Music at Elsewhere
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Venetic: Black Boxcars (WSM Recordings)
20 Jun 2016 | 1 min read
Despite a cover which suggests something akin to John Cale at his most manic, it's the acoustic guitar whch undercuts the image and gives a clearer picture to this, the eighth (eighth?) album in 10 years by Wellington's Venetic. Venetic is Wayne Stuart McCallum who maintains a fascinating website (unusual psychedelic albums, snippets of music writing, travel photos from Europe, the US and... > Read more
Come Out Michelle
RECOMMENDED REISSUE: Terry Allen, Juarez (PoB/Southbound)
20 Jun 2016 | <1 min read
Part Tex-Mex short story about murder, desperation and consequences, and part song-cycle in a spare style, this '75 debut album by the artist/musician and Lubbock-born cult figure Allen was years ahead of its time in in its broad conception. The storyline reaches back across time from the contemporary world to the Aztecs and the Catholic colonialist Cortez ("he crossed all that water... > Read more
The Radio . . . and Real Life
Paul McCartney; Pure McCartney (Universal)
18 Jun 2016 | 1 min read | 1
This big but perhaps unnecessary retrospective of a living legend is available in double disc, four-CD or four-LP formats. Enough product for you? So here's a non-chronological, self-chosen overview of Macca's vast post-Beatles career. And yes, we get the picture . . . At 73, Sir James Paul McCartney is -- for some reason -- still trying to ensure his legacy as one of the... > Read more
IN BRIEF: A quick overview of some recent international releases
12 Jun 2016 | 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. Whitney; Light Upon the Lake (Secretly Canadian): It's forward into the past for this Chicago six-piece who reach back to the folk-pop... > Read more
IN BRIEF: A quick overview of some recent international releases
10 Jun 2016 | 2 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. Michael Daves; Orchids and Violence (Nonesuch): Here's one for real bluegrass fans, and those with a taste its energy but gone... > Read more
Orchestra of Spheres: Brothers and Sisters of the Black Lagoon (Fire)
8 Jun 2016 | <1 min read
This quirky Wellington ensemble have been prolific on the recording front, toured extensively (China, Scandinavia, Europe and the US) and now find themselves on the estimable Fire Records out of the UK, the people behind excellent reissues like the Pere Ubu box sets and the complete JPSE, as well as the excellent new Chills album Silver Bullets. Let it be said there are no planetary... > Read more
Rocket #9
SHORT CUTS: A round-up of recent New Zealand releases
7 Jun 2016 | 3 min read | 1
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 brief. Into... > Read more
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RECOMMENDED REISSUE: Funkadelic; Maggot Brain (Border)
7 Jun 2016 | 1 min read
Okay, this will be blurry: Sometime in New York City, early Nineties maybe, somewhere in a club where the line outside was almost exclusively black . . . and there was me. Because -- and this is where it gets really unfocused -- Parliament/Funkadelic were going to play and somehow I had a ticket. I remember thinking that with decent shoes I'm pretty close to 6 feet but on the night I... > Read more
Super Stupid
The Claypool Lennon Delirium: Monoliths of Phobos (ATO)
7 Jun 2016 | 1 min read
It's an odd thing that James McCartney and Julian Lennon encountered a damned-if they do and damned-if they-don't critical reception to their albums with regard to them sounding like the pedigree they inherited. Dhani Harrison seems to be have been given an easier ride by critics (in fact his band thenewno2 went largely unreviewed and the "supergroup" with Ben Harper and Joseph... > Read more
Ohmerica
IN BRIEF: A quick overview of some recent international releases
5 Jun 2016 | 2 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. Methyl Ethel; Oh Inhuman Spectacle (4AD): Out of Perth, Western Australia – which has given us Empire of the Sun – comes more... > Read more
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The Monkees: Good Times! (Warners)
30 May 2016 | 1 min read | 1
Half a century after they first appeared as a made-for-television pop band, the surviving Monkees (Mickey Dolenz, Mike Nesmith, Peter Tork) have reconvened to tie up some unfinished business and record new songs written for them by the likes of Noel Gallagher with Paul Weller, River Cuomo of Weezer and Andy Partridge (XTC). Nesmith and Tork also wrote a song apiece, and Dolenz gets... > Read more
