• Deep Down South: Birthday Record Store Day, Rumblings on Barrack St and YES to Equality

    April 12, 2015 - By 

    Hooray for Record Store Day! The one day of the year specifically designed for doing what we all love to do, crate-diving and generally enjoying our local oases of good taste. In Cork City, that only means one thing for so many of us, and that’s a visit to long-standing institution PLUGD Records. This weekend, as well as Record Store Day, there’ll be birthday celebrations ahoy for the greatest record shop in the world as it celebrates four years in its present home, the Triskel Arts Centre, operating upstairs in the city’s artistic flagship after being temporarily homeless, and even…

  • Rave New World (9/4)

    April 9, 2015 - By 

    In the latest of installment of Rave New World, Antoin Lindsay delves into very best new electronic tracks and mixes of the week, as well as various unmissable upcoming nights and releases. GIGS The Respected Beggars present Andrew Ashong & Kaidi Tatham at The Menagerie, Belfast Saturday, April 11 I have been absent. Please forgive me and pay heed to my suggestion to go to Belfast’s Menagerie on Saturday to catch Andrew Ashong and Kaidi Tatham. Ashong has released on Sound Signature, which means that his brilliance has personally been noticed by none other than Theo Parrish. He’s a renowned crate-digger…

  • The Hefty Fog: Lars Ulrich Killing Your Buzz

    April 7, 2015 - By 

    Have you ever had a dream where you’re lounging about in your living room with a few good friends and a few good beers, only to hear a commanding knock on your front door? You peel yourself from the seat and on your way to answer you wonder who it could be, you only invited a few from Celtic Studies, this was supposed to be low-key and casual, a real red plaid affair. Before you know it the door starts pounding, the panel splintering with each violent smack, and then it swings agape. The blood stiffens in your veins and…

  • Visual Arts Outlook (6/4)

    April 6, 2015 - By 

    This week saw the return of Late Night Art; contemporary art galleries in Belfast opening on the first Thursday of the month, from 6pm-9pm. Platform arts opened A Collaboration Monument, while the Golden Thread opened their project space with work by Robert Anderson. Platform Arts, Belfast April 3-29 2015 Örn Alexander Ámundason and Olof Nimar A Collaboration Monument Örn Alexander Ámundason and Olof Nimar explore the difficult sometimes authoritative nature of collaboration. The conjuncture of five different practitioners working on a single project makes for an interesting study of performance and sculpture. Artists Örn Alexander Ámundason and Olof Nimar worked with…

  • Deep Down South: Would Bes, Double Stars, and Limerick-Related Besiegements

    April 6, 2015 - By 

    Ireland is full to bursting of stories from its musical fringes. The Would Be’s have one of the most distinct in contemporary music; infamously turning down 14 major labels (remember when there were fourteen of those?) to follow up their debut single, praised alike by John Peel and Morrissey. Over twenty years later, brandishing a requisite amount of new tunes, the Would Be’s are back, having been coaxed out of retirement by rock scribe Tony Clayton-Lea. Cork label FIFA last week released their new single ‘Bittersweet’, backed up with a legendary John Peel Session in its entirety, and April 18th…

  • Visual Arts Outlook (30/3)

    March 30, 2015 - By 

    Mary Stevens delivers her weekly look at all things Visual Arts in Ireland, singling out works and showcases in Banbridge and Dublin. The F.E Mc William Gallery and Studio – Banbridge Virtually There w/ Ann Donnelly, Julie Forrester, Ann Henderson, Sharon Kelly and Andrew Livingstone. Virtually There is a collaboration between artists and school children presented in a formal gallery context. The beautiful and generous space of the FE MCWilliam gallery is given over to the results of a considered body of work which reflects each individual artist and the school groups with which they were paired. Set out as separate projects,…

  • Deep Down South: Terriers – Let’s Hear It For The Boys (Album Premiere)

    March 23, 2015 - By 

    In a special two-part edition of Deep Down South this week, we kick off by exclusively premiering the brand-new record from Cork post-hardcore hunks Terriers, ahead of its release on April 4th at the Cork Community Print Shop, with Hope is Noise and Chameleon Fields in support. Since coming together in 2011, the four-piece have slowly become one of the fixtures of Cork’s gigging picture, marrying post-hardcore heaviosity and classic-rock accessibility with bro-dude humour and a sunny, indie-friendly disposition. Debut EP Girl, I’m Gon’ Do Right By You, released in 2012, showcases this blend at its infancy, boasting mathy instrumental…

  • Deep Down South: Affirmations and a Few More Gigs, There, Lads

    March 8, 2015 - By 

    To be quite frank, your writer is still recovering from an excellent few bouts of sleep deprivation on the trot, so a short one it is this week, before another gig-news binge next week. Deal? Okay. Saturday night saw about five or six majorly important shows happening in town at once. That hasn’t happened in a really long time. To be quite frank, the gig-going public was a little small until recently to be pulling in multiple directions, and if you’d told your writer this time last year that five shows in one night would do well, he’d have told…

  • The Hefty Fog: Sludge in 2015 – The Early Pickings

    March 9, 2015 - By 

    There’s a very noxious chemical present in sludge metal that separates it from all other forms of transgressive music. Even when placed side by side with contemporaries from every god-forsaken, drop-tuned fashion known to the underground, the crooked spoon fury of bands declaring themselves to be sludge stand out like a sore thumb. If punk rock is rebellion and heavy metal is hedonism, for instance, then sludge is a terrible nothingness that is all too human to recognize yet exemplified by sounds which are inhuman. That may sound like a bit of mental gymnastics, but no other subgenre of music has resonated with the…

  • Screen/Play #2: Record Shop Retail in Empire Records and High Fidelity

    March 5, 2015 - By 

    For someone like me who has only ever had a passing interest in music-buying and hit puberty around Napster’s ascendance, the record shop as a location resided almost exclusively in the general cultural imagination as opposed to my regular routine. Inevitably my idea of what record shops and the people who work there were like came to align with the enthusiastic but elitist list-making devotion immortalised by Stephen Fears’ High Fidelity (2000), based on Nick Hornby’s 1995 novel, and brought to life by John Cusack’s world-weary shop owner Rob Gordon and his pair of ‘musical idiots’, played perfectly by Jack…