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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Water From Your Eyes: It's A Beautiful Place (digital outlets)
25 Aug 2025 | 1 min read
This left-field indie outfit from Chicago – signed to Matador after a brace of self-released albums – was first heard by Elsewhere on the album of Howe Gelb/Giant Sand covers Sandworms. That was just a fortnight ago and we speculated most our our readers wouldn't have heard of them either. Here's them with Gelb's Warm Storm. But we do our “own... > Read more
Spaceship
Mild Orange: The//Glow (digital outlets)
25 Aug 2025 | 1 min read
We were so impressed by the previous album Looking For Space by the Dunedin-founded and globally ambitious Mild Orange that we ran a track-by-track account written by their mainman Josh Mehrtens. It confirmed they were as smart a band as we thought. They arrive at this fourth album of gently assertive dream pop somewhere adjacent to the Church of the 1990s and Slowdive. There can be... > Read more
My Light
No Cigar: Under the Surface (digital outlets)
25 Aug 2025 | 1 min read
Although No Cigar have made an impression on the local charts we get the impression they are still not as well known as they should be. We have always rated them in our other life reviewing singles for The Listener, for example when writing about their recent, menacingly chugging single Clean in advance of this album we noted they had two solid albums behind them and were not as risk averse... > Read more
Merci Merci
RECOMMENDED RECORD: Minuit: The 88 (digital outlets)
24 Aug 2025 | 2 min read
From time to time Elsewhere will single out a recent release we recommend on vinyl, like this which now comes as a double album with four additional tracks added to the original album. Check out Elsewhere's other Recommended Record picks . . . . Even band member Paul Dodge admits the electronica trio are “supposed to be retired”. “But the fact that we... > Read more
Cautiousness
Roei Hermon: Dálum (digital outlets)
18 Aug 2025 | <1 min read
According to Israel experimentalist and multi-instrumentalist Roei Hermon the title track here comes from a Polynesian word for inside the mind, and he drew inspiration from Ornette Coleman's Lonely Woman. We buy the latter but suspend judgment about that former claim. The accent above the “a” raises a few alarm bells in itself not to mention the letter “d” being in... > Read more
Sunshine
Fran Barton and the Kevin Clark Group: Dancing on a Wavetop (digital outlets)
18 Aug 2025 | 2 min read
It seems a shame that Kevin Clark is not better known outside of Wellington jazz circles. The pianist, trumpeter and composer won two jazz album of the year awards in 2003 and 2005 for Once Upon a Song I Flew and The Sandbar Sessions respectively. Elsewhere picked up on his 2006 album Zahara where he explored Middle Eastern and Latin sounds with singer Fran Barton. That too won the... > Read more
River
Lachie Hayes: Subsatellite (digital outlets)
11 Aug 2025 | 1 min read
As with any broadly defined musical genre – jazz, rock, rap, blues etc – there are invariably subsets within subsets. Country music contains, among other smaller divisions, white Appalachian music, black Southern country, the cowboy songs of Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, Western Swing, the rock-influenced hat acts like Garth Brooks, the legendary Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn and Dolly... > Read more
The Likes of You
The Response: Novel Idea (digital outlets)
11 Aug 2025 | 1 min read
Christchurch's Response had equal billing on the Art School Dropout album by former Goodshirt singer/writer Rodney Fisher two years ago, an album we described as “a sophisticated collection of quiet, crafted, atmospheric guitar-based pop”. That album was pop in its various manifestations (folk-pop, pop-rock, dream pop) so that meant this one had a good entre for us. And... > Read more
Hollow Branches
Elephant Gym: Live in The World, Tokyo (digital outlets)
4 Aug 2025 | <1 min read
This trio from Taiwan have slowly built a reputation for their genre-defying melange of Chinese pop, post-rock, experimental sounds between jazz and rock and . . . You get the picture. Siblings KT -- sister, singer, bass and keyboards – and her brother Tell Chang on guitars and keyboards, were classically trained and met drummer Tu Chia-Chin in high school. The band formed in... > Read more
Shadow
Dusty Springfield: Longing (digital outlets)
4 Aug 2025 | 1 min read
Although she died more than a quarter century ago and her songs – not even her best pop hits of the early-mid Sixties – seldom get radio play these days, most people with an interest in music would have (or know that should have) a Greatest Hits and her 1968 Dusty in Memphis albums in their collection. She came from folk with the Springfields (her voice utterly distinctive on... > Read more
Tyler Childers: Snipe Hunter (digital outlets)
