Search Results for: AAA

  • Premiere: Myles Manley – Aaa Episode 1: I Took on America and Won

    Were it not for, y’know, the global pandemic laying waste to any semblance of normalcy in our lives, Myles Manley would be setting off on a tour next month. Ahead of those dates, the Dublin artist (who, for our money, is one of the most singular songwriting voices in the country) was also set to release a new music video series. While the planned live dates can’t feasibly go ahead, Manley is – thankfully – still releasing the video series, collectively called Aaa. A masterfully singular triptych, directed by the likes of Bob Gallagher and others, the series encapsulates precisely what has long set Manley apart as…

  • Seoda Shows 7th Birthday Line-Up Announced

    A few months on from pulling out all the stops for their 2019 summer party, Seoda Shows have revealed the stellar line-up for their 7th Birthday show next month. Taking place at Limerick’s Kasbah Social Club on Saturday, February 22nd, the Mary Wallopers and Post Punk Podge & The Technohippies line-up against headliners, Limerick four-piece PowPig (pictured). Admission is ridiculously affordable – a mere €10 – and doors are at 9pm.

  • Heavy Pop: An Interview with THVS

    Ahead of the release of their eagerly-anticipated debut album in Belfast’s Voodoo on October 12, we catch up with THVS, a Belfast-based three-piece whose emphatic “heavy pop” craft is on the very cusp of breaking through. THVS straddle a line between heavy sounds and pop music sensibility. How has the project evolved from your previous incarnations? Michael: I think that very part of it in and of itself is the evolution, the pop sensibility. In any previous band I’ve been in that was very much balked at so I think that step has lead us to a wider sound. Who…

  • Mixtape Preview: Madonna – Truth or Dare @ Oh Yeah Music Centre

    Let’s face it: honorific nicknames in popular music don’t come any more clear-cut than Madonna and the Queen of Pop. The singer, songwriter, businesswoman, actress, producer, dancer, director, author and humanitarian born Madonna Louise Ciccone in 1958 has ceaselessly shapeshifted and fearlessly reinvented like no other. Her musical output is but half the story. Naturally, such a towering legacy has attracted its fair share of filmed exposés and feature-length accounts over the years. None, however, even flirt with the sheer watchability of Alek Keshishian’s 1991 film Madonna: Truth or Dare (or In Bed with Madonna outside of North America). Filmed…

  • Days Gone (Sony, PS4)

    If you follow videogames media, you will no doubt already be aware of the polarised reception to Sony’s latest AAA exclusive title, Days Gone. Those in the positive camp have praised the intense atmosphere of this open world meets survival horror adventure while naysayers have criticised a release that contains more bugs than the Oval Office. Both sides of the debate have been particularly rabid in either their praise or their lambasting and, as is often the case, the truth resides somewhere in the middle. While there is much to enjoy about Days Gone, that enjoyment is all too often hamstrung by frustration, repetition…

  • Stream New Irish Grassroots Compilation: Live @ Fennor Lane

    Tucked away amongst castle ruins and relics of history on the outskirts of Slane town, Mark Carolan runs the intimate Fennor Lane Studios. Like the encouraging number of grassroots Irish compilations and splits that have graced our Bandcamp accounts in recent times to act as connective tissue between previously-disparate scenes, Live at Fennor Lane was made with the same philosophy of shared elevation in mind, as Mark tells us: “The idea behind this album was simply to create a record worth listening to, and the live method of recording gives a characterful and natural feel to it. I hope we can bring new music to all the followers of each band involved in this project and help everyone to expand their audience. Aaaand it was great craic making it!” Featuring several of our favourite bands in the land, each more idiosyncratic than the last, contributions range from Slouch‘s submerged psychogroove, to the…

  • 2018 in Film: 35 Highlights of The Year

    To mark the end of 2018, we’ve sent our film writers rummaging through their scrapbooks for the year’s highlights. Here are the moments, scenes, performances and film-making achievements that we just couldn’t shake. 1. The ballroom scene in The Square In The Square, Ruben Östlund sets about unpicking the false civility of the modern urban beta male (Cales Bang’s museum director) with slow precision. But then, about two-thirds of the way through, he sets off a firework, in which a hulking performance artist (Terry Notary) goes full simian during a high society dinner, baboon screeches, smashing crockery and eventually grabbing a woman…

  • Idles – Joy As An Act Of Resistance

    Urgent. Vital. Important. Essential. Interchangeable words that are denoted to music or artists that are deemed to be definite of the mood of the times. Albums and previously unseen and untold stories that break boundaries down, songs that transcend their form, artists whose messages become immortalised. Punk music and its offshoots have their fair share of such acts, but these words’ meanings have become denatured over time. Now, anything even vaguely resembling depth or that is tangentially outspoken is commonly misconstrued as politically charged or timely (sorry, not sorry, Macklemore, Justin Timberlake). Idles, a five-piece Bristol band who navigate the furious simplicity…

  • The Meg

    Is it possible for a film to be not bad enough? Maybe that’s the wrong way to frame it. Shoddiness comes not just in quantity but in flavour: there’s good-bad, bad-bad, no-budget-bad, cheesy-bad, doomed-from-birth-bad. Producing high-yield schlock involves a precise cocktail of badness. The problem with The Meg, which feels like the frazzled product of heatwaved heads, is in its badness ratio: not enough fun-bad, too much boring-bad. The Meg, in which Jason Statham takes on a giant shark with growling one-liners and a steady harpoon arm, goes for two genre tones, and ends up splitting the difference. One is the…

  • Teen Titans Go! To The Movies

    “More jokes!” After D.C. and Warner Bros’ ultra-sombre film debuts left them with box office egg on their faces, the cinematic DCU has been itching, ever gradually, closer to the light, well-received populism of the Marvel house style. Justice League’s most human moment was a Josh Whedon gag; Wonder Woman swung for idealism and fish-out-of-water larks; the trailer for James Wan’s Aquaman suggests a dopey beef-bro underwater odyssey, while Shazam!‘s leans hard on the comedy, and seems to work. The memo’s gone out: the sillier the better. By that metric, Teen Titans Go! To The Movies is D.C.’s best film yet.…