Music at Elsewhere
These pages - sometimes with sample tracks and videos posted - introduce and review music which may otherwise go unheard and unnoticed. Subscribers to Elsewhere (free, here) receive a weekly e-newsletter with updates on what's new at the ever-expanding site. Elsewhere: an equal opportunity enjoyer. So enjoy.
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Best Bets: The Hollow Husk of Feeling (digital outlets)
14 Oct 2024 | 1 min read
A couple of weeks ago Elsewhere noted – not for the first time – how conservative and complacent a wide swathe on local music was. It was as if, as we said, the songs were obliged to come with guys playing an acoustic guitar around a campfire on a beach at sunset. (And bugger me, that very week a hugely popular local band delivered their new video which ended with almost exactly... > Read more
Delaney Davidson and Barry Saunders: Happiness is Near (digital outlets)
14 Oct 2024 | 1 min read
Delaney Davidson has been enormously prolific in the past decade: at least half a dozen albums under his own name, production work for Marlon Williams, Tami Neilson and Troy Kingi, guest appearances and collaborations. He fitted all these in around touring and appearances in television documentaries. Davidson's collaboration with Barry Saunders' on 2019's Word Gets Around brought... > Read more
Man of Few Words
Goodspace: Let's Talk About Death (digital outlets)
7 Oct 2024 | <1 min read
We saluted Goodspace/Jefferson Chen for his inventive album launch at a foodhall which we wrote about. Now lets turn attention to what's on the menu. Recorded at the Lab, Roundhead and his own studio, this album reflects Chen's considerable abilities and musical interests from the lightly boiling bass and percussion which drives She Don't Need You (which also gets away a serious guitar... > Read more
Nests
Memorials: Memorials Waterslide (digital outlets)
7 Oct 2024 | 1 min read
This impressive debut by Britain's Verity Susman and Matthew Simms cleaves close to classic, upbeat pop heading towards psychedelia with Susman's seductive vocal delivering venturesome lyrics which compliment the twisting melodies: “Turning back to an imaginary hearse, two white horses pulling towards the door. You’re too late to write the book” on the opener Acceptable... > Read more
Horse Head Pencil
Thurston Moore: Glow Critical Lucidity (digital outlets)
7 Oct 2024 | 1 min read
When Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth separated after more than 20 years of marriage, for the indie.kid generation it was as if their own parents had broken up. Moore and Gordon seemed to have had it all: a life together making music and art, being creative, hanging out with the hippest of the hip and so on. Well, infidelity rarely plays out well as Moore discovered, and... > Read more
Hypnogram
Dam Native: Kaupapa Driven Rhymes Uplifted
7 Oct 2024 | 1 min read
It's interesting to look at how this classic New Zealand album fared on release in late 1997: it just scraped into the top 40 and only lasted four weeks on the charts. That doesn't sound impressive at all until you consider that today we have a separate chart for local artists (actually a few) and so Dam Native was up against the best the world was throwing at us: Portishead, Bjork, the... > Read more
Bright Eyes: Five Dice, All Threes (digital outlets)
7 Oct 2024 | 1 min read
Here's an interesting and somewhat relevant comparison: bear with us. John Lennon's 1970 God on his Plastic Ono Band album was a renunciation of previously held beliefs (Elvis, Kennedy, mantra), the litany ending with “I don't believe in Beatles”. It was his farewell to Beatle John, the 1960s and being reborn. It was hard for many to take, but he was optimistic:... > Read more
El Capitan
Paul Turney and the Human Condition: Thoughts and Prayers (digital outlets)
30 Sep 2024 | 1 min read
A couple of weeks ago we posted a major interview with Paul Turney, not just because he was interesting but also because his life showed you how far music can take you: in his case the unexpected journey from playing with post-punk/New Wave band Flight X-7 out of Auckland to now living in lovely Cirencester, England where he has his own company cleaning up archival recordings from the Irish... > Read more
Another World
MJ Lenderman: Manning Fireworks (digital outlets)
30 Sep 2024 | 1 min read
Sometimes you feel a weird connection with an album that you kind of adopt it, tell friends who stop listening the second you mention the unfamiliar name of an artist or just listen to in private wonder what it would take for this artist to become more than a cult act. We leave you with the names Howe Gelb, Julia Jacklin, the Unforgiven and the Shoes. And now MJ Lenderman. Outside... > Read more
She's Leaving You
Nick Lowe and Los Straitjackets: Indoor Safari (digital outlets)
30 Sep 2024 | 1 min read
Over the decades Elsewhere has interviewed many, many hundreds of musicians: some have been smart and funny (David Bowie, PJ Harvey, Lulu), others fascinating (Bjork, Ornette Coleman, Linton Kwesi Johnson), a few surprising in their candour (Miles Davis), some troubled (Townes Van Zandt), some political (Steve Earle, Chuck D) . . . and occasionally there's someone like Nikki Sixx or Neil Young.... > Read more
