• Stewart Lee w/ Chris Kent @ Vicar Street, Dublin

    May 26, 2015 - By 

    It’s May 24, 2015. It’s been one day since Ireland has officially voted in legislation to allow equal marital rights to the LGBTQA community. The previous night’s celebrations are literally the stuff of legend and in its aftermath, the city of Dublin is collectively undergoing what can only be described as a fierce hangover. Yet in spite of this, the atmosphere in Vicar Street is warm and welcoming. That sense of accomplishment and pride from Saturday is still in the air. So it makes sense that many of us decided to flock to see Stewart Lee, probably one of the…

  • Tandem Felix – Comma EP

    May 26, 2015 - By 

    On their new EP, Comma, Dublin’s Tandem Felix have toned down the gritty anxiety that added a particularly distorted, glitching atmosphere to their 2013 EP, Popcorn. That grit, which gave Tandem Felix’s folkier basis a very psychedelic edge, has been twisted slightly to incorporate less abrasion and a little more lap steel guitar. The result is that Comma’s five tracks bear a lot of similarity to the likes of Beck’s Sea Change or Morning Phase, or to the more tender points in Wilco’s discography.  That’s not to say that the anxiety is gone, however. The lyrics express the same sense of…

  • Tomorrowland

    May 26, 2015 - By 

    Brad Bird’s so-far stellar directorial efforts have shown an ability to draw on older forms and attitudes and render them with a fresh, impressive sense of movement and action. Humanist classic The Iron Giant’s story of small-town Americana resisting cold war hysteria was a hand-drawn animation released as the industry barreled towards computer generation. Later, The Incredibles told a superhero family drama in the style of old-glamour spy movies, laced with a critique of the modern world’s low horizons. Tomorrowland, channeling the futurist enthusiasm of Uncle Walt’s original theme park ride, is steeped in the golly-gee wonder of Bird’s Space Age youth, with its jetpacks and rocket ships…

  • Dublin Gay Theatre Festival: First Day Back

    May 25, 2015 - By 

    Returning to the International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival after a four-year hiatus, Canadian playwright and performer Rob Salerno provokes this year’s audience with his one-man show First Day Back.  The production marks Salerno’s second with the festival, making its premiere in the basement of Dublin’s Outhouse, where the leading man conjures a high-school classroom for a set which includes both stage and house.  Featuring an array of characters all embodied by Salerno, the drama captures a group-counseling session held in response to the suicide of one of the school’s students.  Where killer is victim and victim killer, Salerno depicts adolescence…

  • Swans w/ Okkyung Lee @ Mandela Hall, Belfast

    May 25, 2015 - By 

    Writing about Swans is a curious, almost impossible thing. With their three-decade long pursuit of summoning fleeting encounters with ecstasy, induced by masterfully orchestrated swathes of crushing noise, incantation and repetition, they are the living, breathing definition of a band whose seismic might and majesty can only truly be heeded live. A year to the month on from the release of their critically-devoured thirteenth studio opus, To Be Kind, Michael Gira and co. roll into Belfast tonight a towering and potent force to be reckoned with. Expectations simply couldn’t be higher. Immediately silencing the room with a flicker of the…

  • Dublin Gay Theatre Festival: Blind Date

    May 21, 2015 - By 

    Following the recent debut of their first full drama Beasts, fledgling company Home You Go Productions premieres its second play Blind Date in the back half of the 12th Annual International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival.  Written and directed by Colette Cullen, the show sits at a digestible 60 minutes with two separate acts and no intermission.  As the title suggests, the show’s content concerns dating, specifically the awkward world of blind dating.  Though Cullen halves her opus in two distinct experiences, the acts speak to each other in startlingly parallel ways, and they colour one another with nuance that would…

  • The Fall – Sub-Lingual Tablet

    May 20, 2015 - By 

    Only a fool writes off The Fall, a band that have had more returns to form than most bands have had records. With the current lineup now being their longest serving as a complete unit (aside from the recent addition of second drummer Daren Garratt), some have accused them of getting too comfortable and being in need of another shake-up like the days of old, since 2011’s sloppy Ersatz GB, a surprising misstep after the back-to-back excellence of Imperial Wax Solvent and Your Future Our Clutter before it. 2013’s Re-Mit then failed to fully compensate, being a mish-mash of greatness…

  • Dublin Gay Theatre Festival: By The Bi

    May 19, 2015 - By 

    Mounting the second installment of their debut production By the Bi, Blazing Change Players brings an amorphously piquant performance to this year’s International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival. As the title suggests, all matters bisexual are concerned. More interestingly, however, By the Bi is the only production confronting such issues within this year’s festival, the lone voice of its own middle ground. Having premiered a few months ago in the Virginia stomping grounds of co-writers and founders Caroline Downs and Morgan Barbour, this first stop in the show’s budding travelogue marks an important step in the fledgling theatre troupe’s beginnings. Both…

  • Tandem Felix w/ Jawbone @ The Workman’s Club, Dublin

    May 18, 2015 - By 

    Does life imitate art or the other way round? A fundamental question for aesthetes answered simply enough when, prompted by the seated musicians on stage, the audience follow cue and inhabit the dark, seated parameters of the Workman’s Club. Despite the resulting floor space having the inhospitable air of a school disco (circa 1999, god knows what they’re like now) the atmosphere’s closer to a dim lit jazz club. Fitting, perhaps, for the clever work of Jawbone; a folk/blues collective who stray into honky-tonk, swing and delta for good measure. More a showcase than a straight set, the members pay…

  • Mad Max: Fury Road

    May 18, 2015 - By 

    Stay on the road long enough and your brain starts to cook. It’s been thirty years since we last saw mad Mel’s petrolhead wanderer of the scorched Outback, but Fury Road shows no sign of the entropy or compromise that usually accompany extended hiatuses. The seventy year-old George Miller, who has spent the gap making talking animal films and gingerly trying to get a new Max off the ground, has delivered that rarity: a popcorn blockbuster fuelled by the daring clarity of personal, psychotic vision. With its blistering locomotive energy, Fury Road moves at a different warp-speed to blandly directed…