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New Music from Elsewhere

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These pages - with sample tracks and videos posted - introduce and review new music which may otherwise go unheard and unnoticed. New Music from Elsewhere reviews new albums (and some important reissues) you'll play more than once at home or in the car, and will want to tell friends about.

If you do, pass the word: you heard it first at Elsewhere.

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Justin Currie: The Great War (Ryko/Southbound)

Some of these songs heard at a distance -- just the sharp pop and guitar jangle coming through -- and you'd pin Justin Currie as a smart power pop singer-songwriter who might give the charts some real damage. But my guess is most people don't want emotional pessimism, venomous songs about partners and a seething rage bordering on self-loathing -- not to say a wide misanthropic streak -- as... more >>

Added: 30 Aug 10

Ben Vaughn: Designs in Music (Vampisoul/Southbound)

It's not like Ben Vaughn needs a calling card into the world of television soundtracks, his music has apparently been used in That 70s Show and Third Rock From the Sun. But this delightfully referential album -- recorded with the cream of LA session players who are in on the game -- includes nods to everyone from Ennio Morricone to whoever wrote the theme to The Jetsons, Henry Mancini and... more >>

Added: 30 Aug 10

Jon Langford and Skull Orchard: Old Devils (Bloodshot/Southbound)

Langford was in the UK punk-era Mekons way back but has in more recent times embraced a kind of folk-punk Americana and played with the likes of Ryan Adams and Alejandro Escovedo. Chicago-based, he's also a well-known artist (lots of covers for the Chicago label Bloodshot). With Skull Orchard he parlays a rough-edged country-rock with a punk/Clash urgency -- but although he has a way with... more >>

Added: 30 Aug 10

Timothy Blackman: I've Never Lived (Home Alone)

Singer-songtwriter Blackman appeared at Elsewhere previously with his very interesting EP Modern Sprawl, and this is his short (half an hour) nine-song debut album recorded in Berlin in December last year -- which must have been cold. With sole assistance from a drummer in a few places, these are Blackman's naked ruminations (some philosophical, some imagistic) and while there is a... more >>

Added: 30 Aug 10

Dylan LeBlanc: Paupers Field (Rough Trade)

From the understated openers with their gentle backbeat, soft organ and steel guitar, LeBlanc -- barely 21, out of Louisiana -- announces himself as part of a long lineage which stretches back to the country-soul out of Muscle Shoals studio (where his dad was a session musician) and the country-rock of the early Band, but which also reaches to more contemporary names such as Jim James (of... more >>

Added: 29 Aug 10

Leonard Cohen: The Essential Leonard Cohen (Sony)

The British rock writer Nigel Williamson, considering the career of Leonard Cohen, recently observed, “We often describe singer-songwriters as being 'Dylanesque', a band with great harmonies you might describe as 'Beatlesque'. We even talk about someone being 'Waitsean', after Tom Waits. “But have you ever heard the word 'Cohenesque'? It doesn't exist, and that says it... more >>

Added: 29 Aug 10

THE BARGAIN BUY -- Miles Davis: Tutu (Warners)

For Davis' most pure jazz followers who had forgiven him the street corner funk of the late Sixties/early Seventies, the trumpter was a lost cause on his return in '81 after almost a decade without any new studio material. From Man with the Horn to Your Under Arrest ('85) he was widely criticised for simply failing to play trumpet in any meaningful way. The live We Want Miles also handed a... more >>

Added: 29 Aug 10 1 Comment

Melissa Etheridge: Fearless Love (Island)

From the opening title track here – a windblown open-road rocker and statement of ferocious independence – Etheridge confirms her credentials as someone who performs open-heart surgery on the emotions while backing it up with powerful songs. As with Springsteen, she also drops into characters (the unfulfilled housewife in The Wanting of You, the lonely inner life of a... more >>

Added: 23 Aug 10 1 Comment

Various Artists: The Great New Zealand Songbook Vol 2 (Thom/Universal)

The previous volume in this series (see here) sold eight times platinum which proved two things: that well packaged and intelligently compiled collections of New Zealand are popular and in short supply, and that a lot of Kiwis living abroad probably got one for a birthday/Christmas. If that set -- 42 tracks over two discs -- came up a little short in the wave of Pacific artists of the past... more >>

Added: 23 Aug 10

Juliagrace: Beautiful Survivor (Parachute)

One problem with being identified as a "Christian artist" -- as so many have discovered -- is that there is a resistance to them outside that market, and because of that many simply give up and stay with the audience which has and will support them. The other problem is that it means many outside of Christian circles are denied hearing some exceptional singers and songwriters --... more >>

