Music at Elsewhere

Adrianne Lenker: Live at Revolution Hall (digital outlets)

28 Apr 2025 | <1 min read

Outside of the band Big Thief, their singer-songwriter Adrianne Lenker runs a parallel solo career which has hit some impressive high-water marks. Notably last year's Grammy-nominated Bright Future (in the folk category) which was also among our best of 2024 picks. (The earlier Big Thief album Dragon Warm New Mountain in our 2022 list.) This enormous collection – two hours, 43... > Read more

Not a Lot, Just Forever (live)

Alisa Xayalith: Slow Crush (digital outlets)

28 Apr 2025 | 1 min read

Now this is interesting and raises the usual interesting questions about just how autobiographical about their love life an artist wants to be. The embarrassment of J-Lo putting it all out there – on album, documentary and some weird extended video movie – about her getting back with Ben Affleck should be an object example to anyone. A few months after that blitz of... > Read more

Romance is Dead

Lucy Dacus: Forever is a Feeling (digital outlets)

28 Apr 2025 | 1 min read

When bands break up it's interesting to observe which members go on to the most success: in 1970 would anyone have put their money on George Harrison over McCartney and Lennon? The Stones never actually broke up but when Mick Jagger released solo albums he realised very quickly that his best pathway to more success lay in mending the rift with Keith and getting the band back together.... > Read more

Limerence

Tom Lark: Moonlight Motel (digital outlets)

22 Apr 2025 | 1 min read

Two years ago it was Tom Lark's time: the debut album Brave Star under the Lark name -- he also works as Shannon Fowler and Shannon Matthew Vanya -- was in our best of year picks, earned him a Silver Scroll nomination and the album was a Taite Prize finalist for the Auckland singer, songwriter and producer. It was crafted collection of slightlydelic dream pop with intelligent lyrics... > Read more

Dumb Luck

RECOMMENDED REISSUE: Think: We'll Give You a Buzz (CD/vinyl)

14 Apr 2025 | 2 min read

One of the many rewards of following the releases on Grant Gillanders' Frenzy reissue label is just how good so many of the bands were at the time but went largely unheard. Sometimes he unearths a band and pulls together an album out of their recordings. Or in the case of the thrilling Grim Ltd he discovers a live tape of their final gig and releases the raw r'n'b garageband rock to... > Read more

Our Children (Think About)

Serebii: Dime (digital outlets/vinyl)

14 Apr 2025 | <1 min read

The multi-instrumentalist and expat producer Callum Mower (AKA neo-soul, folksy singer/songwriter Serebii) has said he draws inspiration from Aldous Harding and his frequent collaborator has been local soul-jazz artist Arjuna Oakes. Although he has moved back to this country from London, he is increasingly connecting with a global audience and recent PR out of the US said he was... > Read more

By Design

Haiku Redo: Disco Summer (Failsafe/digital outlets)

11 Apr 2025 | 1 min read

Up there in Japan, Rob Mayes of the Failsafe label goes through the dozens of recordings and albums he made with various bands, many from Christchurch during the Eighties, Nineties and some even beyond the label's heyday. It's a rewarding labour love because here was a label on which was the alternative to the alternative (Flying Nun, Xpressway etc) and mostly held the banner high for... > Read more

It's Just Too Long

Alien Weaponry: Te Rā (digital outlets)

7 Apr 2025 | 1 min read

Lest we forget – and perhaps some never knew – Jamaican reggae was originally a rebel music giving voice to cultural outsiders like Rastafarians and Nyabinghi followers, the marginalised and dispossessed. And those who rejected society. It was adopted as such in this country by bands like Herbs, Aotearoa, Dread Beat and Blood, Unity Pacific and others because it spoke to those on... > Read more

Crown

Japanese Breakfast: For Melancholy Brunettes (And Sad Women): (digital outlets)

31 Mar 2025 | 1 min read

Korea-born, Oregon-raised 35-year old Michelle Zauner is one of those artists who has something to say and more than one way of saying it. She may be the singer-songwriter of the band Japanese Breakfast but her life was of such interest that her 2021 memoir Crying in H Mart spent more than a year on The New York Times best-seller list. It explored, sometimes through food, what it... > Read more

Winter in LA

Circuit des Yeux: Halo on the Inside (digital outlets)

31 Mar 2025 | 1 min read

Elsewhere came across Circuit des Yeux – 37-year old Chicago-based electro-rock practitioner and multimedia artist Haley Fohr – purely by chance about seven years ago. She was, as we noted in our review of her album Reaching for Indigo, one of the artists featured on a cover-mount CD which came with an issue of Uncut. We rarely listen to such albums but this one was... > Read more

