Music from Elsewhere

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Fly My Pretties: Fly My Pretties IV (Loop CD/DVD)

Less a band in the traditional sense and more an umbrella organisation which allows for members of the collective to shine, Fly My Pretties have also taken their own route into the hearts of New Zealand audiences. As with Split Enz all those decades ago, FMP avoid the indignity of boozed-up pub crowds and prefer to play theatre settings where not only do people listen but they can also... more >>

Space Cadet

Added: 28 Mar 2012

Various Artists: Time to Go; The Southern Psychedelic Movement 1981-86 (Flying Nun)

When I wrote the liner notes to a couple of collections of New Zealand psychedelic music from the late Sixties/Early Seventies (see here), I was obliged to offer the uncomfortable reminder to cooler-than-thou people who were "there at the time" that the drugs which inspired the movement in the USA and UK were not as readily available in this country as many might have thought, or even... more >>

Russian Rug

Added: 27 Mar 2012 5 Comments

Lee Ranaldo: Between the Times and the Tides (Matador)

Anyone who doesn't hear a throbbing Flying Nun band turned up to 11 here -- Bats, Clean, some solo Chris Knox even -- just hasn't been paying attention. There is a frisson of familiarity about the powerful chords and driving momentum of some of these songs (Lost, but Off the Wall especially where Ranaldo sounds like Michael Stipe fronting a Bats-Clean supergroup) but that takes... more >>

Xtina As I Knew Her

Added: 26 Mar 2012

Michael Kiwanuka: Home Again (Universal)

London-born to Ugandan parents, Michael Kiwanuka has become something of a "next big thing" in the British music scene, but on the evidence of this quietly confident debut album he seems to vindicate the praise being heaped on him. It's not just that he connects to the soul and spirit of Van Morrison's Astral Weeks (the Afro-horn influenced opener Tell Me a Tale), and a folk-soul... more >>

Rest

Added: 26 Mar 2012

Sam Gray Singing; Songs About Humans (Raw Onion)

This album by an expat New Zealander currently in Austria (but clearly itinerant in Europe and he tours, the album recorded in Oslo and released through a company in Denmark), is one which may delight, bewilder and annoy in just about equal proportions . . . and is quite uncategorisable. For want of a better term I would suggest "post-prog avant-classical alt.rock" and should tell... more >>

Scratches

Added: 26 Mar 2012

Jim White: Where It Hits You (Yep Roc)

The idiosyncratic Jim White – whose music is suffused in the dark Southern literary tradition as much as alt.country (more alt than most alt.country) -- was the central figure in the remarkable doco Searching for the Wrong Eyed Jesus as he traveled around backroads and broke-down townships ruminating on Christianity and country music. A troubled man for troubled times, and now... more >>

Epilogue to a Marriage

Added: 19 Mar 2012

Dion: Tank Full of Blues (Blue Horizon)

Dion's first hits – the classics Runaround Sue and The Wanderer – came before the Beatles even got into a British recording studio and by then, in his early 20s, he'd already been treated for a heroin habit. In the mid Sixties -- because the Beatles-lead British Invasion swept aside artists like himself -- he quit aiming for the pop charts and delved into blues and for... more >>

I Read it in the Rolling Stone

Added: 19 Mar 2012 1 Comment

Field Music: Plumb (Shock)

Having been spectacularly underwhelmed by the much acclaimed previous albums by this British band doesn't mean I don't come to another hoping for the best. But the best here has always be the property of their predecssors and it would only be the most short-concentration span -- or 15-year old -- reviewer who didn't start ticking off the accumulation of source material (Beatles and Beach... more >>

Is This the Picture?

Added: 19 Mar 2012 1 Comment

Bruce Springsteen: Wrecking Ball (Sony)

By design and sometimes by chance, Bruce Springsteen has frequently tapped into the emotional state of the American republic. He has documented the lives of outsiders and the dispossessed, the blue collar workers, lost boys and lonely girls, and – when more recently linking with the Pete Seeger tradition on the album We Shall Overcome; The Seeger Sessions – the lost spirit of... more >>

Jack of All Trades

Added: 12 Mar 2012 6 Comments

Sharon Van Etten: Tramp (Jagjauwar)

Among the many this New Jersey singer-songwriter thanks on her third album are Aaron and Bryce Dessner (the National), Kyp Malone (TV on the Radio) and Zach Condon (Beirut); her “recommended listening” list of almost 30 includes Bon Iver, Kurt Vile and War on Drugs; and the album is dedicated to John Cale. All valid reference points for her folk-poetry gone to indie.rock... more >>

Serpents

Added: 12 Mar 2012 1 Comment

Whirimako Black/Richard Nunns: Te More (Rattle)

