• Frankie Cosmos w/ Squarehead @ Voodoo Belfast

    August 27, 2018 - By 

    Frankie Cosmos’s Greta Kline is an artist who oozes cool credibility. A startlingly talented songwriter with a steadfastly DIY ethos, the native New Yorker began garnering acclaim for her music when she was still just a teenager, using Bandcamp to release a veritable avalanche of bedroom pop gems in just a few short years. Now signed with Sub Pop records and touring off the back of Frankie Cosmos’ third full length album,  this evening’s show in Voodoo promises to showcase Kline’s wry poeticism and Lo-Fi yet sophisticated take on the indie pop genre. First sightings of Kline in Voodoo’s bar…

  • Blood Orange – Negro Swan

    August 23, 2018 - By 

    Looking at the decade and a half long career that Dev Hynes AKA Blood Orange, has carved out for himself, there is one word that rings above all others: chameleonic. In that time, the London-born, New York-based polymath has transitioned from noisy, DFA-influenced dance punk to baroque indie pop and then onto masterful R&B with a seemingly effortless pace, adopting each genre and its trappings with such a deft hand that it’s hard to envision him doing anything else. His Lightspeed Champion persona was so convincing that hearing that same mind compose a song like 2016’s ‘Hand’s Up’, a searing…

  • The Eyes of Orson Welles

    August 24, 2018 - By 

    Like a giddy lover, The Eyes of Orson Welles only has eyes for Orson Welles. Mark Cousins’ latest cinematic essay is a swooning, engaged, delightful dive into Welles’ career and personal life and, in particular, his practice of looking, his visual vocabulary as expressed in mostly-lost drawings and, of course, the construction of those fabulous frames. If the film is also under-edited and at times over-earnest, then this can be forgiven. Anyone who’s ever penned a love letter knows how easily they can get away from you. The Eyes opens with a sealed box, a mystery like Rosebud, retrieved from…

  • Another Love Story 2018

    August 22, 2018 - By 

    An intimate festival of approximately two hundred attendees, Another Love Story is based in a family home set in quaint country surrounds of Killyon Manor. A mixture of live music, art installations and talks were enjoyed across various makeshift venues on the lawn as well as inside the house, namely in both cosy front rooms and the spacious ballroom. Now in its fourth year, Another Love Story affirmed its position as Ireland’s finest festival. The interplay between bands from Dublin and Cork, namely, of musicians spotted multiple times performing with different acts over the three days, demonstrated both the connectivity of…

  • Richard Thompson w/ David Keenan @ Empire Music Hall, Belfast

    August 17, 2018 - By 

    There’s been a recurring narrative in most critical discussion around Richard Thompson over the years, that he exists as this undiscovered national treasure. In terms of the comparable reverence commanded by former peers like Nick Drake & John Martyn, that might be true – it’s not a trendy sell, not quite fitting perfectly into folk or rock pigeonholes in a business that operates most efficiently under binary conditions. Couple that with themes that veer wildly between mordant meditations on humanity, and congenial, quintessentially British kitchen sink themes without the ‘benefit’ of A) dying young, or B) self-mythologising as a romantically-inclined…

  • Mitski – Be The Cowboy

    August 17, 2018 - By 

    Given the critical success of 2016’s Puberty 2, touring with Lorde and Run the Jewels, and facing into an almost fully sold out tour across the US and Europe, it’s fair to say Mitski’s upward trajectory in the past few years has been stratospheric. Be The Cowboy, her highly anticipated fifth album marks a more mature direction in the New York artist’s – full name Mitski Miyawaki – sound, both musically and lyrically. Mitski seems to have taken a step away from the guitar and pop-punk sound her name is has become synonymous with. Patrick Hyland (who also worked as a producer…

  • What Where @ Happy Days Enniskillen Beckett Festival

    August 16, 2018 - By 

    Even before the passengers disembark at a secret destination in the Fermanagh countryside, the drama has begun. Franz Schubert’s Winterreise provides the soundtrack en route before the bus stops. The door opens. A woman in green overalls gets on. Megaphone in hand, a bandana masking her face, though oddly, with an opening for the mouth. She walks silently down the aisle, scrutinizing the faces as though searching for the guilty party. Silence descends amongst the passengers. Search over, the woman gets off the bus, as do the passengers, who find themselves in front of a green cattle shed or some…

  • Pull Focus: I, Dolours

    August 15, 2018 - By 

    Maurice Sweeney didn’t want to make a Spotlight special, lost in the evening television schedule, he tells the audience after a screening of I, Dolours, his hybrid documentary about Dolours Price, the late Provisional IRA volunteer, bomber and hunger striker. He wanted to make a movie. Party it’s strategic: a movie gets a slot at doc festivals like Pull Focus, attracting a packed multiplex audience. Partly it’s a way to use story-telling to do justice to Price’s extraordinary story of a life as a Republican soldier. On this ambition, the often-harrowing film is half-successful. I, Dolours tells the story of the Troubles and…

  • Pull Focus: The Image You Missed

    August 15, 2018 - By 

    Outlining an ethics of documentary making in The Image You Missed, the late, acclaimed film-maker Arthur MacCaig (via Ernest Larsen’s crisp, twangy voiceover) describes the subject of the lens’ gaze as one who is forced to ‘account for themselves’ — their choices and responsibilities and lived experience. Who are you? And why are you doing what you’re doing? McCauley’s son Donal Foreman, Image’s director and editor, uses his own film to turn the camera’s scrutiny back on his absent father, producing an engaging, clever consideration and critique of MacCaig’s legacy, of political docs more generally, and of the subtle differences between looking at…

  • Pull Focus: The Lonely Battle of Thomas Reid

    August 14, 2018 - By 

    The word ‘foreign’ is used a lot in The Lonely Battle of Thomas Reid, Feargal Ward and Tadhg O’Sullivan’s portrait of a Kildare farmer holding out against the Irish state’s property vultures. Mostly it’s in the context of ‘foreign direct investment’, or FDI, the economic incentive at the heart of Thomas Reid’s problems. The socially isolated farmer’s home is in the sights of electronic manufacturer Intel, who want to expand their local factory facility. As explained by a representative from Ireland’s Industrial Development Agency, the arm of the state responsible for scouting and securing land for multi-nationals, the farm is ‘really the most appropriate’ site for…