• Tyler, The Creator – Flower Boy

    July 27, 2017 - By 

    Any artist that enjoys strong commercial success in their teens will, to a degree, grow up in public, and this is especially true for Tyler, the Creator. As the de-facto leader of the anarchic rap collective turned media empire Odd Future, he’s been baiting, and duly receiving worldwide media attention for the best part of a decade, both positively for his growing sophistication as a rapper and producer, and negatively for, well, just about everything. Odd Future were truly an exercise in controversy, and while their punk-inspired, stage-diving live shows may have had them banned from New Zealand, it was…

  • Irish Tour: Brian Wilson

    July 27, 2017 - By 

    The downright legendary Brian Wilson and his band live in Galway and Dublin. Words by Steven Rainey and Aoife O’Donoghue, photos by Aaron Corr and Sean McCormack. Festival Big Top, Galway There’s a moment in the 2014 Brian Wilson biopic Love & Mercy where Brian – played by the wonderful Paul Dano – starts playing ‘God Only Knows’ for the first time on the piano. It’s probably one of my favourite scenes. It’s a quiet and poignant moment of the film, and I remember getting chills, awestruck at how such a simple melody was having such a hold on me.…

  • Townlands Carnival 2017

    July 27, 2017 - By 

    Townlands Carnival 2017 rolls up to one of the rainiest days so far this summer but it doesn’t stop the party hardened masses who’ve made their way to Macroom. After the trials and tribulations of Garda checkpoints stopping all incoming public transport, this reviewer is sorely disappointed to miss Gash Collective’s opening showcase at the Subatomic but there are whispers around the festival of an excellent starting performance from these rising stars of the Irish electronic scene. Jamie Behan closes out the Friday night with his faithful brand of techno. Saturday is a brighter and busier affair with the sun…

  • Avey Tare – Eucalyptus

    July 26, 2017 - By 

    Collaboration has typified Avey Tare’s output since the turn of the century – those proto-Animal Collective recordings of Spirit They’re Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished and Danse Manatee, which saw the beginnings of that band’s gradual amalgamation; Pullhair Rubeye with múm’s Kría Brekkan; the more garage-tinged Avey Tare’s Slasher Flicks project. Even Animal Collective, active now for the guts of two decades in some form or other, has always been a mutating thing from album to album, with various permutations of its members dipping in and out indiscriminately. Avey Tare – David Portner to his nearest and dearest – has been…

  • Waxahatchee – Out In The Storm

    July 25, 2017 - By 

    The buzz surrounding Waxahatchee is something else. Ever since 2015’s Ivy Tripp, the project has been generating a ludicrous level of hype. Now, two years later, they deliver Out In The Storm, an album which promises to be a fairly emotionally raw exploration of the dissolution of band leader Katie Crutchfield’s last relationship. On the surface there is a huge amount going for this album. It’s their first release on Superchunk’s Merge Records, a supportive, decently sized label which has given them room to breathe and explore. They’ve got John Agnello behind the desk. He’s a man who recorded and…

  • Cornelius – Mellow Waves

    July 24, 2017 - By 

    Keigo Oyamada (AKA Cornelius) could easily be described as a jack of all trades but certainly not as a master of none. In the 11 years since the release of his last studio album Sensuous, he has been involved in a wide range of projects from working with Yoko Ono and The Yellow Magic Orchestra to scoring music for 2010s Scott Pilgrim vs. The World and the anime series Ghost in the Shell Arise. After a long departure from writing his own music, he was inspired to create something more personal, drawing on the loss of many of his childhood…

  • It Comes At Night

    July 21, 2017 - By 

    It is a wonderful thing when Hollywood actually develops some backbone and throws their weight behind filmmakers like writer/director Trey Edward Shults (Krisha). His latest genre bending horror, It Comes At Night, is incredibly brave filmmaking, as even the title is deceptively chosen – some might call it false advertising. This is an intelligent and tautly crafted horror, with its base set in the dystopian nightmare genre, but there will undoubtedly be detractors who may feel shortchanged by the elusiveness in showing what the ‘It’ fully entails. Set at a time of mass extinction for the human race, Joel Edgerton (The Gift)…

  • Boris – Dear

    July 21, 2017 - By 

    There is a delightful uncertainty associated with a new Boris album. The Japanese three piece have spent twenty-five years keep metal fans on their toes with aplomb. Every new release brings with it a myriad of questions of style, tone and content that makes the pre-release period surprisingly fun. This extends to the first few runs through the record. Each iteration uncovers unexpected turns, subtle slivers of sound folded deeply into the mix and new tapestries of noise that you somehow missed. The only real guarantee that the group offers is that things are going to get exceeding heavy at…

  • Galway Film Fleadh: A Ghost Story

    July 21, 2017 - By 

    The last film David Lowery wrote and directed, 2013’s Southern crime mood piece Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, caught some critical flak for its obvious debts to Terrence Malick’s whispery, wheat-swaying-in-the-sun photography. More than one review noted its promise, but emphasized Lowery’s need to find his own voice. Four years later, after a stint at Disney directing the live-action Pete’s Dragon, Lowery is back in the auteurish game, with a film seemingly designed to answer the charge of unoriginality. Even by A24’s idiosyncratic standards, A Ghost Story is a strange, alienating and singular piece of cinema. To give Lowery his due,…

  • Gang – 925 ‘TIL I DIE

    July 20, 2017 - By 

    For some unknown reason, Britain’s Margate is becoming an unlikely hub of culture. Once famed for its Victorian pier, commodious bathing rooms and Dreamland amusement complex, Margate made for an ideal seaside getaway for middle-class Londoners. Usually, you can read between the lines and translate this to ‘small English coastal town decimated by the introduction of low-cost airlines and package holidays’. But that is not the case. Instead, Margate is one of very few English seaside resorts that has had been regenerated and actually cohabits in the 21st century. The Turner Contemporary Gallery can be found here, as can chic…