• Capernaum

    March 1, 2019 - By 

    “My life is dogshit.” Zain El Hajj, the young protagonist of Nadine Labaki’s third feature Capernaum, which competed for the Foreign Language prize at last week’s Oscars, is not having such a good time of it. Twelve years old with an asterix (as a child to undocumented parents, there’s no birth certificate for confirmation), Zain endures a monotonous, shabby, profoundly unnourishing childhood in Beirut’s dilapidated urban sprawl. Played by Zain Al Rafeea, a Syrian refugee himself, the young lad lives with his large family in a rotting apartment owned by their cousin Assad, in whose shop some of the kids spend…

  • The Gloaming – The Gloaming (3)

    February 25, 2019 - By 

      Virtuoso. The term has undergone somewhat of a realignment of late, thanks in part to the rate of technological advancements spawning a whole new range of art forms and instrumentation to master. Whilst the title clearly draws more gravitas in some fields than others, this hasn’t deterred the term being bandied around a bit too loosely. Timely, then, is The Gloaming’s third offering, whose five masterful musicians taught us to forget everything we thought we knew about the word and its connotations. Since their formation in early 2011, the band has drawn vast critical acclaim, selling out The National…

  • Massive Attack @ 3Arena, Dublin

    February 25, 2019 - By 

    When Massive Attack announced their current Mezzanine XXI tour last October, no one could have reasonably expected a safe or linear presentation of the band’s seminal – and arguably career-cresting – 1998 album. With founding member Robert Del Naja aka 3D promising a “one-off piece of work; our own personalised nostalgia nightmare head trip”, at Dublin’s 3Arena tonight, the Bristol luminaries deliver on that pledge and then some. Unless you’ve been keeping a close eye on recent setlists, the big curveball of tonight’s set isn’t the top-drawer guest vocalists (in this case, Horace Andy and the ever extraordinary Elizabeth Frazer).…

  • Julia Jacklin – Crushing

    February 24, 2019 - By 

    From the outside of a diary we observe nothing but casual scratches and marks of use on deep brown leather. Gently a hand moves to it, and with intention flicks to the next available blank page. A pen moves swiftly to and fro. Ink enters the page not by any requirement of physics, but seemingly through the weight of the deliberation behind it. Lines cross and titles sit unassumingly, until the sign off they reach outwards; the cover is closed and again the aged leather holds our gaze. Following up her 2016 debut Don’t Let the Kids Win, Julia Jacklin…

  • Panda Bear – Buoys

    February 23, 2019 - By 

    Panda Bear’s Buoys is a mirage of deconstructed indie governed by its uninhibited stream of consciousness lyrical style. His writing makes this one of the most vivid depictions of society in 2019 so far and a lament to a generation condemned by its own vanity. Through minimalism, Panda Bear – Animal Collective’s Noah Lennox – draws the listener’s attention solely to his sincere, reverberated vocals through which he bares a haunting portrait of the modern human psyche. Lennox succeeds in making the familiar sound unfamiliar, taking the roots of conventional tracks and scrambling them into something completely unrecognisable and unique.…

  • Cosey Fanni Tutti – TUTTI

    February 17, 2019 - By 

      Cosey Fanni Tutti’s latest LP, her first solo work since 1982’s Time to Tell, has been described by the artist as an attempt to express “the totality of [her] being”; the music here, Tutti explains, interprets “shifting perceptions of how [past and present] inform one another” – an extension of other recent projects concerned with documenting her history as an artist and provocateur. The record follows an acclaimed memoir (2017’s ART SEX MUSIC), a gallery retrospective focused on the work of her 1970s performance art ensemble COUM Transmissions, and an autobiographical audio-visual installation entitled Harmonic Coumaction scored by an embryonic version…

  • The Kid Who Would Be King

    February 15, 2019 - By 

    The Kid Who Would Be King is an old-fashioned film, and I don’t think Joe Cornish would mind it being called that. After some years spent contributing to studio scripts, the English writer-director follows up 2011’s Attack The Block with another tale of hearty contemporary misfits banding together to take on a deadly genre threat. The film is fuelled by issues of story-telling inheritance, drawing on Arthurian, fairy tale structures for a funny, down to Earth, quite moving tale of a young boy trying to figure out who he is. Alex (Louis Ashbourne Serkis) is a twelve year-old struggling with a…

  • Ariana Grande – thank u, next

    February 12, 2019 - By 

    Ariana Grande’s stratospheric rise to fame – with all its adoration, chaos, and residence at the top of the Billboard 100 – has been a tumultuous one. First breaking into the public sphere through virtue of a Nickelodeon show, everything about the Florida-born entertainer seemed innocent, childlike. The fact that her first scandal involved licking a donut speaks for itself. In the past two years however, the now 25- year-old has been forced to grow-up. And unlike many of her child-star peers, she has done it with a grace and defiance that has endeared her to the world and turned…

  • Velvet Buzzsaw

    February 11, 2019 - By 

    What’s the point of art if nobody sees it? This is one of the questions posed by a character in Velvet Buzzsaw, a satire released last weekend on Netflix that wants to sink its teeth into the contemporary art world but fails to leave a lasting impression. The discovery of a series of revolutionary paintings by an unknown and reclusive artist sets off a feeding frenzy among the galleries, museums and art buyers based in Los Angeles. This space is dominated by critic Morf Vandewalt (Jake Gyllenhaal), a man who views everything through the lens of critique but is struggling…

  • Talos – Far Out Dust

    February 9, 2019 - By 

    Talos makes a quiet but triumphal return with his sophomore release, Far Out Dust, the quick follow up to 2017’s Wild Alee. Far Out Dust represents a new sense of maturity from the Cork native, with more ambitious lyrics, and a confidence that was suggested but dormant before. While Talos – aka Eoin French – still plays with the ever-presented influences of artists like Brian Eno, Bon Iver and James Vincent McMorrow, there’s a distinct ‘80s pop influence on many of the tracks here, with hints of synth-pop artists like Hurts, or Years and Years. These influences aren’t surprising, given…