• Buntús Rince: Explorations in Irish Jazz, Fusion & Folk 1969-81

    May 2, 2019 - By 

    Indie-punk wunderkinder Fontaines DC drew the ire of many an Irish music fan lately with the neophile claim that until Girl Band’s emergence, “the only way to sound Irish was to be fuckin’ ‘diddly-diddly-aye’”. Perhaps that statement is more telling of the limitations in Ireland on exposure to genuinely forward-thinking music on a grassroots level as it is of the band’s attitude. On an island the size of our own, there does tend to be room only for that lucky few in the bylines of the Great Irish Narrative, but that overlooks the communities of troubadours, session players and ubiquitous…

  • Aldous Harding – Designer

    April 24, 2019 - By 

    Aldous Harding embodies many selves. Often flickering between different characters in a single song, she weaves between evocations of the tragic, world-weary chanteuse and the elfin and spirited jester seamlessly. She’s not afraid to unsettle, and it’s this fluidity that is the crux of Harding’s appeal – the adamant refusal to be contained by any static identity for too long. At the heart of her work is a lavish commitment to the theatrical. Designer is Harding’s third album, reuniting her with esteemed producer John Parish for a second time, after 2017’s exquisite Party. This time however, we find Harding departing from…

  • Samuel Beckett’s Watt @ Pavilion Theatre, Dun Laoghaire

    April 23, 2019 - By 

    “Nothing. But was that not something?” A stage adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s novel Watt is a fairly mad endeavour. Dense, absurd and peppered with extraordinarily long lists of the possible permutations of ordinary events – comings and goings, goings and comings – Watt is perhaps Beckett’s least celebrated novel. Yet this bleak tale of a non-descript man in domestic service for an indeterminate number of years to Mr. Knott, whom Watt learns nothing about, is laced with wonderfully absurdist humour. It is this comic seam, essentially, that Barry McGovern mines in this one-hour, one-man tour de force, on Dun Laoghaire’s…

  • LAMB – The Secret Of Letting Go

    April 22, 2019 - By 

    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?

    April 22, 2019 - By 

    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

    April 22, 2019 - By 

    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

    April 19, 2019 - By 

    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

    April 18, 2019 - By 

    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

    April 18, 2019 - By 

    “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

    April 17, 2019 - By 

    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…