Added: 23 Aug 10 3 Comments

Tom Jones: Praise and Blame (Island)

The late-career revival isn't uncommon these days (Bob Dylan, Bettye LaVette, Solomon Burke, Johnny Cash et al) but it still comes as a surprise, especially in the case of 70-year old Tom Jones who could have coasted into retirement with albums of interesting standards (in the manner of Rod Stewart) or even just pick up a few contemporary songs which suited his soul-belter style. But, as the... more >>

Added: 23 Aug 10

Queens of the Stone Age: Rated R, Deluxe Edition (Universal)

This, the second album by QOTSA and their first on a major label, was their breakthrough exactly a deacde ago and had critics digging in their superlatives bag. Oddly enough though, it wasn't because it was ground-breaking and innovative but rather it was (mostly) simply no nonsense, no flaffing about hard rock which was grounded in the great tradition of Zepp/Sabbath but with a dollop Meat... more >>

Added: 23 Aug 10

Simon Lynge: The Future (Lo-Max)

Singer-songwriter Lynge's story may be more interesting than his lowkey acoustic folk-pop: born in Denmark, childhood in Greenland (where his father is the local Bob Dylan apparently), back to Denmark, then to Los Angeles and Nashville, debut album Beautiful Way to Drown recorded in LA in Copenhagen in 2005 . . . Hard to top that in life experience for a 24-year old Inuit-Scandinavian... more >>

Added: 22 Aug 10

THE BARGAIN BUY - The Monkees: The Original Album Series (Rhino)

Long before they gradually fell apart in the late Sixties/early Seventies -- their television show cancelled, Peter Tork then Mike Nesmith leaving -- the Monkees had been accepted by serious musicians and critics who looked past their origins as a made-for-TV band. Their story is well documented -- too well perhaps, does anyone really need the three CD version of their '68 album The Birds,... more >>

Added: 22 Aug 10

Various Artists: The Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle (EMI)

Although very different, Brian Eno and Malcolm McLaren had one trait in common: after the event both would attribute philosophical and/or political meaning to something they had done. In the case of the late McLaren, the prime mover behind the Sex Pistols -- Johnny Rotten/John Lydon denies he was ever their "manager" -- would have had us believe that the Pistols/punk/anarchy of... more >>

Added: 22 Aug 10

Hawklords: 25 Years On (Esoteric/Southbound)

This will be reasonably brief because there is perhaps a limited audience for this double CD reissue of the '78 album and EP by an off-shoot of the sci-fi prog-rock band Hawkwind. Inspired by the science fiction of Michael Moorcock, Hawkwind's Dave Brock and Robert Calvert created Hawklords after Hawkwind briefly fell apart (they are still a going concern in some form or other). And --... more >>

Added: 22 Aug 10

The Erica Miller Experience: Reconsidered (Universal)

Obviously there is a curiosity factor at work here: 63-year old Erica Miller is the woman Shayne Carter (Straitjacket Fits/Dimmer) calls "Mum" and so the album comes with acquired cachet in some circles. That it is also an album of covers of songs first recorded by Elvis and arrives on the anniversary of Presley's death adds another dimension of interest. The question is... more >>

Added: 17 Aug 10 1 Comment

Brendan Perry: Ark (Cooking Vinyl)

As half of Dead Can Dance (alongside Lisa Gerrard), Perry was responsible for impressive sonic landscapes which owed a little to a kind of geographically amorphous "world music" and also to cinema soundtracks. Here, more than a decade after his previous solo outing, he embarks on gloomy sounding, authoratively-delivered meditations and thoughts over his swathe of synths which have... more >>

Added: 16 Aug 10

Arcade Fire: The Suburbs (Merge)

The first film by many aspiring directors is often a low budget affair about hookers, junkies or/and zombies. Being young they believe there is drama (or at least cool dress-ups) in these worlds -- but as many later realise there is more true human emotion and drama in that most mundane of subjects: life in the suburbs. Behind the curtains and the seeming mundane daily lives in ordinary... more >>

Added: 16 Aug 10 1 Comment

Department of Eagles: Archive 2003 - 2006 (Bella Union)

Department of Eagles became the vehicle for Daniel Rossen and Fred Nicolaus to get their staccato sonic'n'sample experiments and increasingly dreamy pop into the wider world from their university dorm in New York. Initially they were called Whitey on the Moon, then Dept of Eagles . . . and later Rossen became the mainman in the already extant Grizzly Bear. The Eagles still... more >>

Added: 15 Aug 10