28 Jul 2025 | <1 min read | 1
The country-rockin' Tyler Childers is one of those artists who seems to have gone past most people. He has six albums behind him and at 34 sounds like he's reached a peak on this willfully wayward album of psychedelic country, narrative country-folk and more, produced by Rick Rubin. And we should mention he's become engaged by the Krishnas so there's some spiritual depth here too, and... > Read more
Dirty Ought Trill
Tom Lehrer; An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer
28 Jul 2025 | 1 min read
In one of the university courses I took, I spent a couple of hours on a lecture under the title -- lifted from Frank Zappa -- "Does Humour Belong in Music?" The general point is that most contemporary musicians take themselves so seriously that we can barely imagine them cracking a smile let alone writing a funny song. Talking to you Chris Martin et al. Yet humour has been a... > Read more
Oedipus Rex
Half Japanese: Adventure (digital outlets)
21 Jul 2025 | 1 min read
Elsewhere's long-term affair with Half Japanese has been something of a hiding to nowhere: I doubt we would have convinced a single reader to dive into the albums we have reviewed. But we persist because they are quirky and a little bonkers but, slowly over the past decade or so, have moved more towards an audience than an audience has moved towards them. The problem is having that... > Read more
Lemonade Sunset
Ringlets: The Lord is My German Shepherd (Time For Walkies): (digital outlets)
21 Jul 2025 | 1 min read
When I reviewed Ringlets' single I Was on That Roof Once released in advance of this album I quoted what I thought were the lyrics to point out the surreal nature of their imagery. I heard “like the sea I am burning from the algae of tsunamis”. I was corrected, it was “I am foaming from the algae that's inhabited my gob”. I was close, but not close enough.... > Read more
Posh Girl Holds a Whip
Various Artists: A Day in My Mind's Mind: The Kiwi Psychedelic Scene (Frenzy)
21 Jul 2025 | <1 min read
We have passed this way a few times over the years but the CDs in this Mind's Mind series – up to volume five now – disappear from shelves quickly. So it is sensible to get this 30 song collection out there. It appeared as a limited edition double album at the time when Real Groovy celebrated it 33 1/3 birthday 2014 and we pointed to it then. But this is a terrific... > Read more
Nirvana, by 40 Watt Banana
Polar Extremes: Strange Visions (digital outlets)
21 Jul 2025 | 1 min read
Okay, this is just odd fun . . . with a sense of smarts and cultural history behind it. And although it came out in 2019, it disappeared and has only now gone back up on digital platforms. so . . . Not too many locals might even recognise the horse-flesh resonance of the opening title, Racing This Time (did the great commentator Reg Clapp coin that phrase?), but the album... > Read more
Captain Zodiac's Dictionary
Jay Epae: The Mercury/Capitol/Viking Recordings (Frenzy)
16 Jul 2025 | 1 min read
The archivist and avid compiler of New Zealand artists' recordings Grant Gillanders has written an excellent and assiduously researched article at audioculture about the remarkable life and career of singer/songwriter Jay Epae, a lightly edited version reproduced as the extensive liner notes for this thorough 29 song (and some soundbite promo pieces) collection. Epae from Manaia in Taranaki... > Read more
I'll Cry Tomorrow
Arcades: Who's Most Lost (Rattle, digital outlets)
14 Jul 2025 | 1 min read
A highly unusual release from Rattle who, let's be honest, release quite a lot of highly unusual contemporary classical and improvised music. That's their thing, really. However here David Prior and Dugal McKinnon – who met at Birmingham Uni while doing PhDs in composition – offer a kind of avant-folk pop on this album which was originally released in 2011 but has been now... > Read more
You Were Born Into This
Jesse Welles: Pilgrim (digital outlets)
14 Jul 2025 | <1 min read
Because we introduced American politico-folk singer Jesse Welles not that long ago – noting he was grounded in Dylan's solo, acoustic protest singer days – we will make this brief, although we do suggest that if you hear nothing else, check out his song War Isn't Murder we posted there. He's still mining a similar vein – one of the songs here is Grapes of Wrath – but... > Read more
Philanthropist, ft Billy Strings
The Reds, Pinks and Purples: The Past is a Garden I Never Fed (Fire/digital outlets)
7 Jul 2025 | 1 min read
We will admit immediately that we had never heard of the Californian artist Glenn Donaldson who goes by this endearing name and opens this album with the song The World Doesn't Want Another Band. He has apparently written a couple of hundred songs and released eight albums since 2018. Clearly we've got a lot of catching up to do, but before then we are immersing ourselves in this smart... > Read more