• The Frames – Longitude

    June 29, 2015 - By 

    The Frames have been together in one form or another for twenty-five years and counting. A quarter of a century. That’s a pretty impressive innings, given their profession that they have made it up as they’ve gone along, more ambling than shambling, steadily building up an avid fan base the world over. Not many bands can claim such an achievement – the bonhomie that keeps this fraternity chugging along is clearly genuine, a deep bond that has been forged from years of grinding against an industry that is largely indifferent to proper songs that cannot be squeezed into an easily…

  • The Burning

    June 29, 2015 - By 

    Looking over the last decade or so, we as a culture seem to be falling back in love with the Western. Between John Hillcoat’s The Proposition, The Coen Brothers’ No Country For Old Men and Tarantino’s Django Unchained, the Western is coming back in a very vivid and eclectic way. Each of these films, and most recent Westerns of this ilk, seem to actively want to make a comment on our society, be it moral relativism, the fundamentally nihilistic nature of the world or the centuries old roots of Ferguson and Baltimore. This all neatly leads us to The Burning,…

  • Mastodon w/ Bad Breeding @ Olympia Theatre, Dublin

    June 29, 2015 - By 

    The night begins with a small clan of bemused faces. On the stage is Bad Breeding (frontman, Chris Dodd, below), throwing out fuzzy, mashed agro punk. Clever without being innovative it’s reminiscent of Black Flag, Crass and the noise-rock elements of bands like The Horrors. Not a bad thing, in and of itself, but elements of the crowd are as disinterested as the distortion is unrelenting. This simply seems to be a case of bad booking. So the majority of the crowd hole up in The Olympia’s wonderfully anachronistic bar. The black t-shirts are adorned with tonight’s headliner and the…

  • Russian Circles w/ Val Normal @ Hangar, Dublin

    June 29, 2015 - By 

    The Hangar, formerly Andrew’s Lane Theatre, is fast becoming the best place in Dublin for punk and metal gigs. Grimier, in all the right ways, than the Academy and much more spacious than Whelans, it’s a place that bands like Fucked Up and Titus Andronicus should be playing. So it makes sense that U:Mack, a thoroughly great group, would use the Hangar to host the Instrumental noise makers Russian Circles. The night kicks off with Dublin’s Val Normal, a math rock group. Val are very much a touring band. They’re the kind of group that you’d see on bills throughout…

  • The Look of Silence

    June 25, 2015 - By 

    Joshua Oppenheimer won the MacArthur Genius Grant in 2014, primarily off the back of his 2012 effort The Act of Killing, a brutal and genuinely disturbing masterpiece . The film was about the 1965 Indonesian military coup, the subsequent genocides in which over a million people were murdered and the nation that Indonesia became having been run by the men who committed these acts of killing. It was a film that asked the perpetrators of these acts to reenact them, all of whom did with a worrying glee, in order to help us understand the cultural mindscape of the nation…

  • Body & Soul Festival 2015

    June 24, 2015 - By 

    Friday afternoon of Body and Soul 2015 saw waves of punters throwing their eyes in every direction while walking around the impressively navigable site. Everywhere you look something else is noticed, be it a person juggling, dancing or performing acrobatics, or another one of the myriad food, drink or craft stalls dotted throughout the place. This sense of wonder and intrigue that opened the festival continued throughout the weekend but from the get-go acted as a reminder that this festival is about far more than the musical line-up. It’s about escape from the norm, from the trajectory that a day…

  • Tame Impala – Currents

    June 24, 2015 - By 

    Australian Kevin Parker is the inventive mind behind Tame Impala; a band among the new wave of psych-rock revivalists.  It began as a solo venture, as he wrote, recorded, produced and performed the music, before expanding to become the outfit we know it as today.  Most psych bands nowadays fit into two categories: they’re either a throwback to classic psych instrumentation, making use of feedback, and often get too caught up in clichés; or they operate like Deerhunter or Tame Impala, touching on the past but managing to make use of modern electronics to add a depth of tone and…

  • Fleetwood Mac @ 3Arena, Dublin

    June 23, 2015 - By 

    So I’m back / to the 3 arena / back to the band that I love… Ok, so I may be biased… no hang on, I AM biased because I believe Fleetwood Mac are the greatest living, breathing and touring band in existence. They’re a band who have never mired in talent, their songs are astronomically timeless with all present members accounted for and individually influential. It’s an absolute privilege to watch them perform together with a never-waning enthusiasm for songs you’d expect them to be tired of by now. Consider this: the band are all pushing 70. Stevie announced…

  • Lego: Jurassic World (Warner Bros., Multiformat)

    June 23, 2015 - By 

    If you would be so kind, allow me a moment to unshackle myself from journalistic objectivity, break the fourth wall and relay to you a personal anecdote. Twenty-two years ago, I was staying with some relatives in Toronto, and my cousin announced in her languid Canadian drawl that she wanted to see the new Stephen Spielberg film: “Ya know, tha one aboot the dinosaurs eating folk.” I was easily sold, having been fascinated by the idea of palaeontology since I was a toddler, and so we made the forty-five minute drive along the freeway to the “nearest” multiplex, conveniently situated…

  • Entourage

    June 22, 2015 - By 

    Entourage isn’t really a movie. It’s a feature-length wrap-up of the massively successful HBO show of the same name, which told the story of a group of bromantic friends from Queens who live the high life in la-la-land when the beautiful one gets tapped for stardom. Loosely based on the banter of producer Mark Wahlberg and his buddies, the show combined a lightly-worn underdog spirit with glossy lifestyle porn. The film is, as everyone has pointed out, basically a bunch of TV episodes strung together, a fist-bumping victory lap for the already-smug. In basic story-telling terms, nothing really happens: there’s no arc, no development, no…