• Gil Scott-Heron & Makaya McCraven – We’re New Again

    February 26, 2020 - By 

    It says a lot about the enduring quality of both Gil Scott Heron and his final album, I’m New Here, that in the ten years since he passed, we’re still talking and analysing that final broadcast, trying to find even more depth hidden between the silences. When that album was first pitched in 2006, Heron had recently been released from Rikers Prison with no real prospects on the horizon. When he died six years later, he was back on a career-high with his legacy firmly galvanised and a final transmission that stands a towering monument to his lyrical dexterity, genius,…

  • Richard Dawson @ Empire Music Hall, Belfast

    February 26, 2020 - By 

    After recuperating from crossing freezing Scandinavia and France, Richard Dawson ended his rest period by performing in Belfast for the first time since his appearance at the Black Box in 2017. This time the setting was the Empire, a venue with music hall origins befitting Dawson, a performer who folds together the antique and the modern. His ability to draw such a sizeable crowd is an encouraging sign for any lovers of folk music, particularly because his style is at the less accessible end of the spectrum. Along with Dublin’s Lankum, another abrasive, brilliant group, Dawson’s recent work has done…

  • Claire O’Brien – The Hollow

    February 22, 2020 - By 

      Folk music is an oral tradition: a passing down from generation to generation of not just songs, but tales and memories also. But does this definition hold up when discussing more modern incarnations of folk sounds, especially those of so-called “freak folk” or artists tagged with the New Weird label? At their best, these soft, subtly-psychedelic sounds evoke a different kind of memory, a collective natural memory passed down through the trees, the soil, and the wind. Such thoughts come to mind while listening to Claire O’Brien’s The Hollow, the latest gem from Glasgow-via-Kilkenny label, Moot Tapes.  The majority…

  • Destroyer – Have We Met

    February 21, 2020 - By 

    Over the course of his 25 year career, Dan Bejar, the driving force behind Destroyer, has carved a reputation for bombastic stylistic shifts. Stemming from an overarching philosophy that is actively against forging personal connections with his devoted following, Bejar has consistently given with one hand and taken away with the other. Whether it’s playing shows with his back to an unacknowledged crowd, or lurching from a commercial peak to an avant-garde experiment, Bejar has built one of the most interesting and expansive indie-rock projects with one simple rule: don’t even dare try and guess our next step.  Have We…

  • Andras – Joyful

    February 19, 2020 - By 

    What happens when the rave has to end? Ideas of nostalgia have been a frequent presence in the zeitgeist of recent dance music; from the endless-party revivalism of Jamie XX’s In Colour, to the lost futures that critic Mark Fisher identified from Burial’s debut. Those albums are arguably positioned on the extremes of nostalgia, however; for a more tender, bittersweet exploration of these ideas, Australian producer Andras presents his latest album, Joyful. Andras himself describes Joyful as “cutting a path through an overgrowth of nostalgia around 70s acid folk and 90s acid house”, which on first listen is an intriguing…

  • Wire – Mind Hive

    February 17, 2020 - By 

    Though Wire were always renowned for their musical transformation over three short years in the late ’70s – from the art school punk vignettes of 1977’s Pink Flag through to the icy, doomed post-punk of 154, stopping off at the transitional Chairs Missing in between – it’s no great surprise that 40 years into their career they don’t always possess this same level of invention. It’s not necessarily a bad thing though – while their last outing, 2017’s Silver/Lead could be possibly be described as samey, it was also their most solid and consistent work in a while. At once…

  • Green Day – Father Of All…

    February 13, 2020 - By 

    In 2004, Green Day irrevocably altered how the public perceived them. After their 1994 platinum smash, Dookie, the general consensus was that this was a band of juvenile so-cal boys who liked smoking weed, shamelessly ripping off the Clash and had very little to say. Basically, punk music for mallrats and frat boys. After a decade of not reaching the same commercial highs as their early career, they had to go big or close up shop. They opted for the former and essentially blew up their playbook and legacy.  With the release of American Idiot, gone were the group whose…

  • ShitKid – Duo Limbo/”Mellan Himmel å Helvete”

    February 13, 2020 - By 

    With a name as unashamedly playful and juvenile as ShitKid, Åsa Söderqvist knows exactly what her audience wants. Under this moniker, she offers up some delightful stoner pop nuggets with more than a dash of irony and ire. The strings are fuzzy, the drums are heavy and the melodies are sweet treats shoved through the grime of old school punk. There’s a decidedly scrappy, almost DIY, nature to everything she’s doing here. Her sound is lo-fi and has the atmosphere of being recorded quickly at a friend’s house using Garageband. Even in the visuals, this mindset is present as the…

  • Aoife Nessa Frances – Land of No Junction

    February 10, 2020 - By 

    In certain strands of philosophy, opposing forces are just another cog in the machine that keeps the world working. Full resolutions to a problem are unobtainable, a pipe dream, given that the universe is in a constant flux. Instead, contradiction is to be embraced in order to achieve balance, rather than trying to reach a final resolution. For many, this is a sweat-inducing prospect. For Dublin’s Aoife Nessa Frances, however, this theory binds together her sensational debut album, Land Of No Junction. Frances’ solo debut is a far cry from the raw shoegaze of former band Princess, and instead is…

  • Parasite

    February 7, 2020 - By 

    In the dystopic locomotion of 2013’s Snowpiercer, Bong Joon Ho charted social hierarchy along the X axis. His new film, the Palme d’Or-netting Parasite, swaps horizontal for vertical, delivering a nasty update of the upstairs/downstairs formula for the South Korean service economy. It starts, quite literally, underground. A teenage brother and sister sprinting through the Kim family’s basement flat in a panic, trailing phones along the ceiling to snag a stray thread of WiFi. Their ground-level window offers a view of shoes and trouser bottoms, the alley’s pissed and pissing. The smog of city fumigators seeps in, fogging the domicile like…