Truth

D'Animal: Hedonistic Pillow (Thokei Tapes/digital outlets)

31 Mar 2025 | 1 min read

Elsewhere has sometimes had an affection for amusing band names and album titles like this one, a play on Jefferson Airplanes' Surrealistic Pillow. It may be irrational but it can lead you to an artist you might otherwise gone past or not even heard of. That explains an album by Manchester's Jefferson Airhead in our collection. In this case after the amused smile faded we were into the... > Read more

Hollywood Moment

Jay Clarkson and the Containers: Falling Through (Zelle/digital outlets)

30 Mar 2025 | 1 min read

Christchurch's Jay Clarkson has had a music career which dates back more than four decades, but it has been intermittent as she juggled other interests: a personal life, a literary career as a poetry and fiction writer, writing her memoir, ill-health . . . With her band of excellent and well-known musicians – keyboard player Alan Haig, drummer Mike Dooley and bassist Tenzin... > Read more

1000 Hours

ONE WE MISSED: Skyscraper Stan and the Commission Flats: Those Were the Days (digital outlets)

27 Mar 2025 | 1 min read

This album by Australia-based expat Stan – released in February – didn't so much go past us but was overtaken by other releases on the final sprint to the finishing tape. Although written a few years ago, many of the songs here speak to the times we find ourselves in: Run the Game pokes a sharp stick at the privileged and ambitious (“to you, all of life's a race and... > Read more

Run the Game

RECOMMENDED RECORD: Various Artists: American Baroque (Ace double LP)

24 Mar 2025 | 2 min read | 1

From time to time Elsewhere will single out a recent release we recommend on vinyl, like this which comes as a double set in a gatefold sleeve with extensive liner notes and credits. Check out Elsewhere's other Recommended Record picks . . . . The words “baroque pop” may be inexact but most people get the meaning: pop songs embellished by... > Read more

Barefoot Gentleman, by the Association

RECOMMENDED RECORD: Alison Krauss and Union Station: Arcadia (digital outlets)

24 Mar 2025 | 2 min read

From time to time Elsewhere will single out a recent release we recommend on vinyl, like this one which comes with an illustrated internal sleeve with lyrics. Plays out nicely as two sides also. Check out Elsewhere's other Recommended Record picks . . . . It has been 14 years since the last Krauss album with her band Union Station, the impressive Paper... > Read more

Granite Mills

THE LONG AWAITED NEW ALBUM BY ALISON KRAUSS AND UNION STATION, ON VINYL AND CD

24 Mar 2025 | <1 min read

"exceptional musicianship" says Elsewhere. To read the full review go here. To order direct from Southbound Records go here. > Read more

Jimmy Page and the Black Crowes: Live at the Greek (Vinyl, CD and digital outlets)

17 Mar 2025 | 3 min read

On the face of it, it looked like a case of what Father John Misty had observed on his recent, excellent Mahashmashama album, “Time makes fools of us all”. When reflecting on the 2000 double album Live at the Greek where Jimmy Page joined the Black Crowes for blues classics and a bunch of Led Zeppelin songs, Crowes singer Chris Robinson was dismissive. "I didn't really... > Read more

Whole Lotta Love (live)

RECOMMENDED REISSUE: Nico: Chelsea Town Hall, Live (digital outlets)

14 Mar 2025 | 1 min read

Recorded in 1985, released in '92 as Chelsea Girl/Live and now reissued (CD and vinyl), this often startling concert caught the Velvet Underground chanteuse three years before her death and, although having been ravaged by the effects of heroin, in remarkably fine form. In her own way. Her final album Camera Obscura (produced by longtime supporter John Cale) provided the opener... > Read more

Tananore

THE PATRON SAINT OF HUMMINGBIRDS: Environmental Music Vol 1 (digital outlets)

13 Mar 2025 | <1 min read

This Californian artist – who prefers to remain anonymous – appeared at Elsewhere last year with her ambient Environmental Music Vol 2 and promised Vol 1 would follow. And here it is, a collection of atmospheric pieces recorded during the lockdown era and a restful response to the stresses that some were feeling. Well, stress didn't just evaporate at the end of that time and... > Read more

Meditation V

The Tubs: Cotton Crown (digital outlets)

10 Mar 2025 | <1 min read

This London-based Welsh band come off as a smart marriage of REM's indie.rock jangle, slightly yobby British post-punk pop and a revved up version of Scotland's Proclaimers. In other words, they make smart and memorable folksy power-pop. And there's a real sense of desperation in places (the nervy Illusion, the Pogues-punky Chain Reaction). Singer Owen Williams has some of Richard... > Read more