Music at Elsewhere
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Tinie Tempah: Youth (Warner)
24 Apr 2017 | 1 min read
To hear London-based, award-winning grime master Tinie Tempah tell it, after his stunning debut Disc-Overy and then the lesser follow-up Demonstration he struggled to reconnect with the source of his initial inspiration. So he says he went right back to hip-hop/synth-pop and dubbed up style . . . and yet for this outing four years on from Demonstration he also hooks in Jake Bugg, Guy... > Read more
Girls Like (w Zara Larsson)
RECOMMENDED REISSUE: Dave Dobbyn: A Slice of Heaven; 40 Years of Hits (Sony)
24 Apr 2017 | <1 min read
Not really a reissue and not his first such collection, but here are 21 familiar songs -- one apiece from Th'Dudes and DD Smash, with a few in their 2009 versions – and an acknowledgement of a remarkable and productive career. From rock (Be Mine Tonight) to ballads (the gorgeous blue-eyed soul of You Oughta Be in Love) to experiments in pop (Lap of the Gods, Blindman's Bend) to... > Read more
You Oughta Be in Love
The Jesus and Mary Chain: Damage and Joy (Warner)
14 Apr 2017 | 1 min read | 1
One the interesting things about post-punk bands like Wire is how they acknowledge and sometimes even refer to their past, but use it as a platform to push into other areas. You can’t really say that about too much of this new JAMC album, their first in almost 20 years. Their take on fuzzed-up classic but often downbeat pop remains intact – if recorded a... > Read more
Facing up to the Facts
Jen Gloeckner: Vine (jengloeckner.com)
14 Apr 2017 | <1 min read
Pitched somewhere between ethereal ambience, appealingly drone-like minimalist folk songwriting and astral electronica, this album by Iowa’s Gloeckner – recorded in her bedroom – also includes some eerily evocative sonic backdrops (the disconcerting Firefly) and nods towards economic prog-rock (Prayers) courtesy of her loops and programmes, guests like guitarist John... > Read more
Row with the Flow
IN BRIEF: A quick overview of some recent international releases
10 Apr 2017 | 3 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. Comments will be brief. Coco Montoya: Hard Truth (Alligator/Southbound) Longtime rock and blues fans know that John Mayall was a very good picker when... > Read more
Lord Echo: Harmonies (Soundway/The Label)
9 Apr 2017 | 1 min read
One of the more shamelessly enjoyable acts at the recent Womad was Lord Echo (aka Wellington producer/multi-instrumentalist Mike Fabulous) and his band. Their astute melting pot of many Kiwis' favourite styles – reggae, dub, soul and r'n'b – had all the right groove-riding components welded together into interesting, danceable shapes for such a festival . . . and proved... > Read more
In Your Life
Levi Patel: Affinity (Marigold)
7 Apr 2017 | 1 min read
Elsewhere has had such a long love affair with the restful and imaginative qualities of intelligent ambient music that we hesitate to mention just how long . . . but there are articles about Brian Eno's definitive statements in the Seventies here and as recently as here, just four months ago. And we reference much more “ambient” music elsewhere. But we accept that... > Read more
What Will Become of Us
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Bob Dylan: Triplicate (Sony)
3 Apr 2017 | 4 min read
In his long career Bob Dylan has previously delivered albums in threes: the acoustic into electric no-turning-back trilogy of Bringing It All Back Home/Highway 61 Revisited/Blonde on Blonde in an astonishing 14 months in the mid Sixties; the Christian series Slow Train Coming/Saved/Shot of Love which started in the late Seventies . . . and we might even include the opening salvo in his... > Read more
Wire: Silver/Lead (Pink Flag/Southbound)
3 Apr 2017 | 1 min read
While many of their UK post-punk peers trade on their former (in)glorious past or re-form to trot out the old tropes and phlegm for fans, Wire have rarely looked back and moved on from those three cornerstone albums in the late Seventies: Pink Flag, Chairs Missing and 154. They might have faltered from time to time, and reduced then expanded their membership, but they never really... > Read more
Short Elevated Period
Daniel Brandt: Eternal Something (Erased Tapes/Southbound)
3 Apr 2017 | <1 min read
On our favourite arthouse-cum-ambient label Erased Tapes comes this instrumental debut by the percussionist/multi-instrumentalist Brandt who is also the co-founder of Germany's Brandt Brauer Frick, an electroacoustic group which brought their classical music sensibilities to their sonic landscapes. For this project Brandt says his initial idea was an album purely on cymbals –... > Read more
