• Machinefabriek – With Voices

    January 26, 2019 - By 

    How much does concept matter? Hackneyed as it may be, it’s a question that comes up while listening to the latest album from prolific Dutch artist Machinefabriek AKA Rutger Zuydervelt. With Voices, as the title suggests, is an album of eight tracks composed around the human voice. Heard blind, it’s a fascinating document filled with fascinating sounds that evoke a host of different moods. Reading into it and things get even more complicated or interesting, depending on your view. Machinefabriek crafted a 35-minute piece of music that was sent to the eight vocalists involved, each of whom responded in their…

  • The Mule

    January 25, 2019 - By 

    In Clint Eastwood’s The Mule, The Man with No Name is faced with his biggest adversaries yet: Cartels, the DEA, and smartphones. A quite strange and mostly not very good version of what David Lowery and Robert Redford were doing in The Old Man And The Gun, Eastwood directs and stars as a 90 year-old horticulturist who has fallen on hard times and becomes a drugs mule for the local Cartel. Like Redford’s career criminal in Old Man, Mule is a possible swansong in which a screen icon plays a compulsive workaholic who has neglected his family. But Mule has a sourer…

  • Bouts – Flow

    January 24, 2019 - By 

    After a five year hiatus, Dublin based Bouts have harkened back to when they were regulars on the Irish music scene, circa 2013, and gifted us with a long awaited second album. Flow is the result of two years of intercontinental songwriting and recording, as the lads are now spread across Dublin, London and Amsterdam. But has the maturity and cultural expansion added to the creative and musical process? Barry Bracken (vocals, guitar), Colin Boylan (guitar, vocals), Niall Jackson (bass, vocals) and Daniel Flynn (drums, percussion) have nurtured a sound that’s familiar and comforting in its ‘90s inspired indie pop…

  • Vice

    January 22, 2019 - By 

    “What, uh, do we believe, sir?” a young Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld’s aide during the Nixon years, asks his boss. Rumsfeld, played by Steve Carell, laughs hysterically, blindsided by the naivety of the question. Matters of personal principles and ideology simply do not factor into Washington power games. It’s a central concern in Vice, the latest in Anchorman director Adam McKay’s swerve from knockabout man-boy comedy to polemical film-making, but it’s also a question the film desperately needed to ask itself. What does McKay believe? What moral vision is he trying to put on screen? What on earth is Vice…

  • Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened

    January 21, 2019 - By 

    The word “hustle” used to denote a ruse or con game, a trick to fleece someone out of their cash. In the current parlance of hyper-go morning-routine capitalists, it’s taken on a new aspirational aura, now the religion of twenty three year-old dudes with Tim Ferris quotes in their bio. Following close on the heels of Hulu’s doppelganger doc Fyre Fraud, unavailable outside the U.S., Netflix’s Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened makes clear that, in many ways, the meaning of the word hasn’t shifted at all. Directed by Chris Smith (Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond, another doc about…

  • The Twilight Sad – It Won/t Be Like This All The Time

    January 18, 2019 - By 

    A few years under the wing of The Cure seems to have pushed The Twilight Sad away from the subdued atmosphere of their last record, Nobody Wants To Be Here And Nobody Wants To Leave. On this, their fourth outing, James Graham, Andy MacFarlane and company revisit the gnawing sinister sadness of 2012’s No One Can Ever Know and ramp up the dense, engulfing atmospherics almost to the same level as their 2007 debut Fourteen Autums and Fifteen Winters Previous albums have gradually eased the listener in the Kilsyth group’s murky world but this time guitarist (and producer) MacFarlane wastes no time jumping in…

  • The Upside

    January 16, 2019 - By 

    Phillip Lacasse doesn’t want to be patronised. Played by Bryan Cranston, the disabled billionaire, rendered paralysed from the neck down by a paragliding accident, doesn’t want people making a fuss over him, speaking over him or adopting that pitying tone you would take with a shy child. He hires unemployed ex-con Dell (Kevin Hart, making the radical leap from bad comedy to bad comic drama) as his live-in life auxiliary precisely because he doesn’t tiptoe around his condition. How unfortunate, then, that he finds himself in a film that is so consistently patronising: to him, to his new buddy, and,…

  • The Camino Voyage

    January 14, 2019 - By 

    Four Irishmen in a boat. It sounds like the start of a joke. The Camino Voyage, directed by Irish documentarian Donal O’Ceilleachair, chronicles the attempt of four Kerry men — and later, adding a dash of name-recognition, The Frames frontman Glen Hansard — to travel the traditional route of the Camino de Santiago, also known as the Way of Saint James, an ancient pilgrimage from Ireland to a Galician cathedral in northern Spain. With an appreciation for symmetry, the group — two writers, an artist and a stonemason — set off from St. James’ Gate in Dublin, on a passageway across the Irish Sea, the Atlantic’s edge, and…

  • New Pope shares surprise EP, Mångata

    January 4, 2019 - By 

    TTA favourite and Galway institution, New Pope AKA David Boland has dropped a spontaneous EP to mark the new year. Titled Mångata, the seven-track release is, for now, a YouTube exclusive and is the first new music to come from the Citóg Records founder in over a year. Since we last spoke to Boland around the release of his 2016 debut LP Love, he’s shared a reworked edition of tracks from his former band The Depravations and continued to be a regular live fixture in Galway’s venues. Strangely though, 2018 also saw him removing all of his previous releases from Bandcamp, including Love and its preceding EP, Youth.  With the…

  • The Favourite

    January 4, 2019 - By 

    Court is in session in Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite, a spectacular re-dressing of the period costume drama and savage comedy of manners about people who barely have any. It’s early 18th century England in Queen Anne’s palace. Off-screen, over on the mainland there’s a war with France to fund (there was always a war with France), but home is where the real hostilities are flaring up. Upstart crow Abigail Hill (Emma Stone at her most compelling) is the ruthless social climber cousin of the reigning royal favourite Sarah Churchill (Rachel Weisz), the Cheney-like whisperer who basically runs the country for the…