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.
Subscribe to my newsletter for weekly updates.
Geneva AM: Pikipiki (digital outlets)
1 Sep 2025 | 1 min read
When the Howard Morrison Quartet had a hit with Hoki Mai in 1959 it wasn't without controversy. It was an upbeat revision of Henare Waitoa's Tomo Mai which had been written to welcome the men from the 28thMāori Battalion back from the Second World War. Some older folk objected to the cheery Morrison version (which was part of Rotorua's songbook already). Decades later Dalvanius was... > Read more
Pokarekare Ana
Wet Bandits: Bad Tattoos and Weathermen (digital outlets)
1 Sep 2025 | 1 min read
Debut album time for this Australian outfit which revolves around singer, songwriter and producer Finn Roberts formerly of Hawkes Bay. There's an interesting, genre-avoiding quality to Roberts' writing and production: the opener Not Blue for example is a generous seven and a half minutes which takes its time to emerge from a caress of synths and a tension-release guitar part then a minute... > Read more
The Record Store
Bret McKenzie: Freak Out City (digital outlets)
1 Sep 2025 | 1 min read
So here's what we might call “The Weird Al Conundrum”: if you love a comedian who delivers very funny parodies of artists and genres – like “Weird Al” Yankovic taking off Michael Jackson, Queen, black hip-hop artists, Madonna, James Blunt and others – would you necessarily follow them into their career when they did their own songs? Would you buy an album... > Read more
Too Young
RECOMMENDED RECORD: Rodney Crowell: Airline Highway (New West/digital outlets)
29 Aug 2025 | 3 min read
From time to time Elsewhere will single out a recent release we recommend on vinyl, like this which now comes with an insert lyric sheet and is available in an autographed edition (see end of the review). Check out Elsewhere's other Recommended Record picks . . . . Those of us old enough to remember Texas' Rodney Crowell as the hot young country artist whose... > Read more
Simple (You Wouldn't Call It Simple)
Bill Morris: In the Limestone Country (digital outlets)
29 Aug 2025 | 2 min read
Singer-songwriter Bill Morris (also a film-maker) hasn't appeared at Elsewhere for quite a while. In fact it has been a decade since we heaped praise on his impressive folk-cum-country album Hinterland which in places turned a harsh spotlight on lives on the margins of society. A decade ago No Depression magazine in the US also spoke highy of Morris' songwriting: “Even [Nashville]... > Read more
Davy Lowston
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