Casa Fiesta
The Map Room: Weatherless (themaproomband.com/Aeroplane)
3 Apr 2017 | 1 min read
Elsewhere embraced the debut All You'll Ever Find by the Map Room – Brendon Morrow and Simon Gooding – two years ago for being that rare thing in New Zealand's musical landscape: adult and crafted songs which were intelligent, memorable and floated past on keen-eared pop structures and acoustic guitars. In our world of indie.alt.quirky bands trying to find their point of... > Read more
Here Right Now
RECOMMENDED REISSUE: Buzzcocks: Spiral Scratch/Time's Up (Southbound)
31 Mar 2017 | 1 min read
So here is 40th anniversary edition of the Buzzcocks' famous 1977 four-song Spiral Scratch EP -- "one of punk's most important releases" said Uncut magazine recently. And it is coupled with a furious 11-song live-in-the studio set from that brief moment when Howard Devoto (the prick!) was in the band alongside Pete Shelley (he left with a month after Scratch was released... > Read more
Boredom
Moving Stuff: When I Am Gone (soundcloud)
30 Mar 2017 | <1 min read
Moving Stuff is Auckland singer-songwriter Marina Bloom and her small band whose first single from this album Heroes apparently got more than 30,000 hits when she posted the video of it on Boxing Day. That song is a slightly reined-in and yes, heroic, power ballad but other material on the eight-song album shows a wider reach. Long Distance Love is a quieter piano ballad —... > Read more
IN BRIEF: A quick overview of some recent international releases
27 Mar 2017 | 3 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. Comments will be brief. Spoon: Hot Thoughts (Matador) The joke over beers recently was that no matter how many favourable words you spilled over... > Read more
RECOMMENDED REISSUE: Stevie Wonder: Fulfillingness' First Finale (Universal)
27 Mar 2017 | <1 min read
Like Bob Marley, who would alternate softer albums with righteous stand-up songs, this '74 album fell between Stevie Wonder's more political Innervisions and Songs in the Key of Life. Stevie – the “Little Stevie” Motown child star – had become a self-contained multi-instrumental adult composer/performer who still threw out challenges (the chart-topping You... > Read more
Bhattacharya, Gronseth, Wessel: Bhattacharya/Gronseth/Wessel (pling)
26 Mar 2017 | 1 min read
Many decades ago Elsewhere fell for the album Karuna Supreme by American saxophonist John Handy and tabla player Ali Akbar Khan, just another in a long line of jazz and Indian music crossovers which started in the mid Sixties with Ravi Shankar's Improvisations (an Essential Elsewhere album) and lead on to the Indo-Jazz Fusion albums by Joe Harriott and John Mayer. Because both jazz and... > Read more
Goodnight Irene
Eliza Carthy and the Wayward Band Machine: Big Machine (Topic/Southbound)
26 Mar 2017 | 1 min read
There has always been more interesting streams of British folk than the hey-nonny finger-in-the-ear style which is how many people often encounter it. At the strange end of the spectrum is the Incredible String Band, then there were the folk-rockers like Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span, the introverted types (Nick Drake), purists like the Watersons and innovators like Tuung,... > Read more
The Fitter's Song
SHORT CUTS: A round-up of recent New Zealand releases
25 Mar 2017 | 3 min read
Facing down an avalanche of releases, requests for coverage, the occasional demand that we be interested in their new album (sometimes with that absurd comment "but don't write about it if you don't like it") and so on, Elsewhere will every now and again do a quick sweep like this, in the same way it does IN BRIEF about international releases. Comments will be... > Read more
Omit: Negative Pulse Logic (End of Alphabet Records)
25 Mar 2017 | <1 min read
Omit out of Blenheim – aka Clinton Williams – was once around the avant-garde/experimental music scene but seemed to disappear for a very long time. For more than a decade by our count (you can find links to earlier material here) and his zines and releases are through End of Alphabet Records out of Wellington, a niche label-cum-labour of love which may well be better... > Read more
Skipper Down
Girls Pissing on Girls Pissing: Songs of Sodomy and the Compost of Aethyr (Muzai)
20 Mar 2017 | 1 min read
For reasons we can't and won't fully explain, Elsewhere has always found something of considerable interest in the archly arty, post-punk/experimentalism and enjoyably indulgent shadowland intelligence of GPOGP which sometimes almost gets close to bleak pop of the Fall/Toy Love/Tall Dwarfs/Pere Ubu kind. Almost. This “double album” – 16 songs which apparently can... > Read more