Music at Elsewhere
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BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2011 The Black Keys: El Camino (Nonesuch)
19 Dec 2011 | 1 min read
Although Black Keys' previous album Brothers was on the Best of Elsewhere 2010 list and this one will certainly be in this year's final countback, the two albums are very different. Where Brothers was grounded in classic soul and old school r'n'b and blues, this one kicks up the primal rock'n'pop from the get-go. As a touchstone consider Gold on the Ceiling which sounds like the Glitter... > Read more
Run Right Back
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2011 Adele: 21 (XL)
19 Dec 2011 | 1 min read
Adele's debut album of two years ago -- 19, when she was 19 -- announced the arrival of a great British soul voice even if some of her original material wasn't quite as strong as it could have been. Still, she was only 19 -- but she hardly deserved to be lumped in with the new breed of British women singers coming through (notably Amy Winehouse, Duffy et al). Not that she needed to worry,... > Read more
Adele: Someone Like You
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2011 Lucinda Williams: Blessed (Lost Highway)
19 Dec 2011 | 1 min read
Although Lucinda Williams admits things are going well in her life (see interview here), she also adds that no one is ever permanently happy and she lives in this world with all its sadness and misery. And she has had a few encounters with those things herself, notably the estrangement of her brother after the death of their mother, and the death by suicide of Vic Chesnutt a few years back.... > Read more
Lucinda Williams: Ugly Truth
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2011 Micah P. Hinson and the Pioneer Saboteurs: Micah P. Hinson and the Pioneer Saboteurs (Full Time Hobby)
19 Dec 2011 | 1 min read
Recorded over a two year period and soaked in strings, this folksy rumination on the state of his nation takes its inspiration from Walt Whitman's poem Pioneers! O Pioneers!, a kind of literal and metaphorical reverse-mirror Times They Are A' Changin' of its day when the young America was flexing its muscles across the continent. Hinson uses this starting point to consider, in places, how... > Read more
Micah P. Hinson and the Pioneer Saboteurs: Seven Horses Seen
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2011 Elbow: Build a Rocket Boys! (Universal)
19 Dec 2011 | 1 min read | 1
It's interesting to read the comments at Elsewhere after the previous Elbow album The Seldom Seen Kid in 2008 (which won them the Mercury Award that year): essentially the thread was, how come these guys aren't bigger? Good question, and maybe this one -- more reflective but still as gorgeously delivered as their previous outings -- will rectify the oversight. Guy Garvey here looks... > Read more
Elbow: Ticker Tape (non album track)
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2011 Paul Simon: So Beautiful Or So What (Hear Music)
19 Dec 2011 | 3 min read | 1
One of the things Paul Simon is seldom given credit for is his sense of humor. He too often comes off the kind of earnest New York Jewish singer-songwriter you imagine reads Dostoevsky at night but listens to doo-wop and old soul because he thinks it might be good for him. Yet this is the man who did that clip for You Can Call Me Al with Chevy Chase, and his lyrics are often punctuated with... > Read more
Paul Simon: Dazzling Blue
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2011 Fleet Foxes: Helplessness Blues (Sub Pop)
19 Dec 2011 | 1 min read | 1
A propos of not much, Fleet Foxes' chief songwriter Robin Pecknold recently recorded New Zealand singer-songwriter Chris Thompson's Where is My Wild Rose? for an EP and it appears on You Tube (just with stills) here. But . . . to the matter in hand. If it's fair to say FFoxes' debut album was unexpected, then we might also observe that this one is highly anticipated. However their... > Read more
Fleet Foxes: Battery Kinzie
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2011 Howe Gelb and a Band of Gypsies: Alegrias (Fire)
19 Dec 2011 | 1 min read | 2
The enormously prolific Howe Gelb (interviewed here in depth) is behind the Tucson band Giant Sand (from which Calexico became a more commercially successful split-off) and has also recorded a dozen albums under his own name. And as a reissue programme of about 30 Sand/Gelb albums starts to filter through he also releases this, a beguiling project which saw him taking his dark vocals,... > Read more
Howe Gelb and A Band of Gypsies: The Hangin' Judge
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2011 Tiny Ruins: Some Were Meant for Sea (Spunk)
19 Dec 2011 | 1 min read | 1
Tiny Ruins is the nom de disque of Bristol-born, Auckland-raised (from the age of 10) singer-songwriter Hollie Fullbrook who recorded these songs in "a diminutive [sic] hall, once the local school of South Gippsland's Morraya, Australia" (which doesn't appear on any map of that region south east of Melbourne that I can see, unless they mean Moyarra). No matter, that perhaps adds... > Read more
Tiny Ruins: Old as the Hills
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2011 Iron and Wine: Kiss Each Other