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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Kamasi Washington: Heaven and Earth (Young Turks)
25 Jun 2018 | 3 min read | 1
When composer/saxophonist Kamasi Washington announced himself with the magisterial triple CD The Epic in 2015, many were impressed by the ambition and scope (it was indeed epic in both) as much as by how Washington integrated a considerable number of black American music – jazz which reached from bop to astral aspiration but also soul, funk and more -- into what seemed like a unified... > Read more
The Last Poets: Understand What Black Is (Studio Rockers)
16 Jun 2018 | 2 min read
University students have grown up in a post-gangsta rap world so taking them back to origins – preachers in the church, street poets, Gil Scott Heron and others – is always a challenge for them. They hear some of it as odd, simple and sometimes compelling. The Last Poets present a particular problem because of pieces like Niggers Are Scared of Revolution where you have to... > Read more
Rain of Terror
Jon Hassell: Listening to Pictures/Pentimento Vol 1 (Ndeya/Border)
13 Jun 2018 | 1 min read
Trumpeter Jon Hassell came to attention at the dawn of the Eighties via a couple of innovative albums, Fourth World Vol 1/Possible Musics with Brian Eno and the even more interesting Dream Theory in Malaya (an Essential Elsewhere album) in which for one piece he used the rhythmic splashing of water by a Malay tribe as the base for his odd trumpet sound. Both albums had an appealing... > Read more
Slipstream
Alien Weaponry: Tu (Napalm Records)
8 Jun 2018 | 2 min read
Spotify is all very well but here is where it let's you down: With the vinyl album by this young (two members just 16), disciplined, experienced (they've been at it three years) metal outfit who frequently sing in te reo. Spotify will only give you a compressed sound but the vinyl version comes at you widescreen and about two centimetres from the end of your nose. The tracks are produced by... > Read more
Raupatu/Confiscated
Tami Neilson: Sassafrass! (Southbound)
28 May 2018 | 2 min read
Taking its title from the description of a sassy person rather than the plant, this new Tami Neilson album not only expands her musical horizons even further into songs which mostly which have their roots in the music of the Fifties, but also delivers a strong and over-riding ethos of female assertion and empowerment welded seamlessly onto these great songs. The women here are devil-angels... > Read more