THE MAGAZINE FOR CURIOUS PEOPLE
Elsewhere is a concept and a place, and for many years Graham Reid has been going there for his wide angle travels, writing, music review columns and interviews with writers, musicians and artists.
Elsewhere is an ever-expanding on-line magazine for people curious about new music, different travel, interesting arts and much more. This site is dedicated to the diversity and possibilities of Elsewhere. It is an equal opportunity enjoyer. Subscribe here (it's free) for a weekly newsletter and be in to win CDs, DVDs, books and more. Welcome . . .
Latest posts
Various Artists: 1968, The Kiwi Music Scene (Frenzy)
26 May 2018 | 1 min read
By any measure, 1968 was an extraordinary year in global politics: the year began with the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, rolled on through the student and workers' revolution in France, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, the Grosvenor Square anti-Vietnam protests in London . . . In music there was radical chic as the Stones went back to their blues... > Read more
Hey Gyp, by the Underdogs
TAMI NEILSON, A VIDEO ESSAY (2018): Putting on the style
25 May 2018 | 1 min read
With the release of a sixth album under own name – Sassafrass! – attention once again turns to the award-winning Tami Neilson who has redefined country, brassy soul, rockabilly and rock'n'roll gospel into an amalgam which is distinct and her own. Her story has been well-canvased in the past, how the Canadian-born singer was part of their traveling family band... > Read more
Cut Worms: Hollow Ground (Jagjaguwar)
21 May 2018 | <1 min read
An odd one, not because it's odd . . . but more because it isn't. Cut Worms is actually Midwest singer-songwriter/visual artist Max Clarke now based in Brooklyn. And what he writes are often gentle, deliberately pop-framed songs which often have the charm of, say, Gary Lewis and the Playboys' unashamed Beatlesque pop from the Sixties (on Think I Might Be in Love) and the... > Read more
Cash for Gold
Matthew Sweet: Tomorrow's Daughter (Honeycomb Hideout/online outlets)
21 May 2018 | 1 min read
And here's an object lesson in effortless power pop from a master. Elsewhere never apologises for loving this idiom which peels off slivers of pre-66 Beatles and Byrds, has a lineage in Big Star, Badfinger, Cheap Trick, early Petty and the Posies and comes right up to . . . Just so many good people. Matthew Sweet has had digressions of piste on three covers albums... > Read more
Girl with Cat
Espen Eriksen Trio with Andy Sheppard: Perfectly Unhappy (Rune Grammofon/Southbound)
21 May 2018 | 1 min read
For those who remember when Andy Sheppard appeared – alongside Courtney Pine, Ronny Jordan, Loose Tubes, Django Bates and others – as one of the new wave of British jazz musicians in the Eighties it will doubtless come as a surprise that the young man is now 61 with a dozen or so albums under his own name and many, many more with the likes of the late Carla Bley,... > Read more
Indian Summer
Simon Hirst: Feet of God (usual online outlets)
21 May 2018 | 1 min read
There is an interesting and often ignored thread of slightly dreamy, widescreen pop out there from the likes of Jules Shear, Grant-Lee Phillips (before he went more twang), Matthew Sweet and many others, and at times it gets its head well above the parapet with the likes of Crowded House and Neil Finn's crafted songs. Simon Hirst is in that lineage, although when he hits... > Read more
Arohanui
NEIL YOUNG CONSIDERED (2018): Every Now, and Then
14 May 2018 | 3 min read
For a long time – perhaps from even as far back as '75 – Neil Young earned the right to do exactly what he wants . . . because he just does exactly what he wants. By '75 he has moved from folk-rock to folk and rock as distinct genres as well as finding a place (sometimes very briefly) in Crosby Stills And Nash's close harmonies or going straight down to the... > Read more
Thomas Bartlett and Nico Muhly: Peter Pears; Balinese Ceremonial Music (Nonesuch/Universal)
14 May 2018 | 1 min read
Cards on the table now, this I like . . . but I just don't get it.The title is the first problem: Peter Pears; if you know him at all it is as a long-dead classical singer/composer. And is this Balinese ceremonial music?Well, not a lot of it. Those of us who have been to Bali and enjoyed a healthy distance from the bars and boozy Australians in Kuta for the quiet of... > Read more
Taboeh Teleo
Gene Pitney: A Town Without Pity (1961)
14 May 2018 | 1 min read | 2
Because many of us used to read album covers with something approaching an obsession when we were first buying records, we got to know the names of songwriters (Charles and Inez Foxx always sounded so mysterious when I found them on the first Downliners Sect album) and even producers. So imagine my confusion when I saw the name "Gene Pitney" credited with... > Read more
BOB DYLAN: THE RETURN OF THE TROUBADOUR (2018): Still on the road, heading for another joint . . .
