Favourite Five Recently Reviewed CDs
Five of the best albums from the recent postings at New Music From Elsewhere. Music too good to let slide into the archives. The Elsewhere place if you are looking for a quick fix of great and interesting albums.
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Barbra Streisand: Walls (Sony)
7 Nov 2018 | 2 min read
Despite what many might wish to think, President Trump has actually managed to achieve a lot in his reign . . . like inspiring 76-year old Barbra Streisand to start writing her own songs again. As we noted previously, this remarkable voice has mostly been in the service of other writers but every now and again – and far too infrequently – she has written her own material.... > Read more
Don't Lie To Me
BOB DYLAN: MORE BLOOD, MORE TRACKS, THE BOOTLEG SERIES VOL. 14 (2018): Songs blowing around his skull
5 Nov 2018 | 7 min read | 1
When David called Kevin on a freezing night in Minneapolis just after Christmas 1974 he had an unusual request. He was looking for a small-bodied Martin acoustic guitar and he thought Kevin, a brakeman on the railroad and part-time musician, may be able to help. Kevin, a guitarist, called his friend Chris who had a guitar shop in the northern district of Dinkytown and, even though he... > Read more
You're A Big Girl Now (take 2)
Quimper: Perdide (Soft Bodies/digital outlets)
2 Nov 2018 | <1 min read
This UK outfit had me when they mentioned The Cleaners From Venus in their modest approach to Elsewhere. If you don't know that band then immediately seek out Giles Smith's Lost in Music which is hilarious and a somewhat true story about his time in that unsuccessful but now cult band: It is “one man's journey into the world of rock and then back to his Mum's.” In truth, one... > Read more
Christ in a Field of Caravans
JOHN LENNON, IMAGINE EXPANDED (2018): Just gimme some truth . . . and more
8 Oct 2018 | 6 min read
John Lennon's exceptional and essential Plastic Ono Band album of December 1970 was a self-lacerating autobiographical statement which drilled into skeletal and viscerally spare music, was courageous and emotionally naked. It was a farewell to Beatle John and the decade his band dominated and defined. It was imbued with anger and resentment, and in its final... > Read more
I Don't Wanna Be a Soldier Mama (take 11)
Harry Lyon: “To the Sea” (Norm/Southbound)
5 Oct 2018 | 2 min read
It should come as no surprise that Harry Lyon writes a great album, after all he has some prior form in Hello Sailor and Coup D'Etat. He also wrote Muscles which was on Mitch Marsden's Burning Rain album and was nominated for a Silver Scroll back in '91. Muscles appears here again, but it now sounds very different and bears the aural fingerprint of the album's producer Delaney Davidson who... > Read more