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PERE UBU REISSUED, PART ONE (2016): On a thin wire dancing above the abyss
28 Apr 2025 | 6 min read
In his 1974 philosophical narrative Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the American author Robert M. Pirsig writes of being at the home of some friends where there is a constantly dripping tap. “If you try to fix a faucet and your fixing doesn’t work then it’s just your lot to live with a dripping faucet,” he writes. “This made me wonder... > Read more
Thriller!
Adrianne Lenker: Live at Revolution Hall (digital outlets)
28 Apr 2025 | <1 min read
Outside of the band Big Thief, their singer-songwriter Adrianne Lenker runs a parallel solo career which has hit some impressive high-water marks. Notably last year's Grammy-nominated Bright Future (in the folk category) which was also among our best of 2024 picks. (The earlier Big Thief album Dragon Warm New Mountain in our 2022 list.) This enormous collection – two hours, 43... > Read more
Not a Lot, Just Forever (live)
Betty James: I'm a Little Mixed Up (1961)
28 Apr 2025 | <1 min read
Careers can been pretty short sometimes, witness the case of Betty James out of Baltimore who played the club circuit with her husband on guitar and son on bass. She was heard by a couple of ambitious entrepreneurs --Bobby Johnson and Joe Evans -- who had her record I'm a Little Mixed Up for their New York label Cee Jay. It became a hit in the city but Chess Records in Chicago heard it,... > Read more
Anouar Brahem: After the Last Sky (ECM/digital outlets)
28 Apr 2025 | 1 min read
It has been almost 20 years since we first wrote about Tunisian oud player Brahem (the ECM album Le Voyage de Sahar) whose subsequent albums have always been worth hearing. Oddly enough although we heard them we only ever wrote about one other. That said, he hasn't recorded that much since Sahar, just three albums under his own name prior to this one. We therefore welcome the... > Read more
Dancing Under the Meteorites
Alisa Xayalith: Slow Crush (digital outlets)
28 Apr 2025 | 1 min read
Now this is interesting and raises the usual interesting questions about just how autobiographical about their love life an artist wants to be. The embarrassment of J-Lo putting it all out there – on album, documentary and some weird extended video movie – about her getting back with Ben Affleck should be an object example to anyone. A few months after that blitz of... > Read more
Romance is Dead
Lucy Dacus: Forever is a Feeling (digital outlets)
28 Apr 2025 | 1 min read
When bands break up it's interesting to observe which members go on to the most success: in 1970 would anyone have put their money on George Harrison over McCartney and Lennon? The Stones never actually broke up but when Mick Jagger released solo albums he realised very quickly that his best pathway to more success lay in mending the rift with Keith and getting the band back together.... > Read more
Limerence
The Great Learning Orchestra: Selected Recordings from Grapefruit by Yoko Ono (Karl/digital outlets)
25 Apr 2025 | 2 min read
As we've noted in reviews of a couple of recent books about Yoko Ono, people are increasingly aware that she's in her Nineties and by some accounts unwell. There's a kind of concerned death watch going on and a review of her remarkable career. There was a recent retrospective exhibition at the Tate Modern and touring exhibitions keep her name and physical art alive. Her music is... > Read more
Overtone Piece
The Famous Elsewhere Questionnaire
THE FAMOUS ELSEWHERE SONGWRITER QUESTIONNAIRE . . . Lisa Crawley
24 Apr 2025 | 3 min read
Given that New Zealand singer-songwriter Lisa Crawley has been on many people's radar since the early 2000s -- Elsewhere reviewed her EP Hello, Goodbye and Everything In Between in 2009 and her debut album Everything That I Have Seen was released in 2011 -- it seems odd that at this later stage we would have her answer some songwriting questions. However she won the Pacific... > Read more
The Gatekeeper
PETE HAM OF BADFINGER, REMEMBERED: Take a sad song and make it sadder
22 Apr 2025 | 7 min read | 3
Put simply: Pete Ham was one of the singer-songwriters in Badfinger, the British pop band of the late Sixties and early Seventies which enjoyed the patronage of Paul McCartney. He gave them his Come and Get It (used in the Ringo-Peter Sellers movie The Magic Christian) on the condition they record it exactly as his demo. They did, it was a hit, and a band was born which always... > Read more
Hurry on Father (demo from the Golders Green album)
Big Boy Groves: Bucket o Blood (1962)
22 Apr 2025 | <1 min read
Most songs inviting you to club promise a great night with dancing and drinking and fun times to be had. Ervin Groves from San Diego promising nothing of the sort with this song. In fact this is one club which sounds like it would be a must to avoid because of the bodies stacking up. The mention in the opening lines to the Chicken Shack is a reference to a song by Chris Kenner... > Read more
