentation all come together in this intriguing amalgamation. Sensations of Girl Band, The KLF and Young Fathers all come to mind as the album takes you on its rather spritely journey. It’s sharp, absorbing and more often than not quite compelling. There are issues with its layout and construction, however, that hurt the experience overall. The proceedings start well with the titular ‘Heat Waves’, this brooding creeping creature which…

  • Desaparecidos – Payola

    July 8, 2015 - By 

    Bright Eyes, and by extension their central member Conor Oberst, are the sort of group who elicit a strong reaction from people. There are those who think him a Dylanesque wunderkind whose every word perfectly summarises all the emotion that their teenage selves never could, others see him as an obnoxious, overgrown perpetual adolescent who needs to get over himself rather swiftly. There is also a decently sized camp who are indifferent until he lets his frustration loose in the rawest manner. Of the three groups, the one who’ll be most satisfied by the man’s latest venture, the long awaited…

  • Review: Four Tet – Morning/Evening

    July 2, 2015 - By 

    “If you’re all about the destination, then take a fucking flight” Frank Turner, The Ballad of Me and My Friends What strange and lovely little surprise is this? On June 21, English electronic musician Four Tet quietly released his latest LP, Morning/Evening, via Bandcamp. No fanfare, no big press tour, just the songs available in a free format, which is really an absolutely splendid little treat from one of the more intriguing electronic artists of the last 10 years. Four Tet is by no means an underground artist at this point, so it stands to wonder why he would choose…

  • The Needables – Tales From The Fish Tank

    June 30, 2015 - By 

    How good Country music is considered to be is typically based off one of two things: songwriting ability or the author’s authenticity. For the most part, it’s music meant for working men and women, those forgotten or left behind by society and longing for a return to some former clarity. If you look into the annals of great country music, an almost exaggerated number of its greatest heroes fit this mould to a tee; so it only makes sense that any individual or group that can capture that sense of sadness tinged with bitter optimism while having the appropriately solid…

  • The Burning

    June 29, 2015 - By 

    Looking over the last decade or so, we as a culture seem to be falling back in love with the Western. Between John Hillcoat’s The Proposition, The Coen Brothers’ No Country For Old Men and Tarantino’s Django Unchained, the Western is coming back in a very vivid and eclectic way. Each of these films, and most recent Westerns of this ilk, seem to actively want to make a comment on our society, be it moral relativism, the fundamentally nihilistic nature of the world or the centuries old roots of Ferguson and Baltimore. This all neatly leads us to The Burning,…

  • The Look of Silence

    June 25, 2015 - By 

    Joshua Oppenheimer won the MacArthur Genius Grant in 2014, primarily off the back of his 2012 effort The Act of Killing, a brutal and genuinely disturbing masterpiece . The film was about the 1965 Indonesian military coup, the subsequent genocides in which over a million people were murdered and the nation that Indonesia became having been run by the men who committed these acts of killing. It was a film that asked the perpetrators of these acts to reenact them, all of whom did with a worrying glee, in order to help us understand the cultural mindscape of the nation…

  • Beck w/ Jonny Greenwood @ Royal Hospital Kilmainham, Dublin

    June 19, 2015 - By 

    Beck and Jonny Greenwood on the same bill. It’s very seldom that such an absolute gift is given to the city of Dublin. Both of these men are towering artistic figures who managed to nail that subtle balance between commerce and self expression in a way that few others can lay claim to. Yet in spite of this, the crowd at Kilmainham could well be at a weekend session. Most of the crowd is relaxed and calm, drinking, not to excess, and enjoying some hand rolled cigarettes of a certain variety. Greenwood’s set is predominantly an orchestral one with him…

  • Hudson Mohawke – Lantern

    June 9, 2015 - By 

    To put it colloquially, Warp Records have been absolutely killing it over the last two years. Given their legacy within the electronic music world, the Sheffield label has always guaranteed a certain level of quality, but in recent years their output has begun to become so much more fascinating. Any label that can release the like of Boards of Canada’s Tomorrow’s Harvest, Aphex Twin’s Syro, Flying Lotus’s You’re Dead! and Clark’s Feast/Beast within two years is doing something terribly interesting. The most recent release in their agenda is Hudson Mohawke’s latest LP, Lantern, his first major release since his barnstorming ‘Chimes’…

  • Timbuktu

    June 7, 2015 - By 

    In the world right now, there is a cultural war unfolding. It’s a conflict of moderation against militancy as ordinary Muslims try to sustain their way of life in the face of violence and campaign of fear in the form of ISIS, whose commitment to brutality may well be one of the most legitimately terrifying elements of contemporary society. The group hold a unique position; by flooding the news with hyper-flashy, well edited YouTube videos of their barbarity, they’ve ensured their constant presence on television screens and on and offline publications globally. This monstrous self-promotion has put any kind of…