Music at Elsewhere

JOHN LENNON, IMAGINE EXPANDED (2018): Just gimme some truth . . . and more

8 Oct 2018 | 6 min read

John Lennon's exceptional and essential Plastic Ono Band album of December 1970 was a self-lacerating autobiographical statement which drilled into skeletal and viscerally spare music, was courageous and emotionally naked. It was a farewell to Beatle John and the decade his band dominated and defined. It was imbued with anger and resentment, and in its final... > Read more

I Don't Wanna Be a Soldier Mama (take 11)

Various Artists: Planet Beat; From The Shel Talmy Vaults (Big Beat/Border)

8 Oct 2018 | 2 min read

In the early Nineties there was a compilation entitled What About Us? and it collected Merseybeat bands from the Beatles era who had largely been lost to posterity or whose names – other than the Searchers and Tommy Quickly – were barely know outside of Liverpool. The title was appropriate, although it did suggest there was greatness residing within, and that proved not to be... > Read more

Everybody Knows, by Sean Buckley and the Breadcrumbs (w Jimmy Page)

IN BRIEF: A quick overview of some recent international releases

7 Oct 2018 | 4 min read

With so many CDs commanding and demanding attention Elsewhere will run this occasional column which scoops up releases by international artists, in much the same way as our SHORT CUTS column picks up New Zealand artists and Yasmin does with EPs. Comments will be brief. . Alejandro Escovedo with Don Antonio: The Crossing (Yep Roc/Southbound) The great Hispanic songwriter and... > Read more

Loudon Wainwright III: Years in the Making (Storysound/Southbound)

6 Oct 2018 | 2 min read

Even longtime fans of this enormously prolific songwriter – who has often performed open-heart surgery on his failed relationships, family, psyche, politics and every damn thing – find it hard to explain him to outsiders. He's almost a documentarian – he appeared on MASH as a singing soldier, did weekly political songs on NPR – but also comedic (his early albatross... > Read more

Cheatin'

Harry Lyon: “To the Sea” (Norm/Southbound)

5 Oct 2018 | 2 min read

It should come as no surprise that Harry Lyon writes a great album, after all he has some prior form in Hello Sailor and Coup D'Etat. He also wrote Muscles which was on Mitch Marsden's Burning Rain album and was nominated for a Silver Scroll back in '91. Muscles appears here again, but it now sounds very different and bears the aural fingerprint of the album's producer Delaney Davidson who... > Read more

Christmas in Dublin

Rhian Sheehan: A Quiet Divide (Loop/digital outlets)

1 Oct 2018 | 1 min read

Given that Auckland-based electronica artist and soundscape creator Rhian Sheehan had a previous album Stories from Elsewhere in 2013 we were always going to be interested at Elsewhere. In fact, we had been interested long before that because his work was so enticingly subtle and rose above the ambient into cinematic shapes as it conjured up visual images. That his work has frequently been... > Read more

Bad Sav: Bad Sav (Fishrider)

1 Oct 2018 | <1 min read

They say this album by a Dunedin trio – guitarist Hope Robinson and bassist Lucinda King of Death and the Maiden, with Mike McLeod of Shifting Sands (here on drums) – was 10 years in the making, which might suggest these folks work at a pretty leisurely pace. Let's just pretend they've “been busy”. Because there's nothing laidback about this simmering crockpot of... > Read more

Hen's Teeth

Across the Great Divide: Uncommon Ground (CurioMusic)

1 Oct 2018 | <1 min read

This mostly instrumental album which steers a path between Celtic music, its roots in Americana and more contemporary takes on those sources plays its aces in the second half, notably on pieces the delightfully airy Sleeping Tune which was originally on pipes but here translates delicately to a lute-like piece courtesy of Karen Jones's Celtic harp, and the exceptional Long She Waits written by... > Read more

The Patriot

Jimmy LaFave: Peace Town (Music Road/Southbound)

30 Sep 2018 | 1 min read | 1

When Texas singer-songwriter Jimmy LaFave died about 18 months ago many mourned the passing of not just a great writer but a wonderful interpreter of others' songs (notably Bob Dylan but also Donovan and Woody Guthrie. In the wider world he is best – and perhaps only – known for aching version of Walk Away Rene but Elsewhere has reviewed many of his albums and caught in concert... > Read more

Goodbye Amsterdam

Christine White: When the Things That Heal Us Hurt Us and the Things That Hurt Us Heal Us (digital outlets)

24 Sep 2018 | 2 min read

From the late Eighties and well into the Nineties singer-songwriter Christine White was a fixture on the Auckland music scene and she sprung a number of recordings with her band or under her own name (if I recall, I certainly recall writing about her a lot). She was also an exceptional guitarist, tough and bluesy when required. She seemed to be everywhere – if... > Read more

