• Irish Tour: Super Furry Animals

    December 3, 2016 - By 

    Cathal McBride and photographers Aaron Corr and Dee McEvoy capture the return of Welsh psychedelic rock legends Super Furry Animals to Dublin and Belfast. Olympia Theatre, Dublin Photos by Aaron Corr Limelight, Belfast Photos by Dee McEvoy Despite not releasing a studio album since 2009’s Dark Days/Light Years, 2016 has been a busy year for Super Furry Animals. Having returned last year from a hiatus that saw frontman Gruff Rhys continue his solo career as well as establish side project Neon Neon, the band’s renewed activity has seen a new one-off single, ‘Bing Bong’, for Wales’ Euro 2016 team and a…

  • Æ MAK – I Can Feel It In My Bones

    December 2, 2016 - By 

    On their debut EP I Can Feel It In My Bones Æ MAK have produced something that is inherently joyful to listen to. Childlike glee permeates the EP; not in the sense that it’s immature or undeveloped, but in the sense that it’s pure and unadulterated. This is complimented by the lyrical knowledge projected throughout, urging the listener not only to dance, but to be mindful, to observe oneself without making judgement. The duo chant “Run away/forget your place/let the other piece fall into place” in the title track, highlighting the amalgamation of those qualities. The release follows from ‘I Can Feel It…

  • Honeyblood – Babes Never Die

    November 30, 2016 - By 

    Unambiguously unashamed, hook-riddled pop music and the simple, immediate pleasures that come with it are exactly what the doctor ordered at times. Listening to Scott Walker warbling about punching a donkey on the streets of Galway is all well and good, but there are some times where you need six strings and some oversized melodies to cleanse the sonic palette. Like a fine of lemon sorbet, Scottish fuzz pop duoHoneyblood strip away everything else in your purview with their infectious brand of sharp, yet sweet garage rock. Babes Never Die, the group’s second LP and the first since losing Shona…

  • Meltybrains? @ The Academy, Dublin

    November 28, 2016 - By 

    The underappreciation of musicians and bands is a hot topic at the moment. The fact that creative output is criminally undervalued isn’t news but it seems that, here in Dublin at least, we’ve reached a moment. The fact that bands are openly citing financial and commercial difficulties as a reason for stop doing what they love should be a harrowing distant possibility rather than the hard truth that it is. Yet, as a fan, as a gig goer it’s often hard to keep in focus just how thankless the “job” can be. Just look at Zaska’s well deserved successful fund…

  • Tanya Tagaq – Retribution

    November 28, 2016 - By 

    Retribution is the fourth album of Tanya Tagaq’s career, one in which she has spent much time confronting difficult issues such as Native American rights and working with artists as varied as the Kronos Quartet and Mike Patton. Tagaq is also lauded in her home country, having won both the Juno and Polaris awards, the Canadian equivalents of the Grammy and Mercury Prizes respectively. If you haven’t heard Tagaq’s music before it may come as a bit of a shock. She employs the Inuk discipline of throat singing, a traditional method where the singer creates overtones by manipulating the airflow…

  • Arborist – Home Burial

    November 28, 2016 - By 

    If there is a unifying and constant sensation which runs throughout Arborist‘s Home Burial like some arterial chord it is that of gloom. A cursory glance at the cover art paints a startlingly accurate depiction of what the next 40 odd minutes entails: a gothic, rustic farmhouse sits against a grey, unsettled sky with an impending destructive force looming on the horizon. While it looks like the sort of place Robert Smith might spend a Summer holiday, it does set the stage perfectly. This is not an album of joy, redemption, and salvation, it’s forlorn expedition through the emotional wilderness as our…

  • Le Guess Who? 2016 @ Utrecht, NL

    November 28, 2016 - By 

    It’s been a weird year for the ‘Boutique’ festival market, with ATP coming to an official end following a string of debacles, but in its tenth year, Utrecht’s Le Guess Who? somehow does it. Across four days, it ties together seldom-seen legends, a pocket of essential esoterica, and today’s most boundary-pushing acts, the lineup this year curated by Wilco, Suuns, Julia Holter & Savages. Utrecht is the sophisticated, civilised, more communal sister city of Amsterdam, located just half an hour south of the capital, and in a city with the Rietveld Schröderhuis built in 1924 it houses the kind of forward-thinking…

  • Titanfall 2 (EA, Multiformat)

    November 23, 2016 - By 

    For many gamers, there was a period during which the First Person Shooter genre had become staid, repetitive and stymied by a nagging sense of violence for violence’s sake. The Call Of Duty series, if you pardon the pun, increasingly came under fire for its juvenile reliance on shock tactics, narrative cruelty and an amoral central conceit: shoot, stab, garrotte or blow to smithereens anyone that gets in your way. Of course, this bear-baiting was in part stirred up by a media that knows as much about videogame culture as a duck knows about embroidery, but there was an important…

  • Don Giovanni @ Grand Opera House, Belfast

    November 22, 2016 - By 

    Beethoven branded Don Giovanni as frivolous, but as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote in a letter to his father in 1781: ‘For do you really suppose that I should write an opera-comique the same way as an opera-seria?’ For Mozart, Don Giovanni was an opera-buffa, though the much darker tones that underlie the comedic shenanigans make this an oddly complex psychological opera. This Northern Ireland Opera production wholeheartedly embraces the playfulness of Lorenzo da Ponte’s libretto. And, with a Titanic-esque luxury liner providing the setting for the unfolding action, complete with icebergs in the distance, it’s hard not to imagine that…

  • The Japanese House – Swim Against the Tide

    November 23, 2016 - By 

    If there is one figure which looms large over every moment of Swim Against The Tide, the new EP by pop songstress The Japanese House, it is that of Imogen Heap. With its glitchy beats, emphasis on textured electronics and distinct English twang running through a vocoder, the spectre of the former Frou-Frou vocalist is consistent and undeniable. While the disc never actually manages to escape from Heap’s shadow, it’s still a surprisingly solid slice of ambient dreamy music. Japanese House frontwoman Amber Bain has described her output as “a sad little puppy listening to Beyoncé to cheer itself up”…