• Gareth Davis & Merzbow – Broken Landscapes

    January 30, 2020 - By 

    To be rich in friends is to be poor in nothing, or so the saying goes. Given how barely anyone who dedicates their life to experimental music ends up rich, perhaps the success of such musicians should be measured by their influence and the connections they create. Of course, such an idea cannot be measured quantitatively, but if one were to do that, collaborations could be a handy metric. And by that standard, Masami Akita, or Merzbow to you and I, would take some beating. An exhaustive rundown of his collaborations would be too exhausting to list, but in the…

  • Algiers – There Is No Year

    January 30, 2020 - By 

    One thing that you can’t fault Algiers on is the fact that they know how to start all guns blazing. The title track and album opener for their latest LP, There Is No Year, grabs you by the lobes in the first few seconds and does not let go. It’s pulsating and bumping and filled will an anxious, impassioned cry over a world that is too far gone to save. Franklin James Fisher’s vocals oscillate between a soulful croon and desperate warble over a rip-roaring death march. Your blood begins bumping, things begin to coalesce and the feeling that your…

  • Duster – Duster

    January 25, 2020 - By 

    It somehow seems fitting that San Jose slowcore outfit, Duster, would come back from the dead to release an album on the penultimate day of the decade. Nearly 20 years since their last LP, it’s a move that reflects the same elusive and distant feeling their music evokes. Like Duster’s two previous albums, Stratosphere and Contemporary Movement, the tonal theme of outer space is heavily present and with the opening track ‘Copernicus Crater’, that theme is picked right back up. Setting out the cosmic manifesto early on with a driving  bassline and a gloom laden guitar that really makes you feel like you exploring an other worldly geographical feature. Tracks like ‘Hoya…

  • Lee Fields & The Expressions @ The Button Factory

    January 20, 2020 - By 

    Born in 1951, North Carolina native Lee Fields’ musical CV has amassed an extensive number of impressive notches over the years; he released his first single back in 1969, has worked with the likes of BB King, Kool & the Gang and Dr. John, he helped carve out careers for Sharon Jones – a former backing singer of his – and Charles Bradley, while he had his vocals used in the 2014 James Brown biopic Get On Up, and has had his songs sampled by the likes of J. Cole and Travis Scott. On top of all that he is…

  • God Alone. – God Alone

    January 20, 2020 - By 

    Genre is a tricky thing. While useful for an audience looking for a labelled path to expand their listening, the idea of slapping a label on your music chafes most artists. This can be especially true for metal acts; given its highly specific sub-genres,  it is hard to not be boxed into one or the other. Cork band God Alone. are aware of this, and on their self-titled second EP they demonstrate their grasp on a variety of different styles to avoid any easy categorisation. Opener ‘Feeling on Tic’ is, by a large margin, the heaviest song on the EP.…

  • Field Music – Making A New World

    January 18, 2020 - By 

    One of the under-discussed merits of living in the post-streaming age is that musicians are limited only by their ambition. It used to be that if your label hated your record you either had to bite your tongue and make it more commercial or try to wrangle out of your contract and sell it somewhere else. But now that those Goliaths are largely gone and anyone can host their music for next to nothing, the sky’s the limit. This is an idea which prog-poppers Field Music have embraced wholeheartedly on their seventh album, Making A New World. This LP is…

  • Uncut Gems

    January 17, 2020 - By 

    Uncut Gems, writer-directors Josh & Benny Safdie’s fifth feature together, starts full throttle and only occasionally lets up. It is fixed to the world and worldview of Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler), a jeweller for the stars in New York’s diamond district: a chancer and grifter, thriving in an ecosystem of insatiable avarice. As it becomes rapidly clear, he is a man that gets both a hit and an identity from triumphing over the constant barrage of knife-edge negotiations and impossible odds. Or, failing that, just surviving them. Ratner juggles his family life, with kids he is provisionally interested in and…

  • This Is How We Fly @ Solstice Arts Centre, Navan

    January 17, 2020 - By 

    The setting is unusual for This is How We Fly’s gig at Navan’s Solstice Arts Centre. It isn’t the circle of chairs, perhaps forty, that surround the musicians. In-the-round-concerts, after all, are not uncommon. It’s the fact that the audience is on the stage with the musicians. Through a gap in the curtain the empty theatre is discernible. It feels like a private party. TIHWF was brought together by fiddler Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh, in what all thought would be a one-off gig at the 2010 Dublin Fringe festival. Swiftly approaching its first decade together, the simpatico between Ó Raghallaigh, reeds…

  • Endgame @ Project Arts Centre, Dublin

    December 17, 2019 - By 

    “You’re on Earth. There’s no cure for that!” When tackling any of Samuel Beckett’s plays, never mind one of his most emblematic, the challenge for a theatre company is how to leave its own imprint while navigating the author’s exacting directions. As people enter the Project Art Centre’s theatre to take their seats they are greeted by a recorded reading of Endgame’s text and stage directions. The voice is mechanical, almost synthetic. Beckett wanted actors to downplay the emotions in this farcical tale of stagnation and hopelessness. Pan Pan Theatre, however, has other plans. Pan Pan Theatre has scored notable…

  • Goodbye Quiet Arch @ Empire Music Hall, Belfast

    January 13, 2020 - By 

    From the moment it was announced last month, it was clear that Goodbye Quiet Arch was never going to be your everyday swansong. Too monumental to call a gig; much too highly-charged to truly deem a farewell (Quiet Arch suddenly ceasing to exist? Not a hope.) In truth, it all felt a little unknowable. Momentous, yes, but also laced with the strong hint of something yet to emerge. This morning, suspicions and worst fears lodged in the back of one’s mind were sadly confirmed. Lyndon Stephens was gone. With all the heaviness of Bowie and Blackstar, the timing was heavy but, in…