• 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…

  • Andy Shauf – The Neon Skyline

    February 6, 2020 - By 

    Canadian singer-songwriter Andy Shauf invites listeners into a whimsical narrative with his latest album The Neon Skyline. This is Shauf’s sixth album, following his hugely successful 2016 outing, The Party. In similar style, The Neon Skyline incorporates casual conversation with friends into the lyrics, and with many of the songs we find him as a quiet observer in deep contemplation. The stories that are told throughout the tracklist all take place over the course one evening in the Skyline restaurant, after which the album is named, and loosely mirror the events in Shauf’s life in the aftermath a breakup. The title…

  • The Lighthouse

    January 31, 2020 - By 

    At the beginning of Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse, Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson) arrives on a remote island with his superior, Tom Wake (Willem Dafoe), to tend to the titular beacon. Their path, along steep craggy cliffs in howling winds, was difficult, but there will be no relief inside either. As Winslow bumps his head on the low ceiling of their shared upstairs quarters, Wake is already urinating into a chamber pot, farting and barking orders about Winslow’s duties.  Life on the island is hard. Winslow’s tasks are back-breaking and seemingly never-ending, everything but the more rewarding nursing the light itself – a…