• Sløtface – Try Not To Freak Out

    September 18, 2017 - By 

    A name like Sløtface tends to be a bit of a giveaway that you might be trying too hard. If you want a title like that, you best have the chops to move beyond it. Fortunately for the Norwegian four-piece, they’ve certainly got excellent cuts in their repertoire. Having made a splash last year with their previous EP, Empire Records, the pop-punksters have set the stage for their,  surprisingly solid, debut, Try Not To Freak Out. Taking all the best bits from the ilk of Green Day and Blink-182, the album works because it is unabashedly youthful. This is a…

  • Deerhoof – Mountain Moves

    September 15, 2017 - By 

    Mountain Moves is the 14th album in 23 years from Bay Area art-rock stalwarts Deerhoof. Though the band have changed labels, styles and members over the years, they have always retained their singular madcap approach to writing and recording music. They’ve been a stable four piece since Ed Rodriguez joined on guitar before the recording of 2008’s Offend Maggie and have been releasing an album roughly every two years since then. At times this work rate seems to have flattened the quality of the releases, never quite reaching the heights of 2003’s Apple O or 2005’s The Runners Four but always retaining a certain consistency. During this time they’ve…

  • Zola Jesus – Okovi

    September 15, 2017 - By 

    To aid in writing and recording her fifth album, Nika Roza Danilova – better known as Zola Jesus –returned to the sparse landscape of her childhood in Wisconsin. In turn, the woodland environment itself contributed greatly to the inception Okovi and the soundscapes that pervade it. As a body of work, Okovi is unsettling, unpredictable and conjures the illusion of being lost in uncharted terrain populated by deafening drum machines, sinister synths and, of course, her incredibly powerful vocals. It has been three years since Zola Jesus released new material. The interim facilitated a brief period of collaborating with Dean Hurley – David Lynch’s primary sound designer who recently shared a…

  • Quad @ Happy Days Samuel Beckett Festival

    September 13, 2017 - By 

    “Imagine you have no objects, well, all I can do with no objects is pick up none of them.” It sounds like a teasing philosophical line from Waiting for Godot but in fact, it’s part of the logic used by Bristol University mathematician Conor Houghton to explain the inner workings of Samuel Beckett’s 1981 play for television, Quad – Beckett’s only play to be inspired by dance. Houghton’s entertaining lecture in Enniskillen’s Ardhowen Theatre is the prelude to a rare performance of Quad, in a joint production by Pan Pan Theatre and Irish Modern Dance Theatre. Houghton’s lecture, however, begins…

  • From An Abandoned Work @ Happy Days Beckett Festival

    September 13, 2017 - By 

    For all the grim reality associated with much of Samuel Beckett’s work there is also, frequently enough, a silver lining of humour. This duality is perfectly illustrated in From an Abandoned Work, a prose piece from 1954/5 intended as part of novel that never materialized – hence the title. It took new life as a ‘meditation for radio’ and was first broadcast by the BBC in 1957. Here, it is presented in a secret location as a staged reading, something of an experiment by Director Netia Jones, whose production of Stirrings Still featuring Ian McElhinney proved to be one of…

  • Bicep – Bicep

    September 13, 2017 - By 

    As well known in recent years for their 4/4 bangers as their spacey, off-kilter musical segues from the dance floor to the chill-out room, it’s not entirely surprising that Belfast native, London-based duo Bicep have found a home for their eponymous debut LP on Ninja Tune. Historically, the label’s indie ethos has allowed those artists straddling experimental electronica and the left-field to develop a cult following before propelling them into the greater public depth-of-field. What’s interesting here is that Bicep, having already garnered such an intensely outspoken following on home soil in a relatively short space of time (all things considered),…

  • Ryan Adams @ Olympia Theatre, Dublin

    September 13, 2017 - By 

    Walking into the main room of The Olympia Theatre, you would almost feel as if you are on the set of a 1980s Sci-fi movie as enormous Fender guitar amps, stacks of old cathode Ray TVs and stuffed tigers occupy the stage. As the no doubt Neil Young Rust Never Sleeps-inspired props loom over the audience it makes the room feel really small. This cranks up the excitement levels about being in such an intimate setting with Ryan Adams. Karen Elson opens the proceeding this evening. Touring with Adams on the back of her sophomore LP Double Roses, Elson and…

  • Mogwai – Every Country’s Sun

    September 11, 2017 - By 

    With Mogwai’s soundtrack career ever-burgeoning and winning them new plaudits 20 years after the release of their debut, Young Team, you’d forgive them for taking a break from regular studio albums for a while. This soundtrack work has given them a new sense of purpose, and while 2014’s Rave Tapes was their highest charting album to date, it also earned them some of their most lukewarm reviews, the band themselves even conceding that it was somewhat underdeveloped. Not only that, but their 20th anniversary celebrations – consisting of a career spanning retrospective compilation and some of their most truly triumphant live shows ever…

  • Wind River

    September 8, 2017 - By 

    Taylor Sheridan’s America is an exhausted, shrinking land. Land is a recurring theme for Sheridan, the screenwriter behind two of the best neo-Westerns of recent years, Sicario (directed by Denis Villeneuve) and Hell or High Water (directed by David McKenzie), the latter earning him an Academy nomination. Who owns the land, who takes it, who protects it and — most importantly — what kind of justice is available on it. Both films used frontier geography to tell stories about endings and broken systems, and the moral compromises of righteous avengers. For Wind River, Sheridan directs too. It’s not his directing debut — he did 2011 horror…

  • Mount Kimbie – Love What Survives

    September 8, 2017 - By 

    It would be a hard push to find an electronic act in 2017 as dynamic and ever changing as Mount Kimbie. The London duo came to prominence through their perfecting of the highly popularised post-dubstep sound on their 2010 debut Crooks & Lovers. Further acclaim came then with their sophomore effort Cold Spring Fault Less Youth. Having teased listeners with collaborative singles featuring James Blake and King Krule over the last few months, album number three Love What Survives lands with now with a considerable hype wrapped around it, leaving us itching to discover whether the pair have succeeded in evolving with the indie-electronic…