Music at Elsewhere
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Vorn: Down For It (Powertools)
23 Jan 2012 | 1 min read
In an alternative universe Frank Zappa would be the head of the music school, radio would refuse to play anything by someone who did a photoshoot before writing a song, and Vorn's bent pop would be as big and as popular as Crowded House's. A member of Gold Medal Famous (the point of whose recent album went right past me), Vorn Colgan -- who has an amusingly obscure bio on his website -- now... > Read more
Mental Health Issues in Newtown Part II
The Chaps: Don't Worry 'Bout Your Age (Chaps)
23 Jan 2012 | <1 min read
Selected as one of the three finalists in folk category at the 2012 New Zealand Music Awards, this album finds Dunedin four-piece the Chaps -- average somewhere early 60s at a guess -- doing exactly what they do best: playing unashamedly self-deprecating songs (the title track especially) and thought-provoking lyrics in the bluegrass-folk-country-meets-swing territory. So here are songs... > Read more
Come See About Me
Nino Tempo and April Stevens: Hey Baby! The Anthology (Atco/Border)
20 Jan 2012 | 3 min read
Right up until opening the booklet to this 24 track anthology of this duo who had the huge hit Deep Purple in 1963/64, I always thought Tempo and Stevens were a couple. The love lyrics of their originals certainly suggested that. But they were brother and sister, born to a first generation Italian-American family in Niagara Falls. Their father was a grocer and mother an aspiring beauty... > Read more
Boys Town
Billy Bragg, Volume II (Yep Roc)
16 Jan 2012 | 4 min read
As anyone who has interviewed a number of musicians would attest, you often never know what you are going to get. The woman who make the nicest music can often be bitter and acerbic, yet the dark Goth-metal guy is the most polite person you ever met. But in my experience Billy Bragg was exactly as I had been lead to believe by his music and what other interviewers had said previously: He... > Read more
Tears of my Tracks (demo)
Little Axe: If You Want Loyalty Buy a Dog (On U/Southbound)
16 Jan 2012 | <1 min read | 1
Guitarist Skip McDonald (aka Little Axe) and On-U Sound producer Adrian Sherwood team up once again for an album which exists at the interface of old blues and contemporary dub, and with just enough gospel sensibility (and Nyabinghi drumming on I Got da Blues) to give a spiritual dimension to its innate earthiness. Back in 2006 the Little Axe album Stone Cold Ohio was one of the Best of... > Read more
Grace
Natalia Mann: Pasif.ist (Rattle)
10 Jan 2012 | 1 min read
One of the legitimate complaints made about certain types of New Age music in the Eighties and early Nineties -- and latterly with fusion world music -- is that the music becomes acultural and stateless, existing in a place where cultural resonances are hinted at rather than effected. While that can make for some fascinating "world" music, it can also lead to an emotional... > Read more
Time
Jackie DeShannon: Come and Get Me, The Complete Liberty and Imperial Singles Vol 2 (Ace/Border)
9 Jan 2012 | 2 min read | 3
Ask anyone of "a certain age" who the best/most interesting women pop singers of the mid Sixties were and they might tick off a familiar list: Dusty Springfield, Cilla Black, any of the Spector school of girl groups, the Supremes and so on. It's unlikely Jackie DeShannon from Kentucky would come to mind for most but she was certainly in the top rank, but also one of the most... > Read more
Hold Your Head High
The Cure: Bestival Live 2011 (Lost/Border)
9 Jan 2012 | <1 min read
Anyone who has seen the Cure recently -- say at the Vector Arena in Auckland -- will know that the band which once played very short songs now plays extremely long sets. For my money you could have snipped 25 minutes out of the middle of their Vector show and not felt short-changed, but definitely less bored. And so it is with this two and a half hour/double disc recorded live before 50,000... > Read more
Primary
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2011, READERS' CHOICES
20 Dec 2011 | 16 min read | 4
If you're lookin' for trouble, you've come to the right place, sang Elvis. And indeed I was when it came to my Best of Elsewhere 2011 albums list. As always – and rightly so – everyone has their own “best” albums list. Sometimes the readers' selections crossed over with mine (which are here) but, as expected, astute listeners heard what I didn't. So here... > Read more
AND HERE THEY ARE, THE BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2011 ALBUMS
19 Dec 2011 | <1 min read | 1
Yep, it is utterly subjective (so I can't be right and you can't be wrong, and vice-versa) but here are the best/most durable/most enjoyable/utterly disturbing 30 albums of the past year which I heard. Yes, I missed a few big ones that connected with you or other critics -- but these are the ones I have listened to repeatedly during the year . . . and fully expect to be listening to in years... > Read more
A song for us music writers??
