The Stage:
Nite Jewel
Patrick Kelleher & his Cold Dead Hands

Ramona Gonzalez has come along the way since the release of her swooning debut,Good Evening, which was first released in 2010 on Gloriette Records, and seemed to herald a new wave of US female artists using modest technology to make bedroom pop with auteurist ambition.

A brace of svelte singles on Italians Do It Better followed, but for us it was the 2010 Gloriette EP Am I Real? that represented Gonzalez’s maturing as a writer and performer. Whilst still finding time to embark on collaborations with Dâm-Funk and Jason Grier, and remix Caribou, HEALTH and King Midas Sound, last year the LA-based artist went back into the studio with her husband and longtime collaboratorC.M. Greif-Neill (a former member of Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti who has also worked with the likes of Charlotte Gainsbourg, Stephen Malkmus and Julia Holter) to record her long-awaited second album.

One Second Of Love arrived earlier this month on Secretly Canadian, the Bloomington, IN indie stable that nurtured Antony & The Johnsons and Yeasayer among others, and it’s undoubtedly Nite Jewel’s most robust, refined and resonant statement to date. In the words of our recent review, it finds her shedding the retro-citational tendencies common to the scene she’s a part of – and undoubtedly prevalent in her own earlier work – in favour of a more agreeably earnest, leftfield pop sound. No more hiding behind pastiche: One Second Of Love is a play for the big-leagues.

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Patrick Kelleher and His Cold Dead Hands are a five piece band from Dublin. They create darkly beautiful sounds, which are heavily focused on electronics and rhythm, with plenty of nods to Robert Rental, John Maus, Brian Ferry, Future Islands and all manner of dark electro experimentalism. Their 2011 album ‘Golden Syrup’ was lauded by critics all over the world and earned Patrick and the group a Choice Award nomination.

“Spookily brilliant, like Daryl Hall in hell”
- The Guardian
 

 The Loft:
Three Men and a Bitter Lady 

Three Men and a Bitter Lady is a comedy show recklessly based around what could only be described as a weak pun exploiting dubious perceptions of stand-up gender dynamics. Nonetheless, it delivers an unconventional view of the world for 60 minutes through the 8 eyes of 4 comedians delivered via 4 mouths into 1 microphone (not necessarily all at once); a journey that takes in cats, homosexual dolphin metaphors, OCD and the evolutionary role of the twentysomething male. Some might say ‘varied’, others might say ‘insultingly conceptually incoherent’.