BILLY STRINGS, INTERVIEWED (2025): That ol' bluegrass metal boogie
22 Apr 2025 | 2 min read
The boy's life rolled out like a bleak American black'n'white film set in OxyContin County, Kentucky where fiddlers play on the back-porch and fentanyl is the currency. His father died when he was two, his mother remarried but the couple fell prey to meth addiction. The boy left home at 13 and went through his own dependencies. And that could have been where the film reached... > Read more
Dealing Despair
Tom Lark: Moonlight Motel (digital outlets)
22 Apr 2025 | 1 min read
Two years ago it was Tom Lark's time: the debut album Brave Star under the Lark name -- he also works as Shannon Fowler and Shannon Matthew Vanya -- was in our best of year picks, earned him a Silver Scroll nomination and the album was a Taite Prize finalist for the Auckland singer, songwriter and producer. It was crafted collection of slightlydelic dream pop with intelligent lyrics... > Read more
Dumb Luck
RECOMMENDED REISSUE: Think: We'll Give You a Buzz (CD/vinyl)
14 Apr 2025 | 2 min read
One of the many rewards of following the releases on Grant Gillanders' Frenzy reissue label is just how good so many of the bands were at the time but went largely unheard. Sometimes he unearths a band and pulls together an album out of their recordings. Or in the case of the thrilling Grim Ltd he discovers a live tape of their final gig and releases the raw r'n'b garageband rock to... > Read more
Our Children (Think About)
Elsewhere Art . . . Jeff Healey
14 Apr 2025 | <1 min read
Blues singer- guitarist Jeff Healey -- who died in 2008 -- was a great collector of 78rpm records. When Elsewhere interviewed him in the early 2000s he spoke about the 11,000 he had at home (he'd just bought another 30 or 40 in a nearby store) and so evoking that old time music and look just seemed a bit obvious for this collage. He also loved Dixieland and so there had to be a... > Read more
1968: SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION: The world on a short fuse
14 Apr 2025 | 19 min read | 2
1968: THE YEAR THAT ROCKED THE WORLD? "Somehow Sgt Pepper did not stop the war in Vietnam. Somehow it didn't work. Somebody isn't listening" -- David Crosby of Crosby Stills and Nash, 1970 "Rock stars believed that they possessed the latent power to effect political and cultural change: one anthem and the walls of the citadel would crack, like Jericho under... > Read more
Hotlegs: Neanderthal Man (1970)
14 Apr 2025 | 1 min read
It's not unusual for studio experiments to end up on records, less common that they become the record itself -- as was the case with this single. To backtrack a bit. The successful British songwriter Graham Gouldman who had penned hits for Herman's Hermits (No Milk Today), the Yardbirds (For Your Love, Heart Full of Soul, Evil Hearted You) and others ran into a dry spell in the late... > Read more
(Warning, from vinyl so has enjoyable surface noise)
GUEST MUSICIAN MARK DE CLIVE LOWE speaks of the inspiration for his new album Past Present (Tone Poems Across Time)
14 Apr 2025 | 4 min read
This album is a collection of personal moments and reflections. Reflections on family, reflections on the past, reflections on the present. It’s a sonic and intimate journey with my late father Robin de Clive-Lowe top of mind. A journey of discovery, catharsis and healing. My father boarded a cargo ship and made his way from Auckland, New Zealand to Hiroshima, Japan in late 1953, a... > Read more
Heart
Favourite Five Recent Releases
Marlon Williams: Te Whare Tīwekaweka (digital outlets/vinyl)
14 Apr 2025 | 1 min read
In June 2021, the soul singer Teeks appeared in concert at Auckland's Civic Theatre before a large and appreciative audience. It was a significant event beyond being a concert. Here was a young, bilingual gay Māori man singing to a broad cross-section of mainstream Kiwis and, as I noted in a review, the enthusiastic response her got was emblematic of how far we've come and encouraging... > Read more
Kōrero Māori
Serebii: Dime (digital outlets/vinyl)
14 Apr 2025 | <1 min read
The multi-instrumentalist and expat producer Callum Mower (AKA neo-soul, folksy singer/songwriter Serebii) has said he draws inspiration from Aldous Harding and his frequent collaborator has been local soul-jazz artist Arjuna Oakes. Although he has moved back to this country from London, he is increasingly connecting with a global audience and recent PR out of the US said he was... > Read more
By Design
Haiku Redo: Disco Summer (Failsafe/digital outlets)
11 Apr 2025 | 1 min read
Up there in Japan, Rob Mayes of the Failsafe label goes through the dozens of recordings and albums he made with various bands, many from Christchurch during the Eighties, Nineties and some even beyond the label's heyday. It's a rewarding labour love because here was a label on which was the alternative to the alternative (Flying Nun, Xpressway etc) and mostly held the banner high for... > Read more