This gentle, hypnotic and spiritual album seems a natural consequence of all that has gone before from these two artists: Whirimako Black's moving songs in te reo (especially her exceptional Kura Huna with Russel Walder) and Richard Nunns' longtime exploration of the ambient aspects of taonga puoro. Stripped right back to a warm and beautifully spacious simplicity, these original songs are... more >>

Ororuarangi Suite Part 1

Added: 7 Mar 2012

Ruthie Foster: Let It Burn (Fuse/Border)

After her thrilling appearance before the sad figure of BB King at a concert last year -- and I retract not a word of what I said here about King, he was woeful -- you'd hardly think Ruthie Foster needs any assistance. She seemed to be quite some package: she had a voice which went from gospel and soul to blues and rock and reggae, could play driving and rhythmic guitar and wrote strong... more >>

Everlasting Light

Added: 5 Mar 2012 1 Comment

Shearwater: Animal Joy (Sub Pop)

Jonathan Meiburg -- the mainman in Shearwater, a member of Austin's Okkervil River and a diligent ornithologist with an interest in distant places -- doesn't want for ambition. Shearwater previously released a trilogy of albums (or “triptych” as Sub Pop had it) about the effect of the changing global environment and Mankind on the planet, and specifically on remote islands.... more >>

You As You Were

Added: 5 Mar 2012

The Amazing: Gentle Stream (Subliminal/Southbound)

If you thought Sweden these days was all The Girl with a Bee in Her Bonnet and the killing sprees on Wallander, then The Amazing are here to reassure you that gentle psychedelic trip-rock with a folk edge is still there to let you lie down in the long grass . . . without the fear some psychokiller former-Nazi is lurking with a knife. While they have a lovely pastoral feel in Christoffer... more >>

International Hair

Added: 5 Mar 2012

Bears: Greater Lakes (Misra/Southbound)

Breezy pop – from the Beach Boys through the Shoes and Wannadies to much overlooked recent acts like Camera Obscura, the Clientele and Institut Polaire – is a noble lineage of close harmonies, choruses and a backbeat. The preppy-looking Bears from Ohio (not to be confused with former Bowie guitarist Adrian Belew's “the Bears” also from Ohio) don't mess with... more >>

You're Going

Added: 5 Mar 2012

The Cramps: File Under Sacred Music; Early Singles 1978-81 (Munster Records/Southbound)

The seriously silly but fright-night funny, ridiculously retro but cutting-edge punk Cramps just kept cracking reductively simple covers of B-grade 50s rock'n'roll, raw rockabilly and thrash-trash two-minute songs beamed in from sci-fi drive-in movies. Their references, at the height of New York punk then New Wave, were surf rock guitars, coffin-kickers like Screaming Jay Hawkins and... more >>

Love Me

Added: 27 Feb 2012

Gianmarco Liguori: Duga-3 (sarangbang.co.nz)

Rather by stealth, the Auckland-based guitarist, keyboard player and composer Gianmarco Liguori has created his own fascinating niche in music which exists at a place where jazz, soundtracks and improvised art music intersect. In some incarnation he is behind the interesting instrumental group Salon Kingsadore (see here) but the albums under his own name (Stolen Paintings here and Ancient... more >>

Cosmic Protrusion

Added: 27 Feb 2012 2 Comments

Richmond Fontaine: The High Country (Shock)

If anyone can write a concept album it's Willy Vlautin of the alt.country Oregon band Richmond Fontaine whose first novel The Motel Life was as dark and violent as anything by Cormac McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, The Road) or Elmore Leonard. Previous Richmond Fontaine albums have had themes too: The Fitzgerald was based on Waitsean, marginal characters around a seedy casino where... more >>

The Chainsaw Sea

Added: 27 Feb 2012 2 Comments

Lydia Cole: Me and Moon (lydiacole.com)

Lydia Cole has had some interesting and, I think, generous reviews for this quiet, intimate and at times very engaging album. But . . . And we'll get to that "but" in a minute. It seems these 11 songs were born of a heartbreak and, according to her promo sheet, "Cole spent the last 18 months in hibernation where she turned to her allies -- music, art and time -- for... more >>

Undone

Added: 21 Feb 2012 3 Comments

Wendy Rene: After Laughter Comes Tears (Light in the Attic)

The career of raw-edged pop-soul singer Wendy Rene is remarkably brief as the subtitle of this 22 song collection attests: it is The Complete Stax and Volt Singles and Rarities 1964 -65. By '67 she had quit music to concentrate on raising her children, doubtless prompted when she declined to fly with Otis Redding and his band on what was their final flight. It was also to be her final... more >>

He Hasn't Failed Me Yet (previously unreleased)