Falling Down

RECOMMENDED REISSUE: Darcy Clay; Jesus I Was Evil (Sony)

24 Sep 2018 | <1 min read

Darcy Clay was like skyrocket which illuminated the New Zealand music scene 20 years ago and then exploded leaving barely a trace. His suicide was as sad as it was annoying, you felt that he had so much more in him . . . but he was a man who walked on an unsteady rope and perhaps his fall was inevitable. What he left behind was a six-song EP which included the scouring Jesus I Was Evil and... > Read more

Jesus I Was Evil (live, 1998)

Tash Sultana: Flow State (Sony)

17 Sep 2018 | 2 min read

Anyone who has caught this Australian multi-instrumentalist live and in full flight, as she was at the Auckland City Limits 2018 festival, would come away impressed by her versatility and stage energy . . . but also realising that her free-form playing – where one thing morphed into another – and her songs (if that is what they were) needed some refining and distillation. As she... > Read more

Seven

Juanita Stein: Until The Lights Fade (Nude)

16 Sep 2018 | <1 min read

On this, the second album under her own name in as many years, the former singer-guitarist in ex-Australia, London-based alt-rockers Howling Bells continues here affection for Americana rock, nods towards Patti Smith directness and Chrissie Hynde-inflected pop-rock (both collide on Forgiver written with Brandon Flowers of the Killers) with convincing swagger. There are smatterings of tender... > Read more

Cool

Richard Thompson: 13 Rivers (Proper/Southbound)

15 Sep 2018 | 1 min read | 3

Longtime fans and loyalists – count Elsewhere among them – have long admitted defeat with Richard Thompson OBE: no matter how good the albums are by this extraordinary British guitarist and songwriter, and many are exceptional, his fan base never seems to expand. So despite us here reviewing his albums and conducting interviews we assume that the same small cabal of aficionados... > Read more

The Dog in You

The Warratahs: Drivin' Wheel (Southbound)

14 Sep 2018 | <1 min read | 1

This double disc 30thanniversary collection reminds you not just how prolific the Warratahs were in their heyday (things slowed down in the new century when singer-songwriter Barry Saunders and writer Wayne Mason released solo albums) but also how consistent they were with their considered country-influenced pop and rock. The non-chronological 24 song collection includes gems like Kupe's... > Read more

Cape Turnagain (w Sam Hunt)

Paul Simon: In the Blue Light (Sony)

14 Sep 2018 | 1 min read | 1

At the end of his recent, valuable if slightly flawed, authorised biography of Paul Simon by Robert Hilburn, the musician said his next project would be to go back and re-record and re-arrange some of his favourite but overlooked songs from his vast back-catalogue. “He'll never finish that album. It won't be challenging enough,” Simon's friend, the artist Chuck Close, said.... > Read more

How the Heart Approaches What It Yearns

The Chills: Snow Bound (Fire/Southbound)

14 Sep 2018 | 2 min read

In a typically forthcoming interview with Elsewhere recently, Martin Phillipps – mainman of the Chills – observed that their last album Silver Bullets of 2015 (19 years on from the previous studio album Sunburnt) was in small part a clearing house of songs he'd been sitting on. So he could understand why some said it was just him tidying up scraps . . . but, he asserted, this new... > Read more

Complex

The Changing Same: Creative Evolution (Powertools)

12 Sep 2018 | 2 min read

Outside of the folk tradition (and maybe Don McGlashan every now and again) there's not a great lineage of songs which gently and often lovingly skewer specific places and people's mores in this country. On this new collection by the band helmed by Matthew Bannister (Sneaky Feelings, Dribbling Darts of Love, the Weather, One Man Bannister and solo albums) there is a delightfully lightweight... > Read more

Favourite Clown

Paul McCartney: Egypt Station (Capitol/Universal)

7 Sep 2018 | 2 min read

In our Famous Elsewhere Songwriter Questionnaire we ask, “The one songwriter you will always listen to, even if they disappointed you previously, is?” Names like Bob Dylan, Gillian Welch, Joni Mitchell and Bon Iver have come up a few times. But to the best of our recollection Paul McCartney never has, which is strange given an impressive track record in two Very Big Bands... > Read more

Come On To Me

Princess Chelsea: The Loneliest Girl (Lil' Chief)

7 Sep 2018 | 1 min read

Behind many fairytales there lurks a sense of unease, and so it is with the music of Princess Chelsea (aka Chelsea Nikkel), the Auckland singer-songwriter who has created an interesting persona for herself which she effectively plays with, but frequently delivers music which seems to possess all the magic of dreamy fairytale. But, as we know with fairytales . . . The Pretty Ones here... > Read more