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2011 Fatoumata Diawara: Fatou (World Circuit)
19 Dec 2011 | <1 min read
Yet another artist out of Mali who confirms that country -- alongside only Jamaica perhaps -- seems to have more gifted and distinctive performers per head of population than any other country on the planet. This debut from the ear-pleasing, hypnotically melodic and folk-framed Diawara is given subtle, warm and clean studio production by label boss Nick Gold in conjunction with Diawara and... > Read more
Bissa
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2011 Tom Waits: Bad As Me (Anti)
19 Dec 2011 | 3 min read | 4
At the end of the local edition of this exceptional album -- Tom Waits' first studio album in seven years -- there is a disconcerting litany of images entitled with seeming certainty After You Die, but which in fact asks the more pointed question, "what is it like after we die?" Waits yowls through it like a man broken on a rack, and it's a scary ending to an album which touches... > Read more
Satisfied
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2011 The Bats: Free All the Monsters (Flying Nun)
19 Dec 2011 | 1 min read
The rolling, aural signature of the Bats' guitars and locked-in rhythm section has always sounded at its best when it drops the tempo and engages with a romantically woozy sound which -- when married to lyrics of optimism and gentleness -- just brings a smile. This lovely album - which doesn't stray far from their template -- will have you smiling with recognition and warmth as it unveils... > Read more
When the Day Comes
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2011 Marcin Wasilewski Trio: Faithful (ECM/Ode)
19 Dec 2011 | <1 min read
Pianist Wasilewski who leads this trio has appeared a number of times previously at Elsewhere, with this group, as a member of Tomasz Stanko's ensemble and with trumpetr Enrico Rava. He -- and his trio -- has impressed every time. But this album finds them really pushing themselves: Night Train to You is a 10 minute piece which swings and is full of sparking, energetic piano; the album... > Read more
Woke Up in the Desert
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2011 Jeffrey Foucault: Horse Latitudes (Signature)
19 Dec 2011 | 1 min read | 1
For his first album of originals in five years – the follow-up to his gripping Ghost Repeater – this beardy and rustic Americana singer/songwriter ups the stakes as his strong, dark brown and assured voice takes on life, loss and love in iron-hard images which bring to mind Leonard Cohen (“strange birds on the fence line, it's going to get cold tonight”) or Tom... > Read more
Last Night I Dreamed of Television
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2011 Charles Bradley: No Time for Dreaming (Daptone)
19 Dec 2011 | 1 min read | 1
The title here is certainly true: 63-year old Florida-born Bradley -- an exceptional soul singer who sounds like a distillation of James Brown, aching Otis Redding, the troubled Marvin Gaye, searching Al Green and the much overlooked Sonny Charles of the Checkmates -- has barely had a chance to dream in a hard-working life. Bradley seems to have been a cook most of his life (from a mental... > Read more
Golden Rule
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2011 Thurston Moore: Demolished Thoughts (Matador)
19 Dec 2011 | 1 min read
The solo projects and collaborations of Thurston Moore (of Sonic Youth) have certainly covered a lot of musical landscapes from visceral guitar noise to . . . Well, to this which is mostly gentle, dreamy singer-songwriter work with acoustic guitar, harp, violin and producer Beck on synths, vocals and bass. To a great extent -- because of the intricacies of the arrangements which... > Read more
Space
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2011 Tiny Ruins: Some Were Meant for Sea (Spunk)
19 Dec 2011 | 1 min read | 1
Tiny Ruins is the nom de disque of Bristol-born, Auckland-raised (from the age of 10) singer-songwriter Hollie Fullbrook who recorded these songs in "a diminutive [sic] hall, once the local school of South Gippsland's Morraya, Australia" (which doesn't appear on any map of that region south east of Melbourne that I can see, unless they mean Moyarra). No matter, that perhaps adds... > Read more
Tiny Ruins: Old as the Hills
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2011 Howe Gelb and a Band of Gypsies: Alegrias (Fire)
19 Dec 2011 | 1 min read | 2
The enormously prolific Howe Gelb (interviewed here in depth) is behind the Tucson band Giant Sand (from which Calexico became a more commercially successful split-off) and has also recorded a dozen albums under his own name. And as a reissue programme of about 30 Sand/Gelb albums starts to filter through he also releases this, a beguiling project which saw him taking his dark vocals,... > Read more
Howe Gelb and A Band of Gypsies: The Hangin' Judge
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2011 Fleet Foxes: Helplessness Blues (Sub Pop)
19 Dec 2011 | 1 min read | 1
A propos of not much, Fleet Foxes' chief songwriter Robin Pecknold recently recorded New Zealand singer-songwriter Chris Thompson's Where is My Wild Rose? for an EP and it appears on You Tube (just with stills) here. But . . . to the matter in hand. If it's fair to say FFoxes' debut album was unexpected, then we might also observe that this one is highly anticipated. However their... > Read more