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.

Subscribe to my newsletter for weekly updates.

Anthonie Tonnon: Leave Love Out of This (Slow Time/digital outlets)

12 Jul 2021  |  2 min read

Despite more than a decade of recording, touring (locally and internationally) and a Silver Scroll nomination for songwriting, Whanganui-based Anthonie Tonnon – who first appeared as Tono and the Finance Company – seemed destined for that netherworld reserved for “critics' favourite”. Yet his music has never been especially difficult or challenging. Yes, along... > Read more

When I'm Wrong

RECOMMENDED REISSUE: Leila: Like Weather (digital outlets)

11 Jul 2021  |  1 min read  |  2

Were it not for the chance discovery of an Uncut magazine from earlier this year we would not have known about this album from '98 by the Iranian-born, London-based electronica artist Leila Arab. This was her debut – recently reissued on vinyl – and Uncut singled it out in a Rediscovered column. Like some submerged or subterranean slo-mo trip-hop compilation where each track... > Read more

Namgar: Nayan Navaa (Arc Music/digital outlets)

5 Jul 2021  |  1 min read

Because in the past Elsewhere has gone to the remote Pamir Mountains, Central Asia, Azerbaijan, Native American musics and elsewhere, we are quite comfortable with a venture to the territory of the nomadic Buryats, an ethnic minority in Southern Siberia and Mongolia. But here – rather than some ethnomusicologist's approach – we are welcomed by the Moscow-based Namgar group... > Read more

Khadin Kursa Nogoonda/Green Grass

Dry Cleaning: New Long Leg (4AD/digital outlets)

21 Jun 2021  |  2 min read  |  1

If the immediate acclaim heaped on The Strokes when they emerged two decades ago taught us anything it was to be wary of middle-age and older white male rock critics who heard in them the formative music of their own youth (New Wave/Lou Reed?New York swagger) and therefore anointed the band with some strange notion of authenticity. The Strokes were fun, but accusations of... > Read more

Mdou Moctar: Afrique Victime (Matador/digital outlets)

12 Jun 2021  |  1 min read

Remarkably, it has been more than 15 years since Elsewhere started to write about what has been called “desert blues” or “Sahara blues” out of the Tuareg (and beyond) musicians from the sub-Sahara (and beyond) region of West Africa. Back then we picked Etran Finatawa and Tinariwen albums among our best of the year (and twice more since for the latter's subsequent... > Read more