• Beyoncé @ Croke Park, Dublin

    July 11, 2016 - By 

    It’s hard to grasp the cultural phenomenon that is Beyoncé in 2016. Although always an icon at the forefront of the pop industry, Beyonce, despite her many years in the public consciousness, has only truly established herself as one of the primary voices of this generation with her most recent album, Lemonade. Her stunning journey into visual and musical avenues which explores both the personal and the political has seen Beyonce becoming more than just a pop singer – now she is a voice for women worldwide, for the Black Lives Matter campaign and for the oppressed everywhere. It’s been…

  • Dublin City Block Party 2016

    July 9, 2016 - By 

    With the summer calendar already bursting with an ever-growing number of Irish festivals, the ability to take festival goers somewhere new and exciting requires a pretty promising lineup as well as a distinctive and unique take on the conventional offering. Dublin City Block Party certainly delivered on both fronts with take two of their two day mid-summer blowout that took place right in the heart of the city at the Tivoli Grounds and District 8 last weekend. It has, in fact, taken me until now to finish this review having only just resurfaced after what can only be described as…

  • The Avalanches – Wildflower

    July 8, 2016 - By 

    Like Guns N’ Roses, Dr. Dre and My Bloody Valentine, The Avalanches have been a cautionary punchline for much of the last decade. Having fired out the gate with an album as alarmingly magnificent as Since I Left You, the band had the world waiting with bated breath for the long gestated follow up. But the months turned into years and the years to a decade and anticipation faded into abandon. The group’s style, plunderphonics, is a found art approach to music wherein everything from lost classics to tv jingles and soundbites are stripped apart and reassembled into something new…

  • Foals w/ All Tvvins @ The Marquee, Cork

    July 8, 2016 - By 

    It’s hard to believe that the annual Cork based music and comedy festival Live at the Marquee launched 11 years ago with a Brian Wilson gig. It really doesn’t seem that long. In that time, surely the festival’s greatest success has been the massive variety of acts that have graced the 4,000 capacity Kellie Clarke designed venue in the Cork Showgrounds. Artists ranging from thrash metal legends Slayer to dance mainstays Faithless and from pop upstarts Little Mix to hip hop’s resident shrinking violet Kanye West have played to rapturous crowds over the years down at the Cork Marina. An…

  • Variant Sea – Fable

    July 8, 2016 - By 

    Having formed less than a year ago, Dublin based neo-classical project Variant Sea have been quick to lure listeners into the realm of their delicate, cinematic compositions. Their debut EP Seasons of the Mist was an impressive introduction with plenty of Ludovico Einaudi inspired piano motifs and guitar backdrops a lá This Will Destroy You‘s Tunnel Blanket. Now, only nine months after their debut, the duo comprised of pianist Luke Duffy and guitarist Shell Dooley have returned with Fable, an EP that shows us musicians engaging in gradual growth. While the format of the music has remained the same, the impact of influences and the individual confidence presented…

  • Saul Williams @ Roisin Dubh, Galway

    July 4, 2016 - By 

    We’re very good at pretending nothing’s wrong. Rather, we’re excellent at grunting a few times about how shambolic everything is before sauntering to the bar and quickly changing the subject. Of course we are! We’ve become so resigned to the radical shitness of so much that goes on both far from home and right outside our doors that half the time we just sigh a little and tweet a GIF of a cat that somehow represents how doomed everything is. Sometimes though, we have a tendency to surprise ourselves with our potential. Every once in a while something gives us…

  • Deerhoof – The Magic

    June 30, 2016 - By 

    Spots of the Deerhoof discography can be as mad as a box of psychoactive toads, there’s no doubt about it – though it’s hard to imagine anyone experiencing anything but a journey of enlightenment through the San Francisco quartet’s two decades of aural experimentation. Recorded over seven days (their previous outing, La Isla Bonita, was recorded in ten – swift action clearly suits them) The Magic is in many ways one of their more accessible records, a bounty of joyous freakbeat and wrecking ball riffs; discordant delights and mellifluous genre-hopping that seems even more spiritually aligned with The Ramones than La Isla Bonita was. Three…

  • Interlude 2016

    June 28, 2016 - By 

    A woman loudly and tirelessly lists the bands she may or may not have heard of. Maybe that’s why it feels like we’ve been queuing here for the best part of an hour. After all it couldn’t really be true, could it? But it is. A fact so far excusable because this isn’t any night, nor just any art gallery. This is the return of Dublin’s latest, hippest city festival; Interlude, held in the on paper awesomeness of the Royal Hibernian Academy, a linchpin location for the dynamic art of the city and country. So it’s fine. What’s an hour…

  • King Kong Company – King Kong Company

    June 27, 2016 - By 

    There’s no denying that sometimes all you need in the day is an unapologetically block rocking beat. Simply put there are points where you have to leave the introspection and self-loathing of LCD Soundsystem at the door and let your body and soul go nuts to the sounds of Soulwax, The Chemical Brothers and The Prodigy. Music for those times where you need to dance yourself clean of every ounce of restraint and self-consciousness. If such a hankering should ever strike, then Waterford’s The King Kong Company have got the perfect remedy: their eponymous LP. What’s instantly apparent  is that…

  • The Conjuring 2

    June 21, 2016 - By 

    Contrary to totally-legit marketing stories about priests stationed at screenings, ready to deliver spiritual counsel to distressed moviegoers, The Conjuring 2 is not all that frightening. It is, however, probably the most entertaining big-studio horror movie of the past five years. Not because of the scares, but because of how relaxed it is around those scares. With two Insidious‘ and the first Conjuring under his belt, James Wan is confident enough not to just serve up the jump-scare hard sell that has become the default mode for multiplex horror. The film begins with a nice bait-and-switch: Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga reprising their…