• Everything Sucks #009: Garth Brooks

    July 8, 2014 - By 

    So, the news has just broke that country-pop superstar and apparent one-man economic stimulus package Garth Brooks has decided that the cash-in he was offered from a willing fanbase, that queued up for days in some cases and doubled occurrences of carpal tunnel syndrome refreshing their browsers, wasn’t good enough. After having two shows pulled owing to the objections of residents who have better things to do than have their front yards pissed in, the man himself issued an ultimatum that it was all the money he was initially offered, or he’d find some other backwoods to warm up for…

  • Latté Pappa: Öresunds Festival

    July 7, 2014 - By 

    Öresunds festival is held every year at the end May in the southern town of Malmö, Sweden. It’s purpose is to showcase, exclusively musicians coming from Sweden and Denmark. The countries are connected by the Öresunds bridge, hence the festivals name. Music on offer is a mix of electronic, pop, rock, reggae, R&B and soul. Five venues host the festival over two days at a cost of only 325 SEK (€35). It starts in the early evening and keeps going until 4am. Underage get in for cheaper. This was my second time attending and I think it is getting better…

  • Choice Cuts: The Best Tracks of… June

    July 1, 2014 - By 

    June saw the release of a plethora of hard hitting hip-hop and rainy day jazz music, and perhaps more suitably, a wealth of breezy summer jams to dig your teeth into. Below are ten of the month’s best (sifted from a great many more,) culminating in the top three. J Mascis – Every Morning (Sub Pop) No one can deny the impact J Mascis had on rock and punk music in the 80s and 90s, and its nice to see the Dinosaur Jr veteran continuing to release great music. His new track ‘Every Morning’ is a fairly stripped down acoustic…

  • Meb Jon Sol: The Art of Fanciful Begging

    June 23, 2014 - By 

    I felt someone step over me in dark. They slipped quietly out the door and it shut behind them with a soft click, extinguishing the thin strip of light from the hallway that had briefly appeared, casting the room back into darkness. I pulled the sleeping bag tight around me and rolled over, negotiating a fleeting moment of comfort with the unforgiving wooden floor. The room was already stuffy with the early morning heat. I could tell the figure leaving that morning was tense, and I was the reason. I couldn’t blame them. They had generously offered their floor as…

  • Meb Jon Sol: Four More Fish

    June 6, 2014 - By 

    When the battle lines had been drawn a ripple of laughter broke out among the the groups of lads gathered on the playing fields at Lover’s Retreat. It echoed around the high trees that loomed over the banks of the Camowen river at the edge of the pitch. The teams were unintentionally split straight through the middle of Northern Ireland’s religious divide. It was reflective of the past and the present of a perpetually confusing country: together but still separated. ‘Hold on, we’re one down and yous have an extra.’ a voice from our team remarked. ‘Simon, you go with…

  • Music Matters: Living Through Sound

    June 4, 2014 - By 

    In my humble opinion, one of life’s greatest pleasures is when you see an utterly fantastic film for the first time – and the soundtrack fits. Not only does it fit; it enhances the viewing experience by adding an aural dimension to the atmosphere, an extra quality that engages your attention above and beyond the cinematography. Conversely, I find it intensely frustrating when my mind chooses to dub over the score or soundtrack with something else…and it fits better. This could come down to some latent talent that would be best employed in film production, or it could boil down…

  • Meb Jon Sol: Pay No Heed To Tripod

    May 25, 2014 - By 

    The gig was in a small cafe outside of a town called Clifden, situated on the outskirts of everything, separated from the rest of Ireland (and seemingly the rest of the world) by the wild, unrelenting Connemara landscape. On the door was a rain-sodden poster that played fast and loose with the truth: ‘The much acclaimed Meb Jon Sol’- well at least they were expecting me. I walked up the stairs and into the Cafe. Folks were gathered eating, drinking and enjoying the panoramic view of the bay. It was mid afternoon but the sky was darkening with creeping rain…

  • Cork Heads: Pretty Handsome Studio

    June 3, 2014 - By 

    In the second installment of her wonderfully-titled column Cork Heads – looking at some of the brightest sparks in Cork’s currently thriving arts scene – photographer Brid O’Donovan talks to Billy ‘Pretty Boy’ Browne and Roisin ‘Handsome’ Hanley from Pretty Handsome Studio, a project that combines the DIY aesthetic of screen printing with inspired musings and doodlings in a mission to produce the finest t-shirts, designs and prints for your wondering eyes to feast on. [How it all started] Billy: We were in college together, studying design communication in CIT. We were friends and then we got together at the end of first…

  • In Space, No-One Can Hear You Scream – The Music of Alien

    May 21, 2014 - By 

    In a way, the sheer ordinariness of it all seems like a crime. The death of a person is always a difficult thing, but the death of an artist can sometimes imbue a life with near mythic qualities. So when HR Giger fell down the stairs in his home in Zurich and subsequently died from his injuries, it feels as though the man was cheated of the gruesome, yet appropriate demise many of his admirers may have imagined he’d have preferred.Giger was always a strange fit for our world. A fine artist who scored his greatest success with a sci-fi…

  • Slogan: Or how I learned to stop worrying and hate Serge Gainsbourg.

    April 24, 2014 - By 

    Francois Mitterrand, the French president at the time of Serge Gainsbourg’s death, called him, in a surprisingly emotional obituary, “our Baudelaire, our Apollinaire” with the sort of off-the-cuff erudition that’s made me a life-long Francophile. Our premier at the time was Margaret Thatcher, a woman who is to poetry what Baudelaire was to self effacing good humour and an early night. That the President of France felt the need and, no doubt, a political compunction, to address a pop singers death is extraordinary: I wouldn’t hold your breath, Sir Cliff. But Serge Gainsbourg was much more to the French than…