• LAMB – The Secret Of Letting Go

    Five years since their last effort, LAMB have returned with their seventh full-length album: The Secret Of Letting Go. Having revisited their acclaimed self titled debut for its 21st anniversary in 2017, LAMB have now attempted to strike new ground with their latest release, a goal, which at times, and despite a decent effort, seems just out of reach. Sonically speaking, The Secret Of Letting Go is a delight. The production throughout is consistently shiny and full, all the while retaining enough sparseness to allow Lou Rhodes’ vocals to shine through. Standout moments come in the form of tracks such…

  • Billie Eilish – When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?

    On a recent episode of Vox music podcast ‘Switched On Pop,’ songwriter Charlie Harding explains the theory he has about superheroes and pop music. Superheros have to have a narrative that speaks to their time and to their generation. Eventually, they age out and are rebooted or a new superhero comes along. Harding suggests pop music follows a similar template, and there’s no one more equipped to be the next Generation’s superhero than seventeen year old Billie Eilish. Eilish has grown up in an America defined by mass shootings, rising suicide rates, poverty, and the opioid epidemic. Her home state…

  • BFF 19: Beats

    Wrapping up this year’s Belfast Film Festival, Michele Devlin and Mark Cousins took to the podium and paid tribute, in brittle delivery, to the spirit of the festival and its organisers — generous, curious, international — and to the legacy of murdered journalist Lyra McKee, who had been involved with Doc Fest, the Festival’s documentary spin-off. Some of the best and worst of Northern Ireland running in tandem. We need some catharsis, and closing film Beats, directed by Brian Welsh and adapted by Kieran Hurley from his own play, is just the ticket, an affectionate celebration of friendship, connection and the delight of being…

  • Junior Brother and PowPig @ The Grand Social, Dublin

    The outside of Dublin’s Grand Social is littered with both local and foreign football fans, the downstairs bar is a flood of jerseys and half-spilled pints, but upstairs in the smoking area of the bar, a semi-orderly queue is forming. A few strays weasel their way to the front and mutter something about spare tickets, but to no avail. The rest, stand patiently, smoking, drinking and chatting, waiting to enter the venue. One guy bursts in red as a baboon’s hole and takes three maybe four puffs from an inhaler before joining the line. All of these people are here…

  • BFF 19: Eighth Grade

    If you are someone who finds the multi-pronged genius of Bo Burnham gallingly unjust, then brace yourself. The comedian has turned to film-making, and nailed it on his first go. Burnham has spoken about his own anxiety issues, and Eighth Grade beams us directly into the headspace of maybe the most anxious species on the planet: an introverted 13 year old girl who doesn’t know how to be cool. Kayla (the unforgettable Elsie Fisher) is a sweet, awkward kid about to finish the titular class year and head into the dizzying young adulthood of high school. At school she has…

  • BFF 19: Float Like A Butterfly

    “It’s not about how many times you get hit, it’s abut how many times you get back up.” A flash of Rocky Balboa machismo seems inevitable in Float Like A Butterfly, another dose of feel-good Irish quasi-realism from the producers of Once and Sing Street. But Carmel Winters’ film, her second after 2010’s Snap, complicates the sentiment, delivering it in a moment of desperation, as a proud Traveller forces his meek son into a seaside fistfight he’s wholly untrained for. For the teenage Frances (Hazel Doupe), fighting is a means of asserting herself in a world where hostility comes from…

  • BFF 19: Birds of Passage

    Plagues, locusts and temptation in the desert: Birds of Passage is biblical in its grandeur and moral ruin. The current cultural fetizishation of drug cartel savagery is vampiric and lazy racism. Can-you-believe-this travelogues and “dark tourism” tours take the cash of white hipsters to show them the houses where monsters lived, while much TV and film deploys stock montages of whirring cash counting machines, biped planes stuffed with narcotics and South Americans going loco, bro. But Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra’s follow-up to 2015’s Oscar-nominated Embrace of the Serpent cuts through the fake glamour and returns to the roots of…

  • Turning Pirate’s Mixtape @ Lost Lane, Dublin

    Lost Lane, Dublin’s newest venue, opened its doors this weekend on the site of what used to be the relatively infamous Lillie’s Bordello. While the truism about difficult second albums doesn’t quite translate to a live venue, word about the success of the launch night does put some pressure on tonight’s Turning Pirate Lost Lane Mix Tape to deliver. The bill is promising in itself, we know we can expect to see Barq, Cathy Davey and Niamh Farell of HamsandwicH fame but we are also promised VERY special guests. They even used caps lock. Compere Bryan Quinn introduces Barq (Half…

  • BFF 19: A Bump Along The Way

    Opening the 19th Belfast Film Festival, Mark Cousins, newly installed Chairperson and mega-watt generator of cinematic enthusiasm, advertised the rectangular frame of Movie House Dublin Road as a place where Belfast will “meet the world”. For the inaugural night, at least, the world is the other side of Ulsterbus 273. Northern Ireland’s second city, and the experiences of the women living there, is receiving fresh attention with the success of Lisa Magee’s likeable Derry Girls, and is joined by Tess McGowan and Shelly Love’s A Bump Along The Way, a broad, sometimes difficult local indie with a sympathetic eye for feminine…

  • Ye Vagabonds – The Hare’s Lament

    Just under two years since Dublin-based duo Ye Vagabonds announced their debut self-titled album, their second, The Hare’s Lament, has landed. A collection of traditional and folk songs, sung in both Irish and English with a medley of skilfully played string instruments and the most beautiful harmonies, it’s a remarkable follow up. Brothers Brían and Diarmuid Mac Gloinn have created a sound that is based on a rich folk tradition, but have revived it with their own fresh approach and style of songwriting, resulting in just over 40 minutes of elegantly arranged songs that feel both contemporary and rooted in…