• Louis Cole w/ Cidot @ The Sugar Club, Dublin

    May 20, 2019 - By 

    As The Sugar Club fills with a homogenous mix of stereotypical Music nerds and the types you can imagine spend many an evening on Reddit, the cosy red room is cloaked in a warm ambiance that is characteristic of the venue. Although the show is running slightly behind, the crowd seems to be in high spirits, with audience members nestling into their plush red seats with cocktails and pizza in hand. As the crowd gets comfortable, support act Cidot take to the stage. A two-piece Jazz infused electronic act made up of Cian Hanley on drums and Cathal McKenna manning…

  • Frankie Cosmos – Haunted Items

    May 14, 2019 - By 

    The word “haunted” brings ghost and ghouls to mind but, in Frankie Cosmos’ latest releases, Greta Kline shows that everyday items can be tainted by memories that, when pushed to the back of the mind, can be just as frightening. Haunted items was released in four mini digital-only EPs, rationed out over the course of March. The collection contains all of the classic Frankie Cosmos properties we heard in 2018’s Vessel – catchy major chord progressions with witty melancholic lyrics – but this time it’s just Kline and her piano. Piano was the first instrument that Kline learnt as a child…

  • Manic Street Preachers @ Olympia Theatre, Dublin

    May 14, 2019 - By 

    It’s been a little over twenty years since Manic Street Preachers’ landmark fifth record, This is my Truth, Tell me Yours, solidified a somewhat stratospheric ‘second act’; a manic metamorphosis from a politically punctuated punk four piece into the enduring ruminative band we know today. Back then, the Manics were just about coping with the tragic disappearance of their guitarist Richey Edwards in 1995, and fresh from the meteoric success of the sweepingly superabundant sounds of their following album, Everything Must Go. Despite being the first to be recorded timidly without him, half of it contained his lyrics. The viscerally…

  • MARINA – Love + Fear

    May 12, 2019 - By 

    Psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross theorized that there are two primary emotions: fear and love. All positive emotions come from love, all negative emotions from fear. From love flows happiness, contentment, peace, and joy. From fear comes anger, hate, anxiety and guilt. She also believed fear and love are opposites writing that if you are in a place of fear, you cannot be in a place of love, if you are in a place of love, you cannot be in a place of fear. This theory forms the backbone of Marina’s (formerly Marina and the Diamonds) fourth record which is broken into…

  • Marissa Nadler & Stephen Brodsky – Droneflower

    May 10, 2019 - By 

    Ethereal gothic folk and experimental post-hardcore are convenient, if broad, brushstrokes to describe the individual styles of Marissa Nadler & Stephen Brodsky, but those labels would be to do both a disservice. Theirs at first seems a disparate pairing that might never otherwise have come about save for the fact that they both drank in the same Brooklyn bar. Nadler though has previously dabbled with Scott “Malefic” Conner of black metal outfit Xasthur, among others, not to mention a single released with John Cale earlier this year. Brodsky, best known from the heavier realms of Cave In and Mutoid Man,…

  • Vampire Weekend – Father of the Bride

    May 8, 2019 - By 

    Six years on from Modern Vampires of the City, Vampire Weekend have returned with Father of the Bride, a sprawling double album which finds singer Ezra Koenig trying to find his voice since the departure of Rostam Batmanglij (Rostam) from the band. When the New York outfit first appeared in 2008, they owed their unique sound to a mix of classical, African and western pop influences – never before had a combination of harpsichord, strings, bass, and drums sounded as good as it did on ‘M79’. This evidently was largely due to Rostam, the band’s multi-instrumentalist who has since taken…

  • Fat White Family – Serfs Up!

    May 7, 2019 - By 

    The spirit of Jean Genet has been invoked far too often by would-be provocateurs for his warped aphorisms, especially tiresome when sputtered by indie-rock’s supposed enfants terribles; so many wannabe-libertines have cited The Thief’s Journal in justifying their decadent posturing, I wonder whether Genet’s had a moment’s rest amid his turning in the dirt. When Fat White Family frontman Lias Saoudi told The Quietus recently that Genet was the “lyrical bedrock of the album”, I feared that the band’s raucous black comedy might have begun to curdle into banal pretence. No such worries. While the group has straightened up in some ways…

  • Naoise Roo & Special Guests @ Project Arts Centre, Dublin

    May 6, 2019 - By 

    In a small room known as The Cube within Temple Bar’s Project Art Centre, a small, excited audience has gathered for a live preview of a new EP from singer-songwriter Naoise Roo. Having taken a break from performing, this is the first performance the Dublin native has given in quite some time. There is no grand entrance, no spectacle, Roo and co. simply and quite humbly walk on stage. There is a round of applause, copious whoops, hollers and howls before the crowd settles and Roo begins the show with a short introduction. Even during this introduction, Roo’s charisma shines.…

  • Jason Lytle w/ Malojian @ 1st Presbyterian Church, Belfast

    May 5, 2019 - By 

    Kudos to Malojian (below) for amassing such a considerable array of achievements in a relatively short period of time: touring all over the shop, winning over a legion of fans and recording four albums of hushed reverie – most notably, with big kahuna producer Steve Albini, whose sparse recoding style is fitting for Malojian’s meticulously thought out arrangements. Then, as we are told, there is the forthcoming record with Jason Lytle on which he has been working this past week. The omens and the muses are both very good, it seems. It is easy to see why. Malojian writes clever, engaging…

  • BFF19: Another Day of Life

    May 3, 2019 - By 

    Confusão: chaos, anarchy, confusion. The word runs through Raúl de la Fuente and Damian Nenow’s Another Day of Life like a leitmotif. Little wonder. Their compelling animation-cum-documentary, adapted from the Ryszard Kapuściński book of the same name, depicts the Polish journalist’s three-month sojourn in Angola in 1975, as the country bloodily tore itself free of five hundred years of Portuguese colonialism. Kapuściński, in his book, described the situation as ‘a cosmic mess.’ This is the first film to address Kapuściński, the Polish Press Agency’s Africa correspondent between 1957 and 1981. During that time, in which he also worked in Asia and…