• The Sad and Beautiful World of Sparklehorse @ The MAC, Belfast

    April 10, 2017 - By 

    Few events in Belfast are likely to be as emotionally charged as this evening’s tribute to Sparklehorse. Anyone familiar with the band’s output -and it immediately transpires that not one soul in tonight’s intimate gathering does not hold every beat, note and lyric in their hearts – will already know that frontman Mark Linkous took his own life seven years ago. That fact, tragically, is unavoidable, and there is certainly no avoiding the spectral shadow that such an unnecessary and painful loss casts over the entirety of Linkous’ back catalogue. It is impossible to listen to his music without feeling…

  • Future Islands – The Far Field

    April 10, 2017 - By 

    By 2014, the days of a hard-working band catching their break on late night TV were supposed to be over, at least until Future Islands proved everyone wrong. Clever synth-pop number ‘Seasons (Waiting on You)’ was elevated so much by frontman Samuel T Herring’s performance on David Letterman that they were catapulted onto another level. His hip swaying, chest beating, growling run through the song was almost comically sincere, downright bizarre, and completely captivating. It soon went viral, inspiring GIFs and blog posts aplenty. It even collected prestigious ‘Song of the Year’ gongs from Pitchfork, NME, Spin and others, while…

  • BFF17: Bad Day For The Cut

    April 10, 2017 - By 

    Closing the Belfast Film Festival with a shotgun blast worth of intense visceral thrills, Chris Baugh’s directorial debut is a revenge thriller with the same assured deadly aim of its lead character. Nigel O’Neill owns the screen as the farmer Donal, a quiet man content to live a small life with his mother. But when she’s murdered in a robbery gone wrong Donal sets out to the big city of Belfast in search of her killers. But both the search and the truth prove to be much more complicated than he could have ever foreseen. Screening to awed crowds at…

  • The Jesus and Mary Chain @ The Academy, Dublin

    April 10, 2017 - By 

    Jim and William Reid seem to be getting on just fine these days. You can tell from the minimal interaction and eye contact onstage when the notoriously fractious brothers get The Jesus & Mary Chain tours off the ground. In 2014 the band played a warm-up show in Vicar Street – a kind of dress rehearsal of sorts for their then-imminent Psychocandy tour. It was a ramshackle event from start to finish – and all the more exciting for it – where it seemed the band may not have lasted to the end of the set never mind the beginning…

  • BFF17: Catfight

    April 11, 2017 - By 

    Rage, maternal loss and the sting of humiliation are accelerants in the bloodstream in Catfight, Onur Tukel’s face-thumping black comedy and satire on the unreality of violence. The match is lit when estranged college chums Veronica (Grey’s Anatomy‘s Sandra Oh) and Ashley (Anne Heche) bump into eachother at a fancy Manhattan party for the first time in years. In this alternate America (very near future?), the country is eyeing up another war in the Middle East, and Veronica and her husband, who runs a debris clean-up company, are in for a big payday if they land a juicy Pentagon contact.…

  • Pharmakon – Contact

    April 7, 2017 - By 

    Noise music mostly operates within the sphere of the modern avant-garde, but can be a deeply alienating experience for many; not only because of its tendency to be anti-everything – structure, melody, basic auditory comprehension – but because of its potential to generate actual discomfort in listeners. Despite this, its compositional strategies can be almost decadent in execution – when Lou Reed wanted to release his 1975 double album Metal Machine Music (mostly impenetrable but considered by many to be a pioneering Noise work), he wanted to release it on RCA’s classical arm, Red Seal. Reed, along with many proponents…

  • BFF17: All This Panic

    April 6, 2017 - By 

    Last year the Belfast Film Festival opened with Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s Mustang, a modern Turkish fairytale about a group of sisters dealing with the challenges of puberty in a small, conservative seaside village. This time around, up the road from the buzz of the Julian Barratt’s delirious Mindhorn, opening night gave us another intimately observed film about a coterie of young girls on the cusp of adulthood. The subjects of All This Panic, directed and shot by Jenny Gage and her cinematographer partner Thomas Betterton, are not subject to the same level of lock-and-key control and captivity, the six girls…

  • Elle

    April 3, 2017 - By 

    It’s not very often that a film has me strangely anticipating which social taboo is going to be launched out of the window with amazing indifference next. Yet Elle manages to achieve this with an astoundingly entertaining edge that verges on the absurd when it’s not shocking you with its core theme of sexual assault. But all of this is unsurprising when you know that Elle is made by notorious Dutch director Paul Verhoeven (Robocop), who is at his controversial and stylistically provocative best, and stars the great Isabelle Huppert, a fearless, steely and ridiculously talented actress at the top…

  • BFF17: Mad To Be Normal

    April 3, 2017 - By 

    There is a scene in Robert Mullan’s Mad To Be Normal, a biopic of the Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing (played by David Tennant), in which the controversial figure is being interviewed on American radio during one of his promotional cross-Atlantic trips. While the room’s young, rapt audience look on, the broadcaster introduces Laing with a string of hyperbolic accolades, calling him an “acid Marxist” and, outrageously, a “white Martin Luther King”, whose revolutionary approach to treatment has enamoured the 60s counter-cultural spirit, and guaranteed him a spot on every dorm room bookcase in the United States. Eager for a…

  • Wire – Silver/Lead

    April 3, 2017 - By 

    Wire have always been a band more interested in looking forward than back. On returning from their first hiatus in 1985 they famously hired a Wire covers band, The Ex Lion Tamers, as their support act so they could be freed up to focus exclusively on new material. So it seems entirely appropriate that they would celebrate the 40th anniversary of their debut performance with another new album, their fifteenth. Although still most celebrated for their initial trio of envelope-pushing albums between 1977 and 1979 – the frantic art-punk of Pink Flag, the more effects-laden post-punk of Chairs Missing and…