Birth of an Accidental Hipster
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Kevin Morby: Singing Saw (Dead Oceans)
23 May 2016 | 1 min read
On the cover of this frequently mesmerising album where the music and arrangements can take unexpected but subtle turns, Texas singer-songwriter Morby is a tiny figure caught in a dark landscape with a spot of mysterious colour (a fire). There seems to be a city of lights beyond the ridge. His songs are like this too: they come from dark and solitary places, have a sense of... > Read more
Water
Sturgill Simpson: A Sailor's Guide to Earth (Warners)
23 May 2016 | 2 min read | 1
There is a very special and comfortable place in Heaven for the best country-soul singers, those with the gift of bringing a soulful voice to country music tropes, sometimes touching a little r'n'b with jazz phrasing or saxophones. In the Sixties a lot of this stuff was pouring out of the South, and Simpson from smalltown Kentucky -- who played bluegrass and moved to Nashville four... > Read more
Breakers Roar
Brian Eno: The Ship (Opal/Border)
16 May 2016 | 1 min read
In a recent interview Brian Eno noted he is a different person these days, and in fact – like all of us – has been a series of different people. Which rather suggests he is constantly leaving past selves behind . . . and he has seemed to have done that aesthetically by moving into different territories of art, installations, painting, music for specific purposes and so on.... > Read more
I'm Set Free
Kokomo: Batten Down the Hatches (kokomo.co.nz)
16 May 2016 | 1 min read
Those who don't "get it" or take any time with the blues tend to dismiss it as all sounding the same. Certainly there can be superficial similarities, but it is an idiom with an infinitie capacity for reinvention. Every old black bluesman has a descption of the style -- "Blues is the truth", "Blues is a feeling") and so on -- but ironically it was John Lennon... > Read more
Too Many Words
Pacific Heights: The Stillness (Warners)
16 May 2016 | 1 min read | 1
Pacific Heights is the alias of Wellington producer and songwriter Devin Abrams who was a longtime member of electro-legends Shapeshifter. But here – the first outing under his own name in almost a decade – he pulls back the thumping Shapeshifter beats for an album (with guest vocalists) which shifts between dreamy neo-soul and electro-ambience, the latter tracks like the... > Read more
Airborne ft Deanne Krieg
Tom Cunliffe: Howl & Whisper (Lyttleton/Southbound)
16 May 2016 | 1 min read
The heroically hipster-beared, London-born Tom Cunliffe -- who has lived around New Zealand for decades, currently resident in Auckland -- admits coming to singwriting fairly late. Although he'd learned piano and violin it wasn't until he was 19 -- a decade ago -- that he picked up a guitar and hooked into the lineage of Dylan, Simon, Cohen et al. He's assimilated all that well and... > Read more
There's Your Lord
RECOMMENDED REISSUE: 3 Voices; 3 Voices (ohorecordings.com)
16 May 2016 | 1 min read
The early Eighties were a remarkable time for innovative, daring and genuinely avant-garde music in New Zealand. In short succession there were albums by Avant Garage and Big Sideways (on the short-lived Unsung label) as well as spin-off projects such as Don McGlashan and Ivan Zagni's Standards (on Propellor), Low Profile (Festival), Zagni with Steve Garden on A Selection of Trouble Spots... > Read more
You Were There
Anohni: Hopelessness (Rough Trade)
9 May 2016 | 1 min read
Formerly Antony (of Antony and the Johnsons), Anohni here fully embraces not just his femininity but leaps straight into brittle and often dazzlingly appropriate electronica from Hudson Mohawke and Oneohtrix Point Never. And – still often deploying that gorgeously aching, soulful voice — becomes more overtly political than she has been previously. The piece Obama here... > Read more
Watch Me
IN BRIEF: A quick overview of some recent international releases
9 May 2016 | 2 min read | 1
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. Grant Lee Phillips;The Narrows (YepRoc/Southbound): This former frontman/writer for Grant Lee Buffalo has released a string of excellent... > Read more