• Lykke Li @ Vicar Street, Dublin

    November 24, 2014 - By 

    In April 2011 Lykke Li made an unlikely appearance at the old Tower Records for Record Store Day. With several hundred happy punters crammed in amongst the vinyl, she performed material from her (at the time) recently released second album and international breakthrough ‘Wounded Rhymes’, and absolutely blew the rest of the line up out of the water. It took all of three minutes to identify Li’s stand out live asset, one that an album and a significant step up in stage size has done little to change: honeyed soprano vocals applied to poetic emotional trauma. We were hooked. There’s an obvious hole to…

  • …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead – IX

    November 20, 2014 - By 

    Texan group …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead transgress a variety of genres with their latest release IX, once again showcasing the bands ability to remain an enigmatic force. IX, the follow up to 2012’s Lost Songs, presents the listener with a jigsaw of melody and harmony, indicative of Trail of Dead’s ability to challenge all genres. Opening track ‘The Doomsday Book’ is uplifting, repetitive rock with no set vocal structure, which fans will certainly be accustomed to. The transition between ‘The Doomsday Book’ and second track ‘Jaded Apostles’ is a strange one, perfectly illustrating the…

  • Luke Abbott, Somerville, Subplots @ Pepper Canister Church, Dublin

    November 20, 2014 - By 

    Arriving at the Pepper Canister church on Dublin’s Mount Street last Saturday evening one was met with seemingly incongruous signage screaming Hidden Agenda. Truly esoteric, casual bystanders might have suspected a hijacking, an unsubtle protest at the church in modern Ireland. The fact of the matter was something less overtly political, yet just as exciting. The Dublin venture whose name adorned these signs was putting on a thrilling concert in this venue, an evening of music grounded in folk that gazed ever skyward.Stepping inside, the mood was one of quiet wonder, as smoke softly drifted through air and rich, thick…

  • Mr. Oizo – The Church

    November 18, 2014 - By 

    Mr. Oizo, the alias of French electro-extraordinaire and director Quentin Dupieux, has come a long way from providing the soundtrack for small-time, petty criminal puppet Flat Eric and his Levi jeans thieving shenanigans. Well known to those who came of age in the late nineties and early millennium, the track ‘Flat Beat’ and its fluffy, yellow mascot, represented a crossover of cultural motifs and fused a relationship between image and sound that is still instantly recognisable over a decade later. More importantly, with ‘Flat Beat,’ Dupieux created a track that was flat-out immense; one that was able to transcend the…

  • The Drop

    November 14, 2014 - By 

    The Drop is a good example of how short stories and screenplays are different forms with different expectations and demands. Dennis Lehane, who writes the film, translates the material straightforwardly from his 2009 story ‘Animal Rescue’, producing a low-level Brooklyn crime drama which often feels both undernourished and padded. Director Michael R. Roskam impressed in 2011 with Bullhead, a Dutch-language feature about the animal hormone underworld in Belgium, and here he finds a similar, if less complex, story about day-to-day mob operations and the guarded, tense blue-collar men caught up in them. Bob (Tom Hardy) and Marv (the late James…

  • VA – Slowly Exploding: 10 Years of Perc Trax

    November 14, 2014 - By 

    Techno is in a very different place from when Ali Wells, better known as Perc, started up his Perc Trax label with his own ‘Ice Cream for Kenton’ single. A solid 62 (thus far) 12”s later, a bunch of digital releases and a handful of albums later, here we are in 2014 where Perc Trax’s brand of blistering machine funk is in vogue to an extent not seen since the 90s. To celebrate a decade of the label’s existence we’re given two CDs; a compilation of new Perc Trax material from both label regulars (Perc, Truss, Forward Strategy Group) and…

  • Destiny (Multiformat)

    November 12, 2014 - By 

    It is fair to say that the development company Bungie knows a thing or two about making videogames. With the critically acclaimed, million selling Halo franchise in their portfolio, they would have been forgiven for hanging up their boots and never working on another project again. However, with that incredible success comes the incredible expectation that has weighed upon the release of Destiny since its initial announcement. It has, in one way or another, evaded neat pigeonholing, described in some quarters as a first person shooter in an open world setting, and in others as commingling MMO and RPG mechanics. It has variously been…

  • iamamiwhoami – Blue

    November 12, 2014 - By 

    Sweden’s iamamiwhoami are a curious wee thing. Self releasing electronic albums every year with corresponding YouTube videos providing a unique visual interpretation of the  soundscape the band creates. Their third album, Blue, is not different. For the sake of this review, we’ll be stripping away all of the multimedia whizzbang flashiness and looking at the album in isolation. In this regard, Blue is an interesting but ultimately straightforward synthpop album. The thick, deep bass synths cover the low of the mix, like some kind of heavy musical butter or a laboured simile. The vocals range from the silky and ethereal…

  • Alien: Isolation (Multiformat)

    November 10, 2014 - By 

    Two powerful forces collide head-on in this latest iteration of the classic Sci-Fi Horror movie. Firstly, there is the expectation that the chief tenet of modern videogames is bombast, that they should be loud yet morally and intellectually lacking. Outer space is not the only vacuum in recent releases, which favour the shooty, shooty, bang, bang stuff over anything resembling characterisation or an engaging plot. Secondly, there is the unavoidable fact that previous titles bearing the Alien brand have not been very good. The flailing series has moved further and further away from what made the source material so enthralling. However, just…

  • Run the Jewels – Run the Jewels 2

    November 10, 2014 - By 

    If you’ve been out of the loop with regards to hip-hop for the last number of years, if nothing from the genre has taken you by the scruff of the neck and pulled you into its roughneck world the way it may have before, then consider Run the Jewels 2 to be an assertive wake up call. This second collaborative effort from the duo of Killer Mike and El-P has had the Internet aflame with hype since its free release on October 24th of this year, and it has effortlessly hammered itself into the consciousness of both the underground and…