14 May 2018 | 2 min read
Without even bothering to do a fact-check it's a safe bet that Bob Dylan's last album would have been one of the poorest-selling of his long career: It was Triplicate, a three album set of him singing standards and followed two prior single albums along the same lines, the wonderful Shadows in the Night and the somewhat lesser Fallen Angels. Even the most patient fans... > Read more
Dean Martin: Italian Love Songs
14 May 2018 | 1 min read | 1
The fact is that every home should have a Dean Martin album or two, and those with a sense of humour will go for one in a really stupid cover (like this). Dean Martin was, as we have mentioned previously, profligate with his gifts and never really felt the need to stretch himself or prove anything to anyone. He would walk into a studio or onto a movie set, do his bit... > Read more
THE OFFICIAL NZ MUSIC MONTH SUMMIT (2018): Confronting Issues in the Music Industry
13 May 2018 | 6 min read
May, being the long established month to celebrate and promote New Zealand music, is also the right time to take a close look beneath the surfaces. As with the wider world, the New Zealand music industry is needing to come terms with issues which affect it, and the musicians, managers, promoters, producers and others within it. On Saturday May 26 int the Herald... > Read more
Pieter T: Goliath (usual streaming services)
13 May 2018 | 1 min read
One of the finest Pasifika soul/r'n'b voices – and acknowledged as such by radio play – Pieter T builds a pleasing bridge between pop, r'n'b, electronica and the airy, falsetto soul much favoured by young men in the genre. And that perhaps explains why the first two singles here ROD and Moving On (with B Wise) were playlisted on Spotify's New Music Friday in... > Read more
Used to Be
Steve Reich: Pulse/Quartet (Nonesuch/Universal)
10 May 2018 | 1 min read
As much in the vanguard of tape manipulation and phasing as he was in minimalism, Steve Reich increasingly brought a refined musicality to his larger projects like Tehillim and his opera The Cave which explored his Jewish heritage with historical resonances. In some of his work – especially the more minimalist and layered pieces – he is not that far from a... > Read more
Quartet: Fast Part 3
The The: Soul Mining (1983)
8 May 2018 | 4 min read | 2
Although punk fury exploded during the Labour government of James Callaghan (who succeed another Labour leader Harold Wilson, giving them about five years as an increasingly beleaguered minority government) the anger really became focused when Margaret Thatcher's hard-right Conservatives took over and unemployment rose, the recession bit hard, there were strikes and closures... > Read more
Uncertain Smile
Modern Studies: Welcome Strangers (Fire/Southbound)
7 May 2018 | <1 min read
We caught the debut album Swell to Great by this group now based in Scotland over a year after it rose without a trace in 2016 and was reissued on Fire in late 2017. That album breathed a contemporary and melancholy folk style coupled with loops, and we observed it seemed still on the surface but things ran dark and deep. We might says the same of this, except this is... > Read more
Fast as Flows
Aquaserge: Deja-Vous? (Crammed Discs/Southbound)
7 May 2018 | 1 min read
Here's one to have you racing to a web search because this French outfit can hardly be called a household name, although it seems they've been around for a decade, played in 10 countries, have won praise from Uncut and The Wire, and their last album Laisse ca etre was in a number of best of 2017 lists. They are also the subject of new doco, of the kind that might appear... > Read more
C'est pas tout mais
Various Artists: Late Night Tales; Agnes Obel (latenighttales/Southbound)
7 May 2018 | <1 min read
The Late Night Tales series always introduces unfamiliar artists in the selections but this collection by Agnes Obel is must more eccentric and eclectic than any others in the on-going series Opening with a disconcerting piece by Henry Mancini (The Evil Theme) and closing with Obel reading a poem of her own over percussion and a throbbing melody (Poem About Death), it... > Read more
Glemmer Du, by Agnes Obel
Bob Dylan: Up to Me (1974)
7 May 2018 | 1 min read | 1
Never throw anything away, huh? And Bob Dylan's career, with the massive and on-going Bootleg Series, just keeps presenting outtakes, live material, different versions and sometimes many complete songs which went unreleased. But even before the Bootleg Series was launched with the three volume collection in 1991, Dylan had already released the 53-song, five... > Read more
Steve Earle: Copperhead Road
7 May 2018 | <1 min read
In some ways Steve Earle is still much as he ever was, full of righteous anger, on the side of the working class and downtrodden and bristling with great songs. This 30-year old album has long been an Essential Elsewhere selection (there is an essay about why here) and also apperaed as a Bargain Buy on CD at one point. But we bring it to your attention again, not... > Read more