• Count Vaseline – Cascade

    April 21, 2017 - By 

    One of the more surprisingly common risky moves in music is trying to ape the Beatles. It’s a losing battle from the get-go. No matter how shit hot you think you are, you’ll never be the celestial beings known as the fab three. You could be Ringo though. With such a high risk of failure and the rewards amounting to damning praise, why bother? The correct reason is that you can use their framework to ease the listener into the right mindset. This is what Count Vaseline has done to great effect on his latest LP, Cascade. The title track…

  • Kendrick Lamar – DAMN.

    April 20, 2017 - By 

    Kendrick Lamar has a lot resting on DAMN. He is, of course, in a “good place” artistically at the moment, to say the least: he’s widely considered the greatest rapper in the game at the minute, off the back of two instant-classic albums and frequently stunning guest verses across various musical landscapes (appearing on songs from jazz bassist Thundercat, mega-producer DJ Khaled and pop-rock also-rans Maroon 5 in the past year). 2015’s To Pimp A Butterfly‘s seismic impact created fans in David Bowie and Barack Obama and enemies in the right-wing press, and found it’s single ‘Alright’ being adopted at Black Lives…

  • Lost Avenue – Best Friends

    April 20, 2017 - By 

    Derry based punk trio Lost Avenue recently unveiled their new EP Best Friends, the latest in a series of small releases that punch well above everything they’ve done before. Something about the release threatens to get lost within itself, however, thrashing violently towards an uncertain conclusion. When listening to Best Friends, it’s hard not to get the impression that the band are aiming for something that is certainly achievable, but they’ve overcooked it, using sharp conversions and sudden alterations to an unnecessarily degree. This is likely due to some combination of self-doubt and the need to appear unique in an industry where…

  • Sniper Elite 4 (Rebellion, Multiformat)

    April 15, 2017 - By 

    Whereas most modern first person shooters are looking to the future for inspiration (notably, the much maligned Call Of Duty: Infinite Warfare), this gleefully violent game instead looks to the past – or at least a ludicrously stylised retelling of the past. In this version of World War II, and in the epitome of Boy’s Own wish fulfilment, it only takes one man to bring down an entire fascist regime. That man is Karl Fairburne, a lantern-jawed Rick Dangerous type who is preternaturally gifted at operating a sniper rifle and amoral enough to use it without losing any sleep. To…

  • Fionn Regan – The Meetings of the Waters

    April 14, 2017 - By 

    Capturing an image that denotes a changing phase in one’s life and making that image resonate can be a laboured and often trite task for an artist. An example: about five years ago at a Bon Iver show in what was then the O2 Arena in Dublin, Justin Vernon made a passing remark about how life’s cyclical nature can be observed in the beginnings and endings of seemingly insignificant things – in his case, tubes of toothpaste. It was a nice thought, but one that perhaps felt too individualised to produce anything more than a shrug of vague acknowledgement from…

  • The Levelling

    May 22, 2017 - By 

    Hope Dickson Leach keeps her aim steady and hits her targets in The Levelling, her first feature and a sturdy, professional piece of grim English countryside realism. Trainee veterinarian Clover (Game of Thrones’ Elle Kendrick) is called back to the family farm when she receives word that her brother Harry, who was just given stewardship over the land, has shot himself with a hunting shotgun. The police have filed it as suicide, but her father Aubrey (Joe Blakemore), insists that it was just a “bloody stupid” accident, a descriptor he seems to apply to almost everything, his manner one of…

  • Happyness – Write In

    April 12, 2017 - By 

    Let us begin with a simple, easy to follow tip. It is seldom a good idea to listen to people who take their grammatical cues from Will Smith Oscar Bait. Might seem like a wise move at first, but therein lies danger. Happyness are a decent old fashioned, fuzzed out indie band, in the American sense of the genre; their style being essentially comprised of many long, drawn out jams that stretch on into the horizon. Speed and brevity are not any kinds of priority. While this has lent to a variety of dreamy, spaced out cuts in the past…

  • Father John Misty – Pure Comedy

    April 12, 2017 - By 

    Josh Tillman is a multi-faceted character. You have to regard him as such when considering his work because what he does as a musician he does so with an elusive persona, an alter ego. There are many angles to consider when deconstructing his songwriting, which can often make for interesting debate with friends and among critics. He conjures a similar reaction to Marmite in that you either love him or loathe him. Nonetheless, he has managed to dispel the disdain his personality ignites by making his music the central element of his existence and by exercising thought provoking content throughout…

  • Horizon Zero Dawn (Sony, PS4)

    April 11, 2017 - By 

    Let’s cut to the chase: Horizon Zero Dawn is fantastic. A rewarding, surprising romp set in a vividly realised open world that grows deeper and more engrossing the more hours that you choose to pour into it. Sure, at first it feels like a greatest hits compilation of bits culled from other, equally successful games. You can hunt wildlife and liberate bandit camps like in Far Cry, scale constructions and kill people from above or below as in Assassin’s Creed, and the expansive, varied game world has the depth and breadth of Skyrim. None of these are negative comparisons, of…

  • BFF17: Waiting For You

    April 11, 2017 - By 

    Waiting For You is a passive title for a passive sort of film. NI actor Colin Morgan (the titular warlock in BBC’s weekend fantasy Merlin) makes his feature lead debut as a grieving lad investigating his late father’s secrets in the first film from Charles Garrad, production designer turned director. Garrad’s design background is obvious in the sunny chateaux aesthetics, but more than anything Waiting gives the impression of a film built mood-first, with a screenplay from Garrad and Hugh Stoddart that’s much too fuzzy around the edges. Paul (Morgan) is an architecture uni dropout working in a book store…