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THE MOVE: ALWAYS AND FOREVER; BELATEDLY (2025): Classic pop, great rock then forgot
11 Aug 2025 | 8 min read | 4
Anyone dumb enough to rely on an encyclopedia of rock or -- worse -- that self-described disgrace which is "Classic Hits" radio, would be forgiven for not knowing that the Move ever existed. Those DJs at "classic rock" certainly would have no clue . . . but we expect them to be clueless, I suppose. Shame on them. It seems the Move -- despite their... > Read more
Fire Brigade
THE BEATLES' HELP!, CONSIDERED (1965): Personal, pop and populist
7 Aug 2025 | 4 min read
When the Beatles released their Help! album in August 1965 they owned the world: they'd conquered Britain and the Commonwealth countries, then America and then just about everywhere. There were Beatle copy bands from Manila to Mexico City, Newcastle to New Zealand. Beatlemania was real. They'd sold millions of records, played scores of concerts (Shea Stadium was just a week away),... > Read more
Help!
RECOMMENDED RECORD: Soft Bait: Life Advice (Flying Nun, digital outlets)
4 Aug 2025 | 2 min read
From time to time Elsewhere will single out a recent release we recommend on vinyl, like this which comes with lyrics on an insert sheet and in a framable cover by the band's Joshua Hunter. Check out Elsewhere's other Recommended Record picks . . . . Because Elsewhere is so inundated with full-length albums (and wishes to digress into essays about artists and unusual or... > Read more
Applause
Elephant Gym: Live in The World, Tokyo (digital outlets)
4 Aug 2025 | <1 min read
This trio from Taiwan have slowly built a reputation for their genre-defying melange of Chinese pop, post-rock, experimental sounds between jazz and rock and . . . You get the picture. Siblings KT -- sister, singer, bass and keyboards – and her brother Tell Chang on guitars and keyboards, were classically trained and met drummer Tu Chia-Chin in high school. The band formed in... > Read more
Shadow
THE BRUTHERS, DISCOVERED (2025): Sixties none-hit wunders
4 Aug 2025 | 1 min read
Someone out there in Pearl River, New York will know of the four-pice Bruthers who released one single, Bad Way To Go, in 1966 for RCA. But given that single all but disappeared (collectors like to say “ultra-rare”), those who remember the Bruthers are probably just the Delia brothers themselves or close family members. We can't tell you much more than we already have except... > Read more
Wake Me, Shake Me
Burning Spear, Marcus Garvey/Garvey's Ghost (1975)
4 Aug 2025 | 2 min read | 1
In Ted Bafaloukos' '78 film Rockers -- a lightweight comedy but excellent quasi-doco about the world of Jamaican music with a stunning cast of reggae luminaries -- there are any number of remarkable scenes: the lead character is a drummer (played by Leroy "Horsemouth" Brown) who puts a down-payment on a motorbike with the idea of selling cheap records into shops all over the island.... > Read more
Slavery Days
Dusty Springfield: Longing (digital outlets)
4 Aug 2025 | 1 min read
Although she died more than a quarter century ago and her songs – not even her best pop hits of the early-mid Sixties – seldom get radio play these days, most people with an interest in music would have (or know that should have) a Greatest Hits and her 1968 Dusty in Memphis albums in their collection. She came from folk with the Springfields (her voice utterly distinctive on... > Read more
WHEN POP PLUGGED IN (2025): Synth-pop from the junkshops
4 Aug 2025 | 3 min read
More often than not, music captures spirit of the age: Post-war bebop tuned in to the tough urban world and ran parallel to Jack Kerouac's freewheeling prose and the physicality of Jackson Pollock's art; the Beatles and beat-pop arrived alongside Carnaby Street fashion and the hairstyling of Vidal Sassoon; British punk surging on the phlegm and fury of a young generation failed by institutions... > Read more
Dinah Washington: Big Long Slidin' Thing (1954)
4 Aug 2025 | <1 min read | 1
It's about a trombone player's instrument, of course. Well, of course it is . . . But the sexually voracious and seldom satisfied Washington (seven husbands, countless lovers) knows exactly what this is about and manages to milk the innuendo in her typically sassy way. Her real forte was torch songs and she crossed effortlessly between jazz, blues, pop and rhythm and blues -- and... > Read more
The Circling Sun: Orbits (digital outlets)
4 Aug 2025 | 1 min read
Auckland's The Circling Sun – whose 2023 Spirits debut we called “utterly entrancing” – is a collective around drummer, producer and arranger Julien Dyne and saxophonist Cameron Allen -- both having appeared at Elsewhere many times – tapped into 1960s Latin American jazz and bebop. But this new album sees them push even further into new sources, which... > Read more
Amina
SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, AGAIN (2025): A lie to tell the truth
