• The Boy Downstairs

    June 13, 2018 - By 

    HBO’s Girls has become a shorthand for certain kinds of New Yorkian slice of life dramedies and romances, shaped by the ‘hipster’ spaces and attitudes of articulate inner-city millenials. Desiree Akhavan’s Appropriate Behaviour (2014), for example, which presented a same-sex relationship and breakup in rom-com retrospective, got labelled by some outlets as a lesbian version of Lena Dunham’s show (on which Akhavan later made an appearance). New rom-com The Boy Downstairs, the first feature from writer-director Sophie Brooks, an NYU film school grad, invites the same comparisons. Its details suggest the aesthetic geography of the urban creatives — a craft beer store, a twinkly roof party, a…

  • Kanye West – ye

    June 11, 2018 - By 

    Kanye West’s ye is as harrowing, repulsive and morbidly fascinating as it’s creator. 2018 has been West’s most controversial year to date, almost impressive for a man who’s career has been characterised by outlandish and often toxic behaviour: for many fans who stood by him through bizarre interviews and turned a blind eye to his leering misogyny, his recent endorsement of Donald Trump and widely-reported ‘slavery is a choice’ comments have represented a bridge too far for many. How much his very public battle with bi-polar, and subsequent hospitalisation and struggle with opioid addiction has had to bear on his…

  • Just Mustard – Wednesday

    June 11, 2018 - By 

    Dundalk Co. Louth is becoming more and more of a creative hub, breeding a new wave of young acts paving their way through Ireland’s current music scene. From artists like Elephant and the now UK-based natives Video Blue and Trick Mist to staple venue The Spirit Store and local record shop Classified Records, the town is gradually becoming one of the country’s most vital hotbeds of talent. Testament to that, is the newly label Pizza Pizza Records, and with it – it’s first release, Just Mustard’s debut album Wednesday. Previous to this release, Just Mustard could have been considered a…

  • Metá Metá @ Black Box, Belfast

    June 11, 2018 - By 

    Two years have passed since Metá Metá’s memorable gig at the Crescent Arts Centre as part of Moving On Music’s Beat Root festival. The São Paulo band’s incendiary performance that evening was all the more remarkable given the absence of saxophonist Thiago  França  forced to spend the night in a Belfast hospital due to a virus. Without him, vocalist Juçara Marçal, guitarist/vocalist Kiko Dinucci, electric bassist Marcelo Cabral and drummer Sergio Machada served up a heady brew of indie rock laced with Afro-Brazilian and psychedelic colors. Back to full strength for its return trip to Belfast, Metá Metá greets Black…

  • The Magic Numbers @ Cyprus Avenue, Cork

    June 11, 2018 - By 

    It’s a packed out, older than usual crowd that The Magic Numbers are faced with when they arrive at Cyprus Avenue. Despite the band’s relative obscurity in recent years, they’re met with an excitable, large audience and waste no time settling into riling that crowd up with their jangly, summery indie rock anthems. For the most part, the four piece settle comfortably into their set. They play with charismatic ease and it’s clear the act know their way around a live performance – combining banterous interjections with extremely tight, professional playing. However, the biggest issue facing The Magic Numbers seems…

  • Oneohtrix Point Never – Age Of

    June 9, 2018 - By 

    With his tenth dense and knotty release, Oneohtrix Point Never (AKA Daniel Lopatin) has constructed a lysergic, glitched out rebuke of internet culture, mapping out the deepest recesses of our often cracked and wildly over stimulated minds. Tackling themes of knowledge and truth in the Internet age, Lopatin takes his lofty queue from ’70s Prog to create a dystopian concept album wherein a singularity of artificially intelligent entities have become all knowing, absorbing the entirety of the world’s information from the internet. Of course, the Internet being the Internet, the information they have absorbed is riddled with inconsistencies, contradictions and…

  • Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds w/ Patti Smith @ Royal Hospital, Kilmainham

    June 8, 2018 - By 

    In this hyperbolic age, the phrase “gig of the year” gets tossed about far too flippantly. Every experience must be the best as anything less than perfection is worthless. The thing is though, most concerts couldn’t lay claim to that title. But very occasionally, there is a lineup that makes your jaw drop and forces you to question whether or not this could be the one. On 6 June 2018, Kilmainham played host to one of those shows: Patti Smith supporting Nick Cave. Either of these artists could have been the headliner and no one would be disappointed. They each…

  • Book Club

    June 7, 2018 - By 

    Partly a feature-length advertisement for Random House’s most famous erotic novel series, partly an unintentional satire about the dire state of affairs for older female actors in Hollywood, partly a bland romantic comedy that sticks to formula, Book Club’s eye-raising hook centres on a group of autumnal friends who read 50 Shades of Grey and find their libidinal juices suddenly brought to the boil. It’s like a producer read one of those 2011 articles about middle-aged housewives renovating their own personal Red Rooms, click his ‘treatment’ fingers and then the thing sat in production for seven years. The Christian Grey…

  • Ty Segall @ Tivoli Theatre, Dublin

    June 7, 2018 - By 

    It is as if the drawn out, cloudless evenings knew that Ty Segall was coming to town. A gloriously heady concoction of 60’s proto-punk, garage rock, glam, psychedelia and heavy metal,  Segall’s music is something that may seem at odds with a wonderfully sun drenched weather front, but one that makes perfect sense when listening to his back catalogue. Over the course of his ten solo LPs, numerous collaborative albums, and countless other releases, Segall has managed to prove he can effortlessly combine his love of melody with a raucous sound that can go off on a zig-zagged tangent at…

  • Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

    June 7, 2018 - By 

    Welcome to cinema’s annual extinction event. Or, as it’s known around these parts, the summer. ‘Fallen’ is the word alright. We are a long way from the expertly choreographed, memorably human spectacles that launched a thousand lunchboxes back in ’93. The Jurassic series has struggled to replicate the original Spielberg magic and the exhaustion continues with Fallen Kingdom, the fifth in the franchise and the second in Universal’s second round of ill-fated trips to Isla Nublar (are there any other kind?). Jurassic World director Colin Trevorrow, having gotten the call from Kathleen Kennedy, is out, but he and Derek Connolly have stayed on writing duties.…