• The Go! Team @ Custom House Square, Belfast

    May 11, 2018 - By 

    This evening sees Brighton based musical magpies The Go! Team bring their kaleidoscopic, crate digging pop to Custom House Square as part of the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival. With a stellar archive of hits at their disposal, a crack nine piece band and high energy support from dance pop chameleons The Correspondents, tonight’s performance promises to kick the weekend off with an amphetamine rush of sound and colour. Purveyors of the much-maligned dance subgenre ‘electro swing’, The Correspondents are prone to mixing campy cabaret stylings and big band samples with pummelling drum and bass work outs which could well make…

  • Pragmatic Endeavour: An Interview with Ben Folds

    April 24, 2018 - By 

    Ahead of his sold-out Belfast show at the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival and Dublin’s Vicar Street – musician, photographer, talent-show judge, music therapy advocate, and soon-to-be author Ben Folds speaks to Jonny Currie about managing song requests, making the case for arts funding, and balancing artistic instincts without becoming a snob. You’ve performed in Dublin a number of times, but this is your first visit to Belfast. Is there anywhere else in the world you’d still like to play? That’s a big one. I just recently played New Zealand. I’ve played Australia over and over again but just never got to…

  • Natalia Beylis w/ AR~DS, Branwen Kavanagh, Little Movies @ A4 Sounds, Dublin

    April 23, 2018 - By 

    Hunters Moon presents An Evening of Experimental Performance + Sound took place in the gallery room of A4 Sounds, an art space off Dorset Street in Dublin’s north inner city. The night began in relaxed fashion, as Little Movies, the duo of Ben Donohue and Morgan Buckley, sat on stage facing each other across their modular synths. It looked like a game of Battleship and sounded like an alternate-universe take on ‘Dueling Banjos’. Two opposing banks of sound played out throughout the performance: one, a series of rippling waves, floating bubbles that shifted and grew to different shapes and sizes;…

  • Other Voices at ANAM @ The Helix, Dublin

    April 13, 2018 - By 

    North Dublin gets a lot of bad press. We hear so many tales of ludicrous individuals and gangs that it’s easy to make the assumption that the North of the city is a place lacking in substance. Presented by DCU and Other Voices, ANAM is the start of an annual showcase of what culture lies bubbling beneath the surface of the city, but its importance is felt most by the local residents of the North side. Starting off the night are Discovery Gospel Choir (below), a harmonically powerful, multi-cultural group that shake off the traditional Irish awkwardness by asking everyone…

  • Arcade Fire @ 3Arena, Dublin

    April 10, 2018 - By 

    Having played a massive show at Malahide castle last year, Arcade Fire return with the Infinite Content tour, sardonically named to jibe at the social media age, just one of the many tactics deployed throughout the promotion around their current album, Everything Now. Tonight, in keeping with that off kilter theme they’ve created a show ‘in the round’ – complete with a boxing ring and Michael Buffer style announcements of their accolades as they appear from the far corner of the 3Arena, air-punching alongside flashing ironic graphics of infomercials and ‘tale of the tape’ biographies appear on the 360 degree…

  • The Altered Hours w/ Documenta @ Menagerie, Belfast

    April 6, 2018 - By 

    The Menagerie has really gone from strength to strength since reopening late last year. The galaxy print exterior may have been replaced by a more austere matt black emulsion and the management may even have decided to indulge patrons with something as frivolously bourgeois as a mirror in the gents but the soul of the bar and its reputation as Belfast’s consummate coven of alternative spirit remain wholly intact. Tonight’s appearance by Belfast’s sprawling drone pop ensemble Documenta and Cork based rockers Altered Hours gives the thunderous new PA system ample opportunity to shine, proving once again that the Menagerie…

  • John Cooper Clarke w/ Mike Garry @ Whelan’s, Dublin

    April 6, 2018 - By 

    There’s a fairly wide range of punters in Whelans tonight. Some of them are aged punks who are still rocking questionable facial hair and fashion choices after so many years. Some are young hipsters rocking questionable facial hair and fashion choices after far fewer years. Many are just average folk, coming from work ready to experience the sermon. Regardless of who they are and where they come from, they’re all here to hear the message delivered from on a slightly higher stage by the legendary punk poet John Cooper Clarke. Whelans is decked out with chairs, but it’s clear that…

  • Wild Beasts @ Olympia Theatre, Dublin

    February 18, 2018 - By 

    This is the end of the indie technocrats. Nearly a decade after the release of Limbo, Panto Wild Beasts graced the Olympia stage for the last time. While this signals a very real end for the Kendal four-piece, it also serves as a more abstract end for an era of indie as a whole. Everywhere you look, mid-noughties bands are calling it a day. The age of four blokes and a guitar is over. But then, Wild Beasts never subscribed to this image of the scene. Their music was meant as the antithesis of the cheap lager and a pack…

  • British Sea Power @ Limelight 2, Belfast

    February 11, 2018 - By 

    Despite emerging at a time when the supposed cool of The Strokes and The Libertines reigned supreme, British Sea Power have successfully outlived most of their contemporaries to become a strange sort of cult British national treasure, concerned less with drugs and parties than with books and nature – song lyrics cover such topics as collapsing Antarctic shelves and 1953 floods, and the band once even bagged an appearance on Countryfile. Five years since they last graced Irish shores, BSP’s famously eccentric live show makes a long overdue return. After a reverb-drenched opening set from Belfast dream-pop duo MMODE, BSP…

  • Jeff Tweedy @ Vicar Street, Dublin

    February 6, 2018 - By 

    ‘I need to feel uncomfortable’ explains Jeff Tweedy, when asked about his long hair. He hasn’t cut it since the 2016 election he says, and hates it. At the beginning of a year-long hiatus for Wilco, the very same reasoning could be applied to his decision to embark on this short solo acoustic tour across the UK and Ireland. Bookended by ‘Via Chicago’ and ‘Shot In The Arm’ from 1998’s sugar-coated bitter-suite Summerteeth, tonight’s setlist criss-crosses Tweedy’s back catalogue from Uncle Tupelo to recent Wilco release Schmilco, with some surprising omissions along the way. There’s nothing from 2014’s solo/family affair…