• St. Vincent @ Olympia Theatre, Dublin

    October 23, 2017 - By 

    We heard it here first. St. Vincent is 80% Irish. She tells us this in a rare glimpse into a personal moment, the stage persona briefly dropped to let the audience in. So, here we all are in the middle of a meticulously constructed piece of musical theatre, and Annie Clark is talking about the first two Irish potato famines. Not even the Great Famine – the rockstar famine – but the first two. “It was always family lore that we were Irish” she smiles, and cynicism be damned, it’s actually believable when she claims Irish crowds are her favourite.…

  • Happy Death Day

    October 20, 2017 - By 

    Happy Death Day is a minor slasher remix built around repetition, in a genre already prone to it. Theresa, or ‘Tree’ (Jessica Rothe), is a sorority sister bi-atch who wakes up in a stranger’s dorm bed, hungover and late for class. It’s her birthday, the same as her late mother’s, and she’s in a bad mood, ignoring her Dad’s persistent calls and carrying on with a married professor. She seems to have been in a bad mood for a while. Late that night she gets cornered in a dark underpass on campus by a creep in a buck-toothed baby mask…

  • Album Review: Bully – Losing

    October 19, 2017 - By 

    There are some voices that leave words somewhat redundant. Those special chords that can conjure inordinate amounts with so little. In spite of its deliberately anarchic and amateurish intentions, the punk community has had more than a few. Think of John Lydon’s instantly recognisable sneer, H.R.’s reggae inflections or Corin Tucker’s earth-shattering roar. There is a real magic to them, so every time you find one that even approaches their majesty, it should be a call for celebration. Bully’s Alicia Bognanno has one of those voices: One of those voices that demands your attention and instantly embeds itself in your…

  • Album Review: And So I Watch You From Afar – The Endless Shimmering

    October 19, 2017 - By 

    As they embark on a vast European tour in support of their fifth album, The Endless Shimmering, it is nice to make the note that it was as a result of a decade’s worth of extensive, ubiquitous touring and ferocious dedication that North Coast instrumental behemoths And So I Watch You From Afar got to where they are now, holding a place as one the island’s best and widely loved acts. It’s something that saw them play over 300 shows between 2009 and early 2011, venturing on sprawling tours across continents and countries rarely travelled by independent and relatively niche acts –…

  • The Jesus and Mary Chain @ Vicar Street, Dublin

    October 19, 2017 - By 

    It seems that there’s a different vibe in The Jesus & Mary Chain camp since the release of Damage and Joy in March of this year; antagonism replaced with affability and scorn with humour. It’s in and around six months ago that the band visited The Academy with their first studio album in almost twenty years fresh off the presses, and tellingly on that outing it was Psychocandy material that made up the bulk of the setlist. Not so in Vicar Street – their seminal debut rears its head, but tonight’s is a much more rounded selection and the band…

  • Dishonored: Death of the Outsider (Bethesda, Multiformat)

    October 17, 2017 - By 

    Nobody should need a second invitation to return to Karnaca, the vividly realised fictional world where much of the action in Dishonored 2 takes place. With its disparate influences of European architecture, Steampunk machinery, Victorian science fiction, few videogame locations are quite as appealing. So, it is with no small amount of joy that we gladly accept a return ticket to this very destination, courtesy of the wizards at Arkane Studios. In Death Of The Outsider, the gamer does not play as royal guard and assassin Corvo Attano but as Billie Lurk, a badass cross between a Final Fantasy heroine and a T-1000: her mechanical…

  • St. Vincent – MASSEDUCTION

    October 15, 2017 - By 

    You do wonder how hard Annie Clark, AKA St. Vincent, would have to fall before we stop paying attention to her. In the ten years since her first LP, she’s proven herself to undeniably be one of the best guitarists working today, outmatched David Byrne on their wonderful Love This Giant collaboration and consistently provides a formidable live show to boot. Add to this a run of stellar releases and you’ve got a very rare and special thing on your hands that it’s hard to imagine life without anymore: an artist who can consistently surprise you and yet never let you…

  • The Snowman

    October 13, 2017 - By 

    The Snowman is one of those films that has surefire hit written all over it. Tomas Alfredson (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) in the director’s chair, screenwriters with some great films under their belts and a cast that includes the ultra-talented Michael Fassbender (Hunger), Charlotte Gainsborg (Nymphomaniac), J.K Simmons (Whiplash) and Val Kilmer (Heat). So how in Lord’s name this film turns out to be such an absurd, at times hilarious, howler is absolutely baffling. Based on the bestselling book by Jo Nesbo, The Snowman tells the story of a woman who mysteriously disappears on the first night snowfall. The case…

  • Uncharted: The Lost Legacy (Sony, PS4)

    October 13, 2017 - By 

    Not many development houses can boast the same consistent track record as the one trail-blazed by Naughty Dog. The Santa Monica company may not have many intellectual properties to their name but when those franchises include Crash Bandicoot, Uncharted and The Last Of Us, they can afford to be choosy. Each of these releases is markedly a team production, the result of many hours of designers, writers, voice artists, illustrators and coders collaborating to make the best game that they could possibly make. Also, unlike so many rivals who exploit their respective fanbases through drip-feeding perfunctory add-ons or usurious micro-transactions, Naughty Dog expansions appear…

  • Cuphead (Microsoft, PC / XBO)

    October 12, 2017 - By 

    To paraphrase Bill Murray’s character in Ghostbusters, here’s something you don’t see everyday: a side-scrolling shoot-‘em-up presented in the lovingly hand-drawn visual style of 1930s Max Fleischer cartoons. An unhinged fever dream in which Betty Boop is reimagined as a vindictive mermaid with an octopus sitting on top of her baby doll head, frogs in boxing gloves duke it out in a riverboat speakeasy to the manic strains of a hopped-up jazz soundtrack, and a sambaing screen-sized flower pelts its enemies with explosive carrots. This is just a taster – an amuse-bouche, if you will – of the consistently inventive and…