• Paddy Mulcahy – The Words She Said

    March 22, 2017 - By 

    The finest ambient music often finds the artist mining the barriers and plundering the gaps between analogue and digital. Julianna Barwick uses layers and loops to convert her own voice into a universe of sound. Ian William Craig feeds his operatic tones through layers of fuzz to create something quite brilliant and utterly unique. William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops chart the sound of old, decaying tapes, meant to be digitised – quite literally – falling apart as he lets them play out on rotation. The new record from Limerick’s Paddy Mulcahy has something of this feel to it. Mulcahy explores (in…

  • Beauty and the Beast

    March 21, 2017 - By 

    One of the reasons fairy tales work is that they are so obviously not real. Their fantastical, exaggerated qualities help make the horror, weirdness and romantic impossibilities easier to process. And while it wasn’t exactly frightening, Disney’s iconic animated musical Beauty and the Beast, part of the late-80s/early 90s “Disney Renaissance”, had an understanding of how to build Gothic contrast, moreso than even the 18th-century French original, in which the Beast is not Beauty’s jailor but her doting servant. There was a strangeness to Beauty and the Beast‘s obviously warped story; not just the Stockholm Syndrome infatuation, or the intense…

  • Tennis – Yours Conditionally

    March 21, 2017 - By 

    Making sweet sweet music with your significant other can go one of two ways. The chemistry you have as a couple (good or fractious – Rumours, anyone?) can translate effortlessly when improvising with lyrics and arrangements, eventually expanding into solid soundscapes. It’s akin to building a life or home together, it is a gradual journey that unfurls to represent the couple. On the contrary, a musical duo brought together in matrimony can spawn songs that are, at times, uncomfortable to listen to, presenting a sort of audio PDA. Tennis often waver between these scenarios. In the past they have written…

  • Personal Shopper

    March 20, 2017 - By 

    If you are looking for a ghost story with a difference, then writer/director Olivier Assayas’ (Carlos) latest genre-bender Personal Shopper may be just what you are after. The film initially plods along, with Kristen Stewart (Twilight) leading in an odd combination of a haunted house type story and an insight into the world of Parisian socialites and celebrities. But what gives Personal Shopper an edge is how the movie morphs into a gripping suspense/thriller in its latter half, managing to creep me out more than any other horror that I’ve seen in quite some time. Quite the feat! Maureen (Stewart)…

  • Lawrence English – Cruel Optimism

    March 21, 2017 - By 

    I find it difficult to listen to Lawrence English‘s new album, Cruel Optimism. On first play, I thought it was “suitably bleak”. Further attempts sent me into a mini spiral of despair, thoroughly ruining whole days with its depressive claws. I left it for a while, returning to it tentatively in the hope of gaining more understanding. The album’s title comes from a work by Lauren Berlant, in which she posits that modern desires stand in the way of true growth. Whatever my inferences, English writes that the album is a “meditation” on the challenges we face in today’s world,…

  • Kong: Skull Island

    March 20, 2017 - By 

    Like John Goodman’s black ops adventurer whose mania for fantastic beasts and where to find them drives the film, Warner Bros are chasing something big with Kong: Skull Island. Coming with an Avengers Initiative-style post-credit coda and forming a “Monsterverse” (sigh) with Gareth Edwards’ 2014 Godzilla, this new Kong rendition is a reach for a big, stonking franchise to compete with other studios’ similar endeavours. Peter Jackson’s 2005 King Kong leant into the tragic, emotionally grand tradition of old-timey, New York skyline iconography. Whatever you make of Jackson’s film – and reception was mixed – an eager artistic vision shone through. Skull…

  • HAWK – She Knows

    March 20, 2017 - By 

    HAWK are a Berlin-based, grunge-infused indie rock band who, since their formation in 2013 have had a tendency to address social and political issues through their music, all the while blending dark tones with sometimes delicate and sometimes ferocious arrangements and ethereal vocals. The band’s latest release, She Knows, builds upon the foundations laid by last year’s HAWK EP.  ‘Introduction’ starts the EP on the right footing, a largely atmospheric piece that builds into crashing drums, crunching distortion, and powerful vocals.‘Take it Away’ then, the EP’s second track shows the band embracing a newer, heavier sound. Starting delicately and quickly building into…

  • Sorority Noise – You’re Not As ___ As You Think

    March 20, 2017 - By 

    Like it or not, emo music has been revived. Acts like Julien Baker, American Football and Modern Baseball have gained enough scope to evolve and define what emo music is and what it aims to achieve, and while defining what is classed as emo music is an entirely different kettle of fish, it’s fair to say that associating it with long black fringes and pubescent frustrations is something of the past. On You’re not as ____as you think, their third album , Sorority Noise dive into the depths of depression and death and the ways of coping with them, firmly planting…

  • Julien Baker – Sprained Ankle

    March 17, 2017 - By 

    Julien Baker’s debut album Sprained Ankle lures us in with a curiously intimate complexion; it almost feels too intimate to be listened to casually, as if we’re flicking through the most private parts of Baker’s life, gazing in empathetic awe without even introducing ourselves. It’s a one way conversation with stark, personal subject matters such as relationship anxiety, depression, religion and death, and all we can do is listen. Sprained Ankle was originally released in 2015, but is now being reissued on Matador. It’s hard to comprehend that the album is a year and a half old given that nothing…

  • Laura Marling – Semper Femina

    March 15, 2017 - By 

    There’s a criticism that’s hard to make of Semper Femina; despite tracks that are ostensibly about the breadth of human emotion, chronicling love lost, found and thrown away across platonic and romantic partners there’s a flatness of feeling that permeates the majority of its forty-two minute running time. That may be surprising for any fan of Laura Marling, known especially for her sensitive heart and sage like maturity and wisdom, but here on her sixth album it seems she’s almost sleepwalking through a terrain she’s carefully cultivated over the last decade. Let’s be clear, the record doesn’t come across as…