• The National – Sleep Well Beast

    September 8, 2017 - By 

    After a four year period rich in collaborations, side-projects and production work, the build-up to this, The National‘s seventh album was a carefully crafted and ubiquitous one. Teaser clips hinted the release of its first single, ‘The System Only Dreams In Total Darkness’ and a blue-coloured, minimal take on the album’s cover art popped up in different cities across the globe. What is interesting is how this bold, outward looking campaign stands in a sharp contrast to the songs themselves. Here we find album that at its core is an intimate reflection on failing relationships both personal and universal, one that confronts…

  • The Farthest

    September 7, 2017 - By 

    Whether or not space exploration is your thing, The Farthest is an essential documentary that tells the amazing story of the Voyager mission that was launched in August 1977, with the aim of exploring the outer regions of our solar system and beyond. But what is every bit as interesting as the scientific aspect of the mission is the gold vinyl cargo containing various messages and media – even encoded pictures – from earth for any would-be extraterrestrials that might come into contact with the two space crafts. An interstellar message in a bottle, you might say. Director Emer Reynolds…

  • Eh Joe @ Samuel Beckett Happy Days Festival

    September 7, 2017 - By 

    One of the most satisfying aspects of the Happy Days Enniskillen International Beckett Festival has been its embrace of Beckett in all his diversity – from his emblematic plays to short dramatic works, poetry, and performances written specifically for radio and television. Eh Joe, Beckett’s first play for television, was written for Jack MacGowaran in 1965, though the version on the big screen in Enniskillen’s Ardhowen Theatre comes from a 1986 adaptation by Director Alan Gilsenan, starring Tom Hickey and Siobhan McKenna (as the Woman’s voice). The stark opening scene sees Joe, a middle-aged man in worn, soiled clothes, sat…

  • It

    September 6, 2017 - By 

    Right on schedule, it’s 27 years later and we’re back in Derry. It was inevitable that Stephen King’s It, immortalised by Tommy Lee Wallace and Lawrence D. Cohen’s TV movie and Tim Curry’s childhood-scarring circus fiend, would get drawn into the Hollywood remake machine, even if the story’s theme of inter-generational recurrence does at least provide a meta-logic. The first half of Warner Bros’ two-parter, Mama director Andy Muschietti has been tasked with introducing a new generation to King’s Losers Club and the shape-shifting clown that’s buttering them up with sweet, tasty fear. And fair enough: for younger horror fans,…

  • Máirtín O’Connor, Cathal Hayden, Garry O’Briain & ConTempo Quartet @ The Ulster Museum

    September 6, 2017 - By 

    The metaphoric symbolism of traditional musicians performing inside a museum wasn’t lost on button accordionist Máirtín O’Connor, fiddler Cathal Hayden and bouzouki player Garry O’Briain. “Someone will put a friggin’ glass case over us – fossils of folk,” quips O’Connor, the former De Danana and Boys of the Lough alumnus, to much laughter. “We’ll sit here for the rest of our days.” In such an unlikely event, the Ulster Museum would be exhibiting the wrong musicians, for despite deep roots in Irish folk music, O’Connor, Hayden and O’Briain have, over the course of forty plus years, embraced all manner of…

  • Dr Kathryn White: ‘Teaching’ Beckett @ Samuel Beckett Happy Days Festival

    September 6, 2017 - By 

    Can we teach Samuel Beckett, or is the process more about simply exposing people to The Nobel Prize-winning author and letting his words work their magic on the individual in highly personal ways? This is the main theme of the introductory talk in the Town Hall at the Happy Days Enniskillen International Beckett Festival by Dr. Kathryn White, Lecturer in English in the School of Arts and Humanities at Ulster University. Yes, Beckett is back in Enniskillen after a gap year in 2016, during which the festival successfully upped sticks to Paris. Sagely rebranded as part of the brand spanking…

  • Susanne Sundfør – Music for People in Trouble

    September 6, 2017 - By 

    Not to be that guy, but *ahem* as Confucius once said: Real knowledge is to learn the extent of one’s ignorance. Now, without trying to send readers running for the hills with a review rife with personal enlightenment and pretentious philosophical opening statements, it’d be hard to deny that Susanne Sundfør’s latest album, Music for People in Trouble initially appealed as a sitting duck for my worrisome self and an overhanging £5.20 library fine for a book I never once picked up. This review was drafted to open with a breezy, whimsical quip about Sundfør’s medicinal and spirit-cleansing qualities and the…

  • American Football @ Button Factory, Dublin

    September 7, 2017 - By 

    It’s unlikely that you’re ever going to find a crowd as earnest as the gentle gang of 20-something year olds that bundle into The Button Factory for emo heroes, American Football. It’s been a long time coming but the Illinois band are finally making their Irish debut 20 years after their humble beginnings and emotions are running high among the expectant audience. The first thing to notice about American Football is that, despite how few shows they’ve actually played over the last two decades, you’d be hard pushed to find a band more technically accurate. Each song sounds identical to…

  • Hercules & Love Affair – Omnion

    September 4, 2017 - By 

      In 2008, when Andy Butler formed Hercules & Love Affair and released breakthrough single ‘Blind’ –featuring Anohni – into the world there was a fear from DFA Records that the track had the potential to be a one-hit wonder of sorts. Quite the contrary, the critically acclaimed track shone a light on Butler’s project which has now, nearly ten years later, released its fourth studio outing Omnion. Since its inception, Hercules & Love Affair has grown to be a more collaborative effort, combining the intensity and and elegance of Butler’s production with a word-class cast of featured artists, including…

  • LCD Soundsystem – American Dream

    September 4, 2017 - By 

    After putting a metaphorical bullet in the project’s jaded head five years ago, James Murphy found himself with plenty of time to kill in a post-LCD Soundsystem world. He went back to producing music, and found he was still good at that. He became something of a wine and coffee connoisseur, and found he was good at that too. But like many retirees he began to feel a void. And so an awkwardness was born — not unusual for Murphy — which left him with something of a conundrum: do you reform the band you supposedly buried forever and risk…