Crying Inside
JT and the Agnostics: Yes More Blues (digital outlets)
30 Sep 2024 | 1 min read
This will be quick because this Waikato band have an album release coming up (see details below). First, they are honest: the album title, the band name with reference to the opener God's Mind. The band are as follows, and there are some familiar names here enjoying themselves on these originals: John Thomson (bass, vocals), guitarist Maciek Hrybowicz, Ben Gilgen (keyboards), drummer... > Read more
Feeling for the Blues
Manu Chao: Viva Tu (digital outlets)
25 Sep 2024 | 1 min read
Although he could comfortably slip onto our world music pages, French-born Manu Chao is popular in the Western world of folk and rock for his assemblages of sounds and styles as diverse as Algerian rai, the Clash, samba, Cuban music, reggae and more. His first band Mano Negra broke out of the world music sphere with their energetic shows and recordings. I caught them in Paris... > Read more
Cuarto Calles
Johnny Devlin and the Devils: Live in Christchurch 1959 (digital outlets)
23 Sep 2024 | <1 min read
Now here's something of more than just historical interest: New Zealand's first teenage sensation rock'n'roll star Johnny Devlin with his band the Devils proving that poor recording, barely functional playing and primitive rock songs can't diminish the excitement of the moment. Yes Max Merritt got there first in local rock'n'roll but Devlin toured, had the Elvis moves down and better... > Read more
Twenty Flight Rock
Kokomo: Futura (digital outlets)
23 Sep 2024 | <1 min read | 1
If you haven't heard of Kokomo – and they have appeared at Elsewhere a few times – that is hardly their fault. Formed in 1991when Tauranga singer/guitarist Derek Jacombs hooked up with harmonica player Grant Bullot to play blues, they added members, played every festival possible from Sweetwaters 1999 to folk and jazz events, and along the way recorded more than a dozen albums.... > Read more
Something Funny Going On (Red Mix)
Molly Payton: YOYOTTA (digital outlets)
23 Sep 2024 | 1 min read | 1
Sometimes the first track on an album is an announcement of what is to follow, although increasingly we have notice a number of artists ease their way slowly Рand sometimes at great length Рwith that first piece. So as with the book/cover clich̩ which contains an element of truth, it's best not to make up your mind just one track. Case in point this debut by London-based... > Read more
A Hand Held Strong
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds: Wild God (digital outlets)
16 Sep 2024 | 2 min read
About 10 years ago I was invited to introduce Nick Cave to an audience which had turned up to see his film 20,000 Days on Earth – a fiction which looks like a doco about a few days talking and recording – and then engage in a Q&A session. He was delightful: business-like, undemanding, witty, accommodating and generous. He and I chatted a little beforehand – I wrote... > Read more
Final Rescue Attempt
David Gilmour: Luck and Strange (digital outlets)
9 Sep 2024 | 1 min read
Many decades ago there was a New Zealand whisky called 45 South. My father used to say it was a perfectly fine drink . . . as long as you didn't think of it as a whisky. I mentioned this the other night to a friend when the topic of the new David Gilmour album came up. Neither of us had rated his solo albums outside Pink Floyd as being up to much and then I said I actually didn't mind... > Read more
The Piper's Call
Gillian Welch and David Rawlings: Woodland (digital outlets)
9 Sep 2024 | 1 min read
When we interviewed Gillian Welch 20 years ago it was still relatively early in her career, but she and her partner David Rawlings were already being acclaimed – on the basis of the albums Hell Among the Yearlings and Time (The Revelator) – as being in the vanguard of a deeply rooted Americana. Their debut – although credited solely to Welch – was the Grammy-winning... > Read more
The Day the Mississippi Died
Pitch Black: Echoes of the Night; The Adrian Sherwood Remixes (digital outlets)
6 Sep 2024 | 1 min read
Elsewhere at Elsewhere Mike Hodgson – one half of Pitch Black alongside Paddy Free – explains how these four remixes of their material came into being. Have a look here. So here let's just acknowledge how very different the results are from the source material on their 2007 Rude Mechanicals album. The haunting opener Transient Transmission is twist of a twist: remixer... > Read more
Transient Transmission
Peel Dream Magazine: Rose Main Reading Room (digital outlets)
6 Sep 2024 | <1 min read
Across 15 seductive songs this LA-based trio offer what sounds like lush miniatures which blend languid vocals, warm synth washes, minimalist repetition and understated melodies. The sort of music you could imagine playing quietly in a reading room. They aren't averse to glistening pop (I Wasn't Made For War) and we might guess the band's songwriter Joe Stevens had an affection for... > Read more