Favourite Five Recent Releases

Five of the best albums from the recent postings at Elsewhere. Music too good to let slide into the archives. The Elsewhere place if you're looking for a quick fix.

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The Flaming Lips: American Head (Bella Union/digital outlets)

14 Sep 2020  |  2 min read

Longtime fans of Oklahoma's Flaming Lips – the pivotal figure being the delightfully humorous but here deadly serious Wayne Coyne -- know how frustrating they can be. Elsewhere goes as far back as Transmissions from the Satellite Heart ('93) and even before that courtesy of the '98 triple CD compilation Finally the Punk Rockers Are Taking Acid 1983-1988. But their digressions... > Read more

Emily Barker: A Dark Murmuration of Words (Thirty Tigers/digital outlets)

12 Sep 2020  |  1 min read

Those who were engrossed by the British version of the television series Wallander (guilty!) about a Swedish detective played by Kenneth Branagh – and many Swedes I've met preferred it to the local original – might recognise the name of this Australian singer-songwriter. She wrote the haunting theme music for that BBC series, which alone might be recommendation enough for this... > Read more

Nubya Garcia: Source (Concord/digital outlets)

6 Sep 2020  |  1 min read

From this distance and just relying on recordings, Britain's vibrant, contemporary jazz scene appears to pivot around large London ensembles, sometimes with shifting memberships and often with Shabaka Hutchings somewhere central or as a facilitator. Among Elsewhere's favourite albums from this exciting milieu – of those that we have heard – however are Blume by... > Read more

The Wild Kindness: Faulty (Orchard/digital outlets)

30 Aug 2020  |  1 min read

During the first Covid closure in New Zealand we here at Elsewhere were bombarded by bands and artists who had recorded their lockdown single, EP or album and were anxious to get attention for it. That it coincided with New Zealand Music Month simply meant that literally more than a score of music releases would arrive ever week, some recorded beforehand and others just banged off in... > Read more

Various Artists: The Ann Arbor Blues Festival 1969 (Third Man/digital outlets)

1 Aug 2020  |  5 min read

As we well know, history is telescoped by time: something which happened 20 years ago ago can be fresh in the memory but also thought to have been contemporary with something from 10 years previous. Long gone decades implode and blur. We can easily forget, for example – given just how familiar we have become with the blues – that this was a marginal music in the early... > Read more