• 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…

  • Woman at War

    May 3, 2019 - By 

    I don’t know if it’s the diet or something in their water supply, but Iceland seems incapable of creating bad films. And with Benedikt Erlingsson’s latest, after the wonderful Of Horses And Men, we may just have the finest film to come out of the island; one that is deftly timed, hugely relevant and, above all else, hugely entertaining. Woman At War follows the daily routine and double-life of Halla, a 50 year-old who is a choir master by day, and a dare-devil, militant environmental activist by night, waging a near one-woman war with Iceland’s aluminium industry, which she deems…

  • Big Thief – U.F.O.F.

    May 2, 2019 - By 

    There’s a mysterious quality to Big Thief, their songs have a familiar warmth that feels as though they could be made up of melodies you’ve known for years, but at the same time they don’t sound quite like anyone else. This makes listening to a new Big Thief album an oddly nostalgic experience. On U.F.O.F, the band’s third album and their first on 4AD, there are moments when their sound feels like it could belong to an esoteric forgotten 1960s folk album, another Vashti Bunyan-esque rediscovery, while there are other times when the fragile timbre and turns of Adrianne Lenker’s…

  • John Cooper Clarke @ Ulster Hall, Belfast

    May 1, 2019 - By 

    “It’s let’s see who’s still alive in Belfast night”, the fifty-something-year-old man said, entering the foyer of the Ulster Hall. For the city’s former punks any gig by the movement’s old guard is reason to turn out, even it if is for a poetry night. John Cooper Clarke, to be fair, is no ordinary poet. Since the 1970s, Salford’s punk-poet extraordinaire has surfed the highs and lows of an unfashionable business, rhyming and riffing on everything from sperm tests and inner-city poverty to the crumbling NHS, metrosexuals and Bono’s stolen trousers. At seventy, this great satirist is perhaps more relevant…

  • Anna Mieke – Idle Mind

    April 30, 2019 - By 

    Hailing from the hills of Co. Wicklow, singer/songwriter Anna Mieke independently released her stunning debut full length LP Idle Mind in April; fusing elements of Irish folk music with those of global  traditions and alternative pop, Mieke’s debut is a tremendously promising effort. Folk influences abound Idle Mind’s soundscapes: Mieke’s cello drones underneath neatly percussive guitars and a layered arrangement of auxiliary instruments such as harmonium (played here by Ye Vagabonds’ Brian Mac Gloinn), bouzouki, piano, drums and fiddle. The bulk of the instrumentation on the album is provided by Mieke and Mac Gloinn, with additional players Matthew Jacobson, Sonny Sampson,…

  • Foxygen – Seeing Other People

    April 27, 2019 - By 

    Accompanying the announcement of Foxygen’s fifth album Seeing Other People, frontman Sam France penned a letter to fans assuring them that this isn’t the end. “We’re never breaking up. We’re not a band and never were”. Right, then.  We’re told to “read between the lines” on Seeing Other People, but unfortunately the album offers little more than superficial gripes – a tepid and weak account of a public parting that feels, now, like it’s been a long time coming. Opener ‘Work’, with lyrics attuned to the petty stirring of doubt in relationships, sees France play the genius-nightmare creative partner up…

  • Avengers: Endgame

    April 26, 2019 - By 

    God bless Robert Downey Jr. As Tony Stark, the lonely tin man with a hole in his chest, Downey Jr. does more with his face than all of the Avengers films’ awkward speechifying about teamwork, solidarity and what it means to be Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. A decade of story-telling synergy comes to a close with Avengers: Endgame. So much of it is the sludge we’ve become used to, but when the thrusters kick in, and the film finds its heart, it’s because of Downey Jr. He almost — but not quite — makes all of this worth it. It’s been some time since the…

  • SOAK – Grim Town

    April 25, 2019 - By 

    A northern voice cuts through the chatter; “this train is for the following categories of passenger only—recipients of universal credit or minimum wage, the lonely, the disenfranchised, the disillusioned, the lost, the grieving”. You pull your jacket closer to fend off the chill air that fills the carriage, wiping at the window with your free hand. It’s foggy outside, you make out nothing but a few barren trees and distant hills. With a heave the train begins to move, and before the conductor has even announced the destination you know where you’re going. Bridie Monds-Watson’s (aka SOAK) sophomore album Grim…