• Hozier, Wyvern Lingo @ Liverpool Empire Theatre

    January 14, 2016 - By 

    There are many grand theaters in Liverpool, a city where they come ten to the penny. With a dozen or so within spitting distance that would work, tonight is about the splendour of a proper neoclassical master. Bathed in tons of marble and acres of velvet The Empire sets the scene for the 2400 odd that have packed in to a sold out show. Sandwiched between the Panto and Priscilla Queen of the desert, tonight’s show has a very Wicklow bent. I say this as I was asked on numerous occasions if there was a local support act, there wasn’t……

  • The Altered Hours – In Heat Not Sorry

    January 14, 2016 - By 

    About 20 seconds into In Heat/Not Sorry, it dawns on you that you’re in for something else entirely. For a band that’s drawn with such fearless and bold strokes in previous singles and EPs, opener ‘Who’s Saving Who?’ impresses and awes with its restraint and confidence, setting the tone for the whole record. What we have here is the sound of a band coming into itself, the Cork psych-rock outfit arriving at a destination of sorts after years of exploration. Raw and feral, yet considered and focused, the album hits its stride as its opening gambit of mid-paced movers comes…

  • The Revenant

    January 13, 2016 - By 

    When we’re surrounded by movies running on autopilot, it seems perverse to fault a film for trying. But there’s trying and then there’s trying, and The Revenant, Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s new revenge Western, indelicately treads the line between the two. Loosely based on the real-life bear mauling and survival of nineteenth century frontiersman Hugh Glass, documented in Michael Punke’s 2002 novel, this is an in-your-face exercise in iron-blooded macho perseverance. It’s 1823 and Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) is assisting a hunting party led by Domhnall Gleeson’s blue-blood Captain, tracking down valuable animals pelts in the wilderness claimed by the Louisiana Purchase. When the company men…

  • David Bowie – Blackstar

    January 8, 2016 - By 

    If David Bowie’s The Next Day, overall an excellent record, had a killing flaw it would be a lack of experimentation and ambition. Bowie has always been regarded as a frontiersman, working on the fringes of the avant garde and reinterpreting it for the masses without simplifying it. His career has been driven by the seemingly endless drive towards the future and the new, which lent The Next Day an unfortunate overtone. Its fourteen tracks were steeped in Bowie mythology, each one acting almost as a summation of a specific part of the man’s storied career. It felt like a…

  • Hinds – Leave Me Alone

    January 7, 2016 - By 

    Welcome to 2016. It’s a new year with new opportunities to be realised, new landscapes to be traversed and new ideas to be formed. So what better way to kick off this new and exciting twelve month period than with a delightfully fuzzy throwback album that wraps itself up in the sweet sounds of the 1960s. Leave Me Alone, the debut LP from Madrid’s Hinds, is covered head to toe in a profoundly retro lustre, taking a homemade lo-fi jangle rock sound and filtering it through The Velvet Underground. While the weight of the influences can be overbearing, it is…

  • Sea Pinks – Soft Days

    December 22, 2015 - By 

    With five albums in little over five years, Neil Brogan’s work ethic is admirable. And that’s just with Sea Pinks – add to that the albums and EPs he drummed on with Girls Names before his 2013 departure, an excellent recent EP with post-punk quartet Cruising and a low key solo EP as Winterlude early this year and you wonder where he finds the time. With more and more small bands operating part-time in today’s unsteady music business, longer gaps between releases are increasingly common, but the release of Dreaming Tracks in late 2014 still feels like only yesterday, and…

  • Glen Hansard @ Ulster Hall, Belfast

    December 21, 2015 - By 

    Glen Hansard stands at the edge of the stage, his dark attire all but blending in with the darkness, giving the strange appearance of a floating, disembodied head. He sings ‘Grace Beneath The Pines’, unamplified and accompanied only by a swelling string section, and his voice ghosts all around the interior of the concert hall. It captures the spirit of Josef Locke or John McCormack, namechecked by Hansard later on in the show, and as openings go, it is certainly an effective one. In fact, it sets the tone for the whole evening, which is more subdued than one might…

  • Happy Mondays @ Vicar Street, Dublin

    December 18, 2015 - By 

    As soon as you step into Vicar St tonight, it is clear Dublin is in the mood for a party. Shaun Ryder and his merry gang of oddball Mancs are here to celebrate the anniversary of their seminal Pills ‘N’ Thrills and Bellyachesø album reaching the quarter century mark and they’re ringing it in in the only way they know how. Those in attendance might be a little older than the last time our unlikely heroes rolled into town but the baggy shirts and fisher hats are still present and accounted for. The atmosphere inside is warm with loose endorphins floating…

  • In The Heart of the Sea

    December 16, 2015 - By 

    Captain Ahab’s white whale is a metaphorical object for the ages. When it comes to In the Heart of the Sea, Ron Howard’s soggy nautical epic, an unconvincing take on the Moby Dick myth, the sea monster invites symbolic interpretations too tempting to ignore. Maybe Ahab’s desperate, pointless chase for the creature represents Howard’s search, now 23 features in, for a distinctive style or personality? Maybe the good ship Essex, our seafaring vessel for most of the two-hour run, is a stand-in for the movie, drifting through the endless blue, its maps and compasses pointing towards an ever-receding point or point of view? Or maybe the movie is the…

  • Maverick w/ Selene & So Long Until The Seance @ Voodoo, Belfast

    December 16, 2015 - By 

    A freezing cold night in Belfast city centre, surrounded by grimacing late night shoppers (outside) and beaming beered-up revellers (inside) – what else could it be but retro rockers Maverick‘s triumphant post-European tour/pre-Xmas gig in Voodoo? The perpetually cheerful lads gathered up a couple of support acts to help them celebrate the silly season, starting off with newbies So Long Until the Seance, who assemble onstage and proceed to rock out, delighting the growing crowd. Vocalist Mike Van D, formerly of horror punks Little Miss Stakes, quite simply belongs on a stage, as evidenced by the ease with which he cracks…