• Joanna MacGregor @ The Market Place Theatre, Armagh

    April 9, 2015 - By 

    Many of the world’s greatest classical pianists are content to spend the entirety of decades-long careers playing the same scores. Joanna MacGregor, however, is cut from a very different cloth. The British pianist, conductor and curator’s journey has been marked by adventure and an open-minded approach to music that has seen collaborations with artists as diverse as Talvin Singh, Django Bates, Dhafer Youssef, Andy Sheppard and Brian Eno. MacGregor may be world-renowned for her interpretations of Bach, but interdisciplinary projects like 2002’s Crossborder, which fused Chinese traditional music, contemporary dance, film and computer technology prove that, to borrow from jazz parlance,…

  • Therapy? – Disquiet

    April 9, 2015 - By 

    When talk first began of a sequel to ‘Troublegum’, the 1994 punk-metal opus that made legends of Co. Antrim trio Therapy?, your writer couldn’t help but feel pangs of uncertainty. From a band that over the course of 25 years plowed a fiercely independent furrow, and did so while thinking about ten steps ahead of the musical sentiment of the time, a move for nostalgia would be surely a massive anti-climax after producing two career-defining albums in ‘Crooked Timber’ and ‘A Brief Crack of Light’. Is it? Well… the jury is still out after a fortnight’s constant listening, which, for…

  • Shlohmo – Dark Red

    April 9, 2015 - By 

    Up until this record, the first since 2011’s Bad Vibes, Shlohmo existed in that murky area of electronica that throws up morpheme collisions like glitchhop, witchtrap and future-garage. His particular brand of emotive electronica had, on his solo releases, hovered just a few notches over the ambient dissonance line and on his collaborations he exhibited a chameleon like ability that let him lend his talents over the genre boundary without stretching too far out of shape. Just look at last year’s collaboration with Jeremih that saw the LA based producer slip seamlessly into RnB like a seasoned pro. While that…

  • A Place To Bury Strangers w/ Travis Is A Tourist @ Voodoo, Belfast

    April 7, 2015 - By 

    On a cold, dank – did I mention cold? – and generally miserable Belfast evening, what could  be more inviting than some live music with good friends and good beers? Not much, and as we headed into Voodoo, safe in the knowledge that the aforementioned factors would welcome us, we were thrilled to just be warm and dry. Then, at 8.30 sharp-ish, Travis Is A Tourist takes to the stage in support of the headline act for the evening, A Place To Bury Strangers. Wonderful. Well, actually, wonderful in a sense.  Here’s the thing: Travis Is A Tourist (below) is…

  • Fast and Furious 7

    April 6, 2015 - By 

    Typically, we love the underdog story. The scrappy young team of misfits and broken toys come together to take on the elite and emerge victorious. The Fast and Furious series is very much an underdog story. From the initial entry, the film got a deserved critical mauling that carried on for the earliest entries. The films were inherently ridiculous but treated themselves with such a po-faced sincerity that much of the fun was derived from the deepest ironic wells. Fortunately the arrival of director Justin Lin helped to curb this. Directing four of the series’ seven entries, Lin not only…

  • Battlefield Hardline (EA, Multiformat)

    April 1, 2015 - By 

    The Battlefield series has always been the only true rival to Activision’s all-conquering Call Of Duty. WhereasCOD is as much fun for noobs as being repeatedly slapped in the face with a live sea-bass, Battlefield has always been fairer or at least more willing to give inexperienced players an easier ride. Levelling up is not quite as punishing a slog while the playing fields themselves, in contrast to the tightly confined spaces of other online multiplayer titles, are vast stomping grounds with multiple buildings you can hide in – and, crucially, blow to smithereens. This encourages all kinds of play, from those who prefer to run…

  • Dying Light (Warner Bros, Multiformat)

    March 31, 2015 - By 

    Zombies, eh? You can’t live with them, you can’t live… well, you know what I mean. It’s funny to think how crucial a mainstay of the gaming medium the groaning, slavering undead have become in recent years. Whether they are the slow or the fast variety, they’re everywhere, clutching and clawing, scratching mindlessly, mouths agog and leaking out glottal moans; or pegging it after moving cars like decomposing Usain Bolts, flailing their limbs and yowling. From Ghosts ‘n Goblins to a cameo in the children’s animation Wreck-It Ralph, zombies pop up all over the place, and even made the numb-skulled Call Of Duty almost bearable.…

  • Cloud Castle Lake w/ Willow Sea – Roisín Dubh, Galway

    April 1, 2015 - By 

    Sound problems from the get-go don’t stop local multi-instrumentalist Willow Sea from dishing out his usual generous helping of genre crossing fun in his support slot for Cloud Castle Lake on Thursday in the Roisín Dubh. Combining clunky electronica, cheeky sampling and shredding guitar work, it’s always a pleasure to watch Mr. Sea having fun on stage as he piles the blocks of his soundtrack – ready tunes on top of one another and engaging the bar in some charming, self-deprecating banter; “That’s the depressing shit out of the way, time to get obnoxious”.  Unfortunately though, the dynamic in the…

  • Who Am I – No System Is Safe

    March 31, 2015 - By 

    In the pantheon of great films about technology, there are very few members exclusively devoted to coding, even fewer exclusively dealing with hacking. The main films that comes to mind when faced with these parameters are 1995’s Hackers, in which Matthew Lillard plays a skateboarding Pippi Longstocking lookalike, and 2001’s Swordfish, a film which people remember for John Travolta’s goofy facial hair and two other reasons which earned Halle Berry about a million dollars. So when discussing hacking movies, we’re not in good cinematic company. Sadly, Who Am I – No System Is Safe, while a stronger film than many…

  • Sleater-Kinney @ Vicar Street, Dublin

    March 30, 2015 - By 

    Less than six months on from announcing No Cities To Love, their first studio album in a decade, Sleater-Kinney are currently experiencing a remarkable rebirth and easily their most popular streak in their three-decade long career to date. The twenty-first show of a twenty-one date comeback tour that has seen them zig-zag them across the States and Europe, Carrie Brownstein (above), Corin Tucker (below) and Janet Weiss return to Dublin tonight a valiant and imposing alt-rock force; an unspeakably influential and headstrong threesome that has weathered the storm of changing scenes and industry to assert that they are, without a…