• Billy Corgan @ Olympia Theatre, Dublin

    June 23, 2019 - By 

    Billy Corgan (or William Patrick Corgan as he formally likes to be known as these days) has taken an unprecedented opportunity to perform a short tour of Europe alone, airing out new work and well trodden, decades old tunes. It’s a brief sojourn from the Smashing Pumpkins who are in the middle of a somewhat renaissance tour with three of the four original members which he’ll return to in a couple of weeks. Tonight we’re dispensed with a rare intimate show from the magmatic frontman and anticipation as to what facet of his personality we’ll be presented with is palpable.…

  • In Fabric

    June 21, 2019 - By 

    A haunted dress is the kind of premise that even Stephen King at the height of his cocaine period would struggle to make more than a short story out of, and a very silly one at that. But with In Fabric, Peter Strickland (The Duke of Burgundy, Berberian Sound Studio) uses the conceit to create a deeply sensual and deranged experience that wraps itself around your brain and refuses to let go. As played by Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Shelia is a reserved and harried woman who yearns for some passion after separating from her husband. The day before a date, she’s convinced to buy…

  • Julia Shapiro – Perfect Version

    June 20, 2019 - By 

    Perfect Version finds Julia Shapiro wrangling with the idea of the self at a tumultuous time in her life, cataloguing the period following her exit from Chastity Belt’s third album tour due to a flustered blend of relationship woes and emotional toil. Facing the mirror to see nothing, she begins to question what it means to be someone at all, to be truly authentic. ‘Parking Lot’ materialises this thought into the daily task of trying to find somewhere to park, unmasking routines as things done out of mere habit rather than because we want to, raising questions about the significance…

  • Scullion @ Lost Lane, Dublin

    June 20, 2019 - By 

    The pre-show murmur before the second of Scullion’s sequence of three “Down in the City” shows at Lost Lane is somewhat muted but polite and convivial. Critically it is dry. Just prior to doors opening the heavens did the same and most of our audience seem to have been caught in the deluge at some point en route to the venue. The mild drenching seems to have brought out an “us-against-the-world” attitude in the attendees, which always makes conversation a little easier and it’s clear everyone is very happy to be safely ensconced in Lost Lane’s cozy space. Scullion are…

  • Docs Ireland: The Inventor

    June 19, 2019 - By 

    An “invention” is, of course, not just a product you make, it’s a story you tell, a fancy you fashion. This linguistic slipperiness runs through Alex Gibney’s The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, his gripping critique of StartUpLand, a place pathologically allergic to plain speaking. Gibney’s Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005) is one of the definitive portraits of corporate American group-think, flagging up the delusional market faith that would help decimate economies a couple of years later. The dangerous sway of belief and magical thinking are recurring preoccupations of the film-maker— his previous film was…

  • Docs Ireland: 2040

    June 14, 2019 - By 

    The screening of 2040 was packed with schoolchildren thanks to the involvement of Into Film, a Northern Irish charity focused on film as an educational tool, and it’s easy to see why Docs Ireland extended the invite. The film, presented and directed by Australia’s Damon Gameau, is a layperson’s guide to the causes of, and urgently needed possible solutions to, rapid climate breakdown, and a love letter to his daughter and the possible futures she will inhabit. There is a breezy pedagogical tone to the film, in which Gameau, via to-camera testimony, narration and slightly hokey visual aids, outlines the physical…

  • Docs Ireland: The Silence of Others

    June 14, 2019 - By 

    “Spain is covered in mass graves.” Buried wells of grief and pain stir underneath Spain’s transition from decades-long dictatorship to holiday destination democracy in Robert Bahar and Almudena Carracedo’s El silencio de otros (The Silence of Others), a sobering, difficult documentary with deep resonance for our own state and its preoccupation with protocols of remembering and forgetting. Mass executions, concentration camps, torture stations, stolen babies. Francoist Spain was a horror story, one that occupies less space in cultural memory than comparable collections of atrocities. Part of the reason for this is the so-called Pact of Forgetting, a bill passed following…

  • Cate Le Bon – Reward

    June 8, 2019 - By 

    The songs on Cate Le Bon’s fifth album, Reward, came about as the result of time spent in a cottage in England’s rural Lake District, where she lived for a year in almost total isolation. Retreating from several years of going through the looped motions of touring, writing, and recording, there in nature and solitude Le Bon spent her days learning how to build furniture from scratch and her nights pouring over a second-hand piano, where she found herself writing the most introspective and personal songs of her career. Unsurprisingly then, location plays a vital part in Le Bon’s writing,…

  • Days Gone (Sony, PS4)

    June 7, 2019 - By 

    If you follow videogames media, you will no doubt already be aware of the polarised reception to Sony’s latest AAA exclusive title, Days Gone. Those in the positive camp have praised the intense atmosphere of this open world meets survival horror adventure while naysayers have criticised a release that contains more bugs than the Oval Office. Both sides of the debate have been particularly rabid in either their praise or their lambasting and, as is often the case, the truth resides somewhere in the middle. While there is much to enjoy about Days Gone, that enjoyment is all too often hamstrung by frustration, repetition…

  • In Their Thousands – Acrasia

    June 7, 2019 - By 

    Donegal’s In Their Thousands are no overnight story, it’s fair to say: brothers Aidan and Declan McClafferty have been playing music with their cousin Ruari Friel since childhood, and have been performing as In Their Thousands, alongside bassist Marty Smyth, for around a decade or so. These years of shared experience permeate through, the band’s debut long player. The 13 songs collected within feel distinctly ‘lived-in’ – from the collective setbacks, small victories and long nights of the soul detailed in their lyrics, to the ease of the band’s confident, unshowy playing. The title track and lead single, a recent…