3 Aug 2025 | 5 min read
Many who read Robert Kershaw's recent, scrupulously researched and compelling Dünkirchen 1940: The German View of Dunkirk would doubtless be drawn back into watching Christopher Nolan's award-winning 2017 film Dunkirk with its extraordinary sound design by Hans Zimmer. Through remarkable cinematography by Hoyte van Hoytema and a story-line that shifts in time and location, Dunkirk largely... > Read more
THE LEGACY OF CHUCK BERRY, CONSIDERED ONCE MORE: The first poet of rock'n'roll
30 Jul 2025 | 1 min read
With only one notable exception – his godawful '72 hit My Ding-A-Ling – nearly all of Chuck Berry's best known songs came in a rush on the Chess label in a five year period from August '55 when he released Maybellene. Berry was one of the greatest and most important figures in the development of rock'n'roll and popular music for many reasons: he brought the guitar to the... > Read more
The Famous Elsewhere Questionnaire
THE FAMOUS ELSEWHERE HIGHLY PERSONAL QUESTIONNAIRE: Cameron McCurdy aka LEIGH
28 Jul 2025 | 11 min read
Elsewhere recently received an email from a former music student who invited us to have a listen to their debut album. It is titled Empathy for my Future Self and we reviewed it very favourably. It was released under the name LEIGH because Cameron (now she/her) had undergone the transition and the album addressed that. But, as we noted, “While many trans artists speak of the... > Read more
He's Giving
Tyler Childers: Snipe Hunter (digital outlets)
28 Jul 2025 | <1 min read | 1
The country-rockin' Tyler Childers is one of those artists who seems to have gone past most people. He has six albums behind him and at 34 sounds like he's reached a peak on this willfully wayward album of psychedelic country, narrative country-folk and more, produced by Rick Rubin. And we should mention he's become engaged by the Krishnas so there's some spiritual depth here too, and... > Read more
Dirty Ought Trill
ROCK'N'ROLL OVER BEETHOVEN? Where classical music enters pop
28 Jul 2025 | 3 min read
Although most pop and rock listeners might not think it so, many songwriters have drawn on classical music . . . and not just for inspiration, but sometimes quite directly grabbing at the melodies. We're not talking about Deodata offering his electro-treatment of Strauss' Thus Spoke Zarathustra or Love Sculpture's flat-tack guitar workout on Sabre Dance (by Khachaturian), or... > Read more
Goodbye Cruel World, by James Darren
Tom Lehrer; An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer
28 Jul 2025 | 1 min read
In one of the university courses I took, I spent a couple of hours on a lecture under the title -- lifted from Frank Zappa -- "Does Humour Belong in Music?" The general point is that most contemporary musicians take themselves so seriously that we can barely imagine them cracking a smile let alone writing a funny song. Talking to you Chris Martin et al. Yet humour has been a... > Read more
Oedipus Rex
The Clear Path Ensemble: Black Sand (digital outlets)
28 Jul 2025 | 1 min read
On recent releases we've seen local jazz musicians pull from the spiritual quests of people like John and Coltrane, Sun Ra and Pharoah Sanders (Lucien Johnson's highly recommended Wax///Wane and Ancient Relics albums) and those leaning towards the Latin American direction (Julien Dyne and Cameron Allen's on-going Circling Sun project). There have been those around Jeff Henderson... > Read more
Temple Block Sustain
Bruce Springsteen: Fugitive's Dream (1983)
28 Jul 2025 | <1 min read
Not really pulled from our vaults because this was only recently pulled from Springsteen's. It has been released on the box set Tracks II: The Lost Albums. That sequel to the 1998 box set Tracks collects seven unreleased and complete albums (more correctly six discrete albums and one collection of sessions). It is like a slightly alternative journey through Springsteen's career: there... > Read more
Fugitive's Dream, version 1
STEVIE WONDER: THE SECRET LIFE OF PLANTS, CONSIDERED (1979): Trimming and pruning required
28 Jul 2025 | 3 min read
Every now and again a book comes along and captures the imagination of many. Recently there has been the Oprah-approved The Secret and Eat Pray Love (“Now a major motion picture starring Julia Roberts!”). The late Sixties and Seventies seemed awash with popular books passed hand-to-hand: anything by Carlos Castaneda (drugs and enlightenment, man), Chariots of the Gods... > Read more
The First Garden
LIONEL HAMPTON WITH ILLINOIS JACQUET: Tenor taking flight in '42
21 Jul 2025 | 2 min read
Most rock and pop biographies follow a very standard pattern: a little about the artists' background and home life, meeting fellow travellers, early struggles, career taking off, troubles and travails and . . . However that story ends: drugs, death, rehab or second coming etc. Jazz biographies however, because of the very nature of the music and its creation, tend to have greater... > Read more