• Iron & Wine – Beast Epic

    August 24, 2017 - By 

    Hot on the heels of last year’s collaborative record with Jesca Hoop – Love Letter for Fire – Sam Beam returns to the Iron & Wine moniker with Beast Epic – eleven comparatively back-to-basics folk songs. Iron & Wine’s three-album run of The Shepherd’s Dog, Kiss Each Other Clean, and Ghost on Ghost gradually channelled Beam’s musical ambition into more florid arrangements while pulling his songcraft into the middle of the road. The same delicate turns of phrase were still present, but crowded out by florid flutes and saxophones. Recorded in Wilco’s Loft studio, Beast Epic marks a return to…

  • Final Portrait

    August 23, 2017 - By 

    Final Portrait is actor Stanley Tucci’s fourth film as writer-director and shares with Big Night, his 1996 gastro-drama debut, an interest in artisans and their obsessions; though in comparison, it’s an amuse-bouche. Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti, living in 60s Paris, explains the changes in portraiture philosophy to James Lord, a young American fan and writer who is sitting for one of his own. Portraits used to be finished articles, a frizzle-topped Geoffrey Rush explains, because the subject needed a likeness and a double; the advent of photography has erased that. His portraits are, he admits, essentially unfinished; laboured and inspired…

  • Grizzly Bear – Painted Ruins

    August 23, 2017 - By 

    Grizzly Bear are a band of individuals and this has never been as true as it is on their latest record Painted Ruins. In the five years since Shields, the once Brooklyn-based band have scattered across the east and west coasts slowly reconvening to create new music. These years have perhaps been the most formative in the band’s tenure as vocalist Ed Droste describes, “life happened”. Marriage, kids, divorce and everything in between has transformed the four indie rockers into adults, each unique in their experience of the world. And it’s with this experience that the band approach Painted Ruins.…

  • Soccer Mommy – Collection

    August 23, 2017 - By 

    In her debut album to be released through Fat Possum, Sophie Allison’s Soccer Mommy brings a new lease of life to previously released tracks, along with introducing a promising new era with two new ones. In recent years, Allison has become renowned for her lo-fi bedroom recordings, earning her quite the following on Bandcamp. Previous EPs, Songs From My Bedroom and Songs for the Recently Sad were the proud product of a simple TASCAM mic and Garageband set-up, giving her music its trademark, serene vocals and intimate charm as she shared her thoughts on young love, relationships and, more recently,…

  • Holly Macve w/ Alana Henderson @ Studio 1A, Bangor

    August 23, 2017 - By 

    Far beyond providing mere entertainment, a festival has the capacity to animate everyday spaces and nudge people to perhaps see their habitual surroundings in a new light. Now in its fifth year, Open House Festival has brought Bangor’s spaces – small and large, public and private, mundane and magical – to life, via the arts in their broadest possible spectrum. The transformative nature of Open House Festival is evident in the concert of Holly Macve, the first concert held in the century-long history of the former The Good Templar Hall, re-baptized Studio 1A in April 2017, after extensive renovations and…

  • Kesha – Rainbow

    August 21, 2017 - By 

    We’ve still got another five months to go until the year’s end, there is a certainly a clear frontrunner for the most pleasant surprise of the last 12 months. Do you remember a nearly a decade ago when the phrase “wake up in the morning feeling like P Diddy” entered our cultural milieu? Ke$ha managed to represent an alternative side to female empowerment while also being completely unbearable. Honestly, it’s been eight years and I still can’t understand the actual appeal of songs such as ‘Blah Blah Blah’ or ‘Your Love Is My Drug’. After the initial spark and a…

  • The Districts – Popular Manipulations

    August 21, 2017 - By 

    Since their self-released debut made a critical splash and got the then high-school band signed to Fat Possum, The Districts have seemed to belong to a different age: the Pennsylvania group’s penchant for plaid shirts and moody guitar theatrics evoked the likes of Pearl Jam and even Crazy Horse, while singer Rob Grote’s vocals recalled the early 2000s indie of Wolf Parade, Arcade Fire and My Morning Jacket. A Flourish And A Spoil, their sophomore effort, was a minor triumph which found Grote singing tales of small town heartbreak over garagy riffs that The Replacements would be proud of. Popular…

  • Dispossession: The Great Social Housing Swindle

    August 18, 2017 - By 

    In 2015’s Sleaford Mods: Invisible Britain, film-maker Paul Sng used the Nottingham duo to tell a story about British working class discontent in the age of austerity. His new film, Dispossession: The Great Housing Swindle, takes a longer historical perspective, aiming to examine the failures and dysfunctions of modern British housing. As Maxine Peak’s narration outlines, post-war liberalism championed the country’s new council estates as fulfillments of a democratic promise, ambitious concrete guarantors of secure and dignified shelter. How, the documentary asks, did we get to the present moment, when the term ‘council estate’ is mouthed with a sneer? How…

  • Everything, Everything

    August 18, 2017 - By 

    The heroine of young-adult romance Everything, Everything, adapted from Nicola Yoon’s novel of the same name, lives in a bubble. Thanks to a complicated autoimmune condition, Maddie (Amandla Stenberg) is vulnerable to the common bacteria bugs of everyday life. For Maddie’s own protection, her mother, a doctor and her only living family, keeps her inside their specially designed, expensive-looking, air-sealed house. After she got sick as an infant, she’s never ventured outside the home. So she stays inside, reading books and blogs about them on her nice Mac, while dreaming of a life outside of the see-through walls. In concept,…