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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Sarathy Korwar: More Arriving (Leaf/Southbound)
19 Jul 2019 | 1 min read
The previous studio album Day to Day by this US-born, India-raised and Britain-based percussionist/scene-maker received immense praise at Elsewhere and was in our best of 2016 list. It was a blazing and exciting fusion of samples, electronica and jazz. It was also quite the challenge. This time out Korwar – shying not a bit from making challenging music – invites in a number... > Read more
Mumbay
75 Dollar Bill: I Was Real (Glitterbeat/Southbound)
12 Jul 2019 | 2 min read
Anyone who saw the extraordinary Noura Mint Seymali from Mauritania at Womad Taranaki in 2018 couldn't help but be impressed by her husband on guitar whose playing was fluid, mercurial, seemingly effortless and shapeshifting of melodies and chords. Unfortunately that playing by Jeiche Ould Chigaly was only hinted at on the album Arbina . . . but his name alone made such a deep impression... > Read more
WZN4
Thom Yorke: Anima (XL/Rhythmethod)
8 Jul 2019 | 1 min read
When the Italian indie-cult horror film Suspiria – with a soundtrack by prog-rockers Goblin – appeared on television recently you had to wonder why, after more than 40 years, it would suddenly pop up on the small screen. Perhaps because of the recent remake which had new and very impressive music by Radiohead's Thom Yorke? Maybe encouraged by the approval his soundtrack... > Read more
Bob Dylan: The Rolling Thunder Revue; The 1975 Live Recordings (Sony, 14 CD box set)
24 Jun 2019 | 6 min read
When Bob Dylan resumed his Rolling Thunder Revue tour in April 1976 for dates around the South -- four months after the first incarnation had finished playing around the US North-east and into Canada -- there was a very different atmosphere around it. By every account, Dylan in the new year was more serious and introspective, his marriage was in serious trouble, his old folk-days friend... > Read more
One More Cup of Coffee
Bruce Springsteen: Western Stars (Sony)
23 Jun 2019 | 2 min read
In his Broadway spoken (and SHOUTED!!!) word show peppered by songs, the man they call The Boss joked that he'd written about those who do the daily working grind, but that he'd never done it himself. Yet from Born to Run – and more specifically Darkness on the Edge of Town – he started to channel the hopes, fears, dead-ends and lives of those out there struggling to survive... > Read more
The Wayfarer
RECOMMENDED REISSUE: Sonic Youth: Battery Park NYC, July 4th 2008 (Matador/Rhythmethod)
18 Jun 2019 | 1 min read
This live album was released as a bonus with Sonic Youth's final album The Eternal in 2009 (one of Elsewhere's best of that year) and reminds you what a seminal band they were. And how much missed they are in the current climate of seemingly unfashionable (if we believe the charts) guitar-based rock. Effortlessly creating a bridge between NYC avant-garde, guitar-noise and... > Read more
100% (live)
Scott Mannion: Loving Echoes (Lil' Chief)
10 Jun 2019 | 1 min read
Although recorded in Spain, Norway, New Zealand and Wales over six years with a cast of Lil' Chief artists and fellow travelers, this debut album by Scott Mannion – who came to attention with the wonderful Tokey Tones in 2003, and has lived in Spain since 2013 – holds together as a musically coherent work. His reflective and understated lyrics follow the arc of a relationship... > Read more
Somebody Else's Dream
Jimmy Barnes: My Criminal Record (Bloodlines)
7 Jun 2019 | 1 min read
The great Australian rock legend JImmy Barnes has undergone a kind of soul-baring resurrection in recent years with his autobiographies Working Class Boy and Working Class Man, his garrulous interviews and a candour which endears him to an audience which can identify with his fuel-injected years in Cold Chisel and his songs about the harder edges of life which he sings about so persuasively.... > Read more
Jeff Kelly: Beneath the Stars, Above the River (Green Monkey/digital outlets)
20 May 2019 | 1 min read
Seattle's Jeff Kelly has appeared many times at Elsewhere for over a decade, initially when we made the case for his classy and literate pop-rock with the band Green Pajamas (intelligent indie-pop and sometimes hitting the perfect pop-rock point of the Beach Boys and Beatles 1965-66), then in a different incarnation on acoustic-framed and artistic albums and now . . . His travels to Spain... > Read more