The Sigla Blog

I’m sure it’s got nothing to do with the fact that I’m another year older today, but personally, birthdays have always come with a certain amount of existential angst and a big mortality slap in the face. For some people this is a “what am I doing with my life?” or “I’m racking up […]

Sufjan Stevens
Come on Feel The Illnoise *****
Albums, unless they’re compilations or anthologies (see this month’s Luke Haines review), generally come along, nicely packaged with an average of 12-15 tracks. Sufjan Steven’s ‘Come on Feel The Illnoise’ has no truck with such pithiness. His latest album boasts 22 songs and is the second instalment in […]

With a title as provocative, and contradictory, as Rape: A Love Story, Joyce Carol Oates sets herself a difficult task. How do you write about the experience of rape, and how, in any sense, can it be about love? It’s worth pointing out that although the novel is fiction, for thousands of women there will […]

The Mercury Prize nominees for this year have been announced and there are well-deserved inclusions and the customary “what the hell are they doing on there?” choices. Top of the latter list is Coldplay’s ‘X&Y’. The album should simply have been called ‘Y?’. This is one of the most uninspired, predictable, U2-lite*, mediocre records […]

Ok, if you’re a fan of the Harry Potter books, you’re obviously all a-quiver at the thought of bookshops opening at midnight to sell the new book to Potter-starved fans (is HP book crack?) tonight.

Me? I’m a book fan and I couldn’t care less. I have no interest in the Potter books and the hype […]

Wei Hui’s frank account of Chinese youth, sexuality and a love of popular culture ensured it was banned in her native China. She returns, unrepentant as ever with a follow-up, ‘Marrying Buddha’ and spoke to Sinéad Gleeson on a recent visit to Dublin.
Wei Hui InterviewFor most writers, the first words they commit to a […]

Stuart A Staples
Lucky Dog Recordings 03-04 ****
Dublin. A rainy Saturday morning. An ideal time to put on new solo album from Stuart Staples, frontman of The Tindersticks, a band who surely take lessons in broody melancholy from Nick Cave. Also an ideal time to acknowledge that this is nothing like The Tindersticks and is an […]

Rilo Kiley
Take Offs and Landings ***
Before you start thinking you’ve lost all concept of time and another Rilo Kiley album has come around all too quickly, relax. It was only January since the release of More Adventurous and Take Off and Landings, isn’t a new, hastily-recorded collection, it’s a reissue of their 2001 debut. Hailing […]

Someone passed the following exchange on to me from Media Matters and it further confirms how messed up Murdoch’s Fox News agenda is. Better still it fuels Bush’s desire to keep reminding us all, all of the time, about the ‘war on terror’. Like we could ever forget as we’re constantly bashed over the […]