• Playlist: Choice Music Prize 2016

    March 3, 2016 - By 

    With The Gloaming proving well-deserved victors last time round, tonight’s Choice Music Prize is – as has almost always been the case with the award – an extremely tough one to call. Selected by an Irish industry judging panel, the following albums – perfectly diverse in score and vision – will all compete to walk away with the prize at Vicar Street later today. Girl Band – Holding Hands with Jamie (Rough Trade) HamsandwicH – Stories From The Surface (Route 109A Records) Gavin James – Bitter Pill (Warner Music Ireland) Jape – This Chemical Sea (Faction Records) Le Galaxie – Le Club (Universal Music…

  • Bookmark: Frankie Gaffney

    March 2, 2016 - By 

    In this installment of Bookmark, we chat to Dublin author Frankie Gaffney about the books that have made the biggest impression on his life thus far. Photos by Pedro Giaquinto. I’ve split my list into fiction and non-fiction. Non-fiction tends to get neglected, but it influences my writing every bit as much as fiction. Non-Fiction A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson This book gently and briefly explains what’s currently known about the universe: the very basics of the cosmos, our planet, and the life that inhabits it. For some reason they don’t really teach you the broad…

  • Track Record: Anderson

    March 2, 2016 - By 

    In this installment of Track Record, we head over to the home studio of Dublin based singer songwriter Anderson, while he selects the records which have made a huge impact on his life from The Beatles to Joni Mitchell. Photos by Tara Thomas. The Beatles – Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band This record is redolent of my childhood, it has been a sturdy vessel for so many of my earliest and happiest memories. As a musician the way I listen to records has changed and become much more analytical, listening to this record now only enhances my regard for…

  • And So I Watch You From Afar in Japan

    February 29, 2016 - By 

    And So I Watch You From Afar drummer Chris Wee reports from their recent stint in the Nihon lights of the Far East. With paper cup of coffee in hand I sat, knees wedged toward my chest in the first passenger row of our boxy Hiace van, the intrepid road warrior of many an Asian motorway. The whole thing shook and bumped at every contour of the Tomei Expressway connecting our last city of Nagoya to Tokyo. There are not too many certainties in life, but in terms of ASIWYFA, whether it was the 1000mile stretch from Edmonton to Salt…

  • Monday Mixtape: Steven Agnew

    February 29, 2016 - By 

    Following on from his two-part TTA interview, Green Party of Northern Ireland leader Steven Agnew selects and talks about some of his all-time favourite songs, featuring Yo La Tengo, Hot Snakes, Neutral Milk Hotel and Slint. Go here and here for Stevie Lennox’s interview with Agnew. “I’m one of those people who laments technology. I miss making mixtapes. I wouldn’t even have the equipment to make or play it on anymore, but I was a big fan. High Fidelity was always one of my favourite books – the rules of making mixtapes. I’ve never sat down to think about it,…

  • Rave New World (26/02)

    February 26, 2016 - By 

    Antoin’s away in Berlin, so here Aidan Hanratty returns for his latest look at the very best electronic gigs, tracks and mixes of the week. Gigs Move D & Shanti Celeste at Opium Rooms, Dublin Friday 26 February  Craig David is sold out, so I guess this will have to do. The ageless Move D continues to thrive, most recently showcasing his considerable talents alongside Jordan GCZ on their Live In Seattle album for Further Records. A relative newcomer then by comparison, Shanti Celeste has moved from under-the-radar releases on Brstl and Idle Hands to a killer cut with Funkineven and…

  • Cinema 16 For ’16: Secret In Their Eyes

    February 25, 2016 - By 

    An alternative guide to this year’s cinematic offerings, we trawl through the dilapidated rows of seats in the back alley ‘art’ cinemas and crumbling picture palaces so you don’t have to; rescuing gummy Venus de Milos from sticky crevices and fishing midget gems out of cold cups of tea. Diaries at the ready cinephiles. ‘Hollywood remake’ is a somewhat tainted term, for every The Birdcage there’s an Old Boy. But in this much maligned time of endless sequels and franchises that reboot like a skipping record, isn’t it better to take a brilliant foreign film and try to reimagine it…

  • New Pope’s Guide To Galway #2: General Election 2016

    February 24, 2016 - By 

    Ah Galway, city of tribes. Hipsters, students, buskers, shams, bogmen, crusties, drunks, Spanish, gaeilgeoirs, nordies, immigrants, the homeless: Galway has them all! And, for the most part, we all live in ignorant tolerance of one another. But who is to represent such a diverse and bohemian jumble of dole-monkeys? Here is my guide to the upcoming election in the constituency of Galway West. I am, of course, going to leave out Fine Gael, Fianna Fail and Labour because they are all shitehawks. Don’t believe a word from any of them. They are liars. Definitely do not vote for them, I’m…

  • Cinema 16 For 16: Bone Tomahawk

    February 23, 2016 - By 

    An alternative guide to this year’s cinematic offerings, we trawl through the dilapidated rows of seats in the back alley ‘art’ cinemas and crumbling picture palaces so you don’t have to; rescuing gummy Venus de Milos from sticky crevices and fishing midget gems out of cold cups of tea. Diaries at the ready cinephiles. After a fallow period of two movies in eight years, Kurt Russell returns to the silver screen in a second western- this one with a liberal dose of horror- in two months with Bone Tomahawk, the first film from writer-director, S. Craig Zahler. While The Hateful…

  • Bookmark: Kevin Curran

    February 23, 2016 - By 

    In this installment of Bookmark, Dublin author Kevin Curran selects and talks about some of his favourite novels, featuring the likes of Saul Bellow, Don DeLillo and F Scott Fitzgerald. Curran has just recently published his second novel Citizens. Photos by Pedro Giaquinto. James Kelman  – A Disaffection A brilliant, if under-appreciated writer brings us a ground-breaking use of vernacular language that would later be made famous by Irvine Welsh. Not as brash as Welsh, but more gritty and stylistically accomplished, A Disaffection is a powerful book about twenty-something despair and isolation in a world that doesn’t care. Saul Bellow –…