• Lightning Bolt – Fantasy Empire

    March 4, 2015 - By 

    You need to be careful when choosing an album opener. The track needs to be the clearly defined mission statement of the album, but also needs to be what you’re willing to hang your hat on if all else fails. First impressions only come once. So it’s odd that, for their latest LP, Fantasy Empire, the noisy, experimental duo known as Lightning Bolt would choose to begin with something as standard as the album opener, ‘The Metal East’. The track is by no means bad. It’s loud and exciting with enough twists and jagged edges to poke your eyes out…

  • Snowpoet @ The Little Museum of Dublin

    March 3, 2015 - By 

    “Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence”, King Crimson’s Robert Fripp once observed when the poetic muse had taken hold. Or perhaps it was the wine. Regardless, Fripp would doubtless have approved as music, wine and silence, in various combinations, were all in good supply at Snowpoet’s Dublin concert. The concert was part of music production company and record label Ergodos’ series of specially curated concerts sponsored by Santa Rita, the legendary Chilean wine makers, whose stunning red and white wines on offer at the reception teased loose the tongues and gently flushed the cheeks of the…

  • Charlie XCX – Sucker

    March 3, 2015 - By 

    Charlie XCX has quickly grown from the ‘featuring’ artist of other artists’ hits to a main attraction. Charlie (Charlotte Atchinson) wrote the hit ‘I Love It’ and let the Swedish pop duo Icona Pop record it. Last summer she featured on Iggy Azalea‘s Fancy. Now, finally, she gets to keep the spotlight on herself. As an album, Sucker is a bit repetitive. Each track would work well on any commercial radio playlist but played one after the other, the songs blend together. ‘Boom Clap’ is a great single – and it is easy to imagine any track from Sucker being…

  • PALS: The Irish at Gallipoli @ National Museum of Ireland, Dublin

    February 26, 2015 - By 

    A bleak Irish sky backdrops the frigid Collin’s Barracks, former military stronghold turned national museum turned proscenium for ANU Productions’ breathtaking new performance PALS.  Born out of the financial collapse in 2009, ANU (pronounced “anew”) has boldly challenged Irish theatre to tackle Irish issues in visceral ways, turning its site-specific method of performance into a niche, accessible, and affordable outlet for the Dublin theatre-going public. ANU’s total-immersion style of theatre forces audiences not only to witness a story, but to experience its place as an integral element of the narrative.  2012’s Boys of Foley Street revived a time and place…

  • Death From Above 1979 @ Limelight 1, Belfast

    February 23, 2015 - By 

    When Toronto dance punks par excellence Death From Above 1979 announced they were calling it a day back in the good old days of yore (2006), every second twenty-something rued through tear-soaked eyes somehow managing to miss arguably one of the finest duos of a generation live. And so, as has happened innumerable times before, in precisely the same fashion, the seeds of legacy were well and truly sown, reaped, a whole decade on, by an expectedly agog congregation of newcomers and “I was there, man” thirty-somethings at Belfast’s Limelight 1. Will the well-documented tension between Sebastien Grainger (drums/vocals) and Jesse Keeler (bass) – apparently resigned…

  • Resident Evil HD (Capcom, Multiformat)

    February 20, 2015 - By 

    Fittingly for a videogame about zombies, Resident Evil refuses to die. First released way, way back in 1996 on the Playstation, it was entirely rebuilt and remodelled six years later for the Nintendo Gamecube. Now Capcom have given us the remake of the remake, a concept that would sound like charlatanry if it were not for the fact that Resident Evil remains a fantastic game twenty years after it shuffled into the medium, groaning, clawing and chomping for brains. There is no doubt that some aspects of the gameplay feel archaic: the rhythm of get key, open door, obtain map, flick switch does seem…

  • Echo & The Bunnymen w/ Arborist @ Mandela Hall, Belfast

    February 19, 2015 - By 

    Thirty-seven years in, Echo & The Bunnymen’s repute as one of the most vital and influential British rock bands ever is long beyond contention.  Notwithstanding a couple of reunions and several line-up changes, Ian McCullough and co – founding guitar/songwriter Will Sergeant and a considerably more callow touring band – have battened down the hatches for the long run, summoning their pioneering post-punk “glory days” on stage where recent recorded material has just fallen short of that early vitality. Tonight they offer up the timeless magic once more, an undeniably legendary proposition. With a steady stream of expectant heads herding into the Mandela Hall, singer-songwriter Mark…

  • Reluctant Yet Obligatory Review of the Year: 50 Shades of Grey

    February 19, 2015 - By 

    It’s hard to imagine anyone leaving their cinema seat after Fifty Shades of Grey feeling truly satisfied. Certainly not people like me, who had followed the on-set bust ups and disastrous pre-release press tour with some amusement and turned up hoping to see a hilariously terrible turkey. In fact, the movie is entirely well-made – it’s just well-made to a fault. This a cold, sterile piece, over-produced to within an inch of its life and with no semblance of real human sentiment or emotional weight that should come in a film that entirely focuses on a complex romantic relationship between…

  • Levon Vincent – Levon Vincent LP

    February 18, 2015 - By 

    Considering it’s a debut record, there’s a lot of interest in Levon Vincent’s self-titled album. Levon Vincent isn’t your regular LP debutant, though. A steady release of a couple of 12”s and singles as well as occasional mixes and a relentless global touring schedule means that Vincent is now one of the most recognisable names in techno and house. Vincent’s music also has an ethos – the title of the first track we heard from the record Anti-Corporate Music should give you a fairly rough idea what that would be. There’s been rumours that Vincent has been leaking his own…

  • Decemberists @ Vicar Street, Dublin

    February 14, 2015 - By 

    …in which the good ship Infanta sails into Dublin on a sea of whimsy and English tea, bearing forth a band of bohemian minstrels, sweating absinthe, smoking shisha pipes, brandishing muskets, sextants and satchels overflowing with sonnets scrawled on rolls of teletype paper. Right from the outset, it is clear that the audience, squeezed into a venue fittingly bedecked in wooden friezes, will be treated to something truly rare in modern music: originality. Firstly, there’s frontman and songwriter in chief Colin Meloy’s lyrics, which are uniquely literate, ribald and at times just a tad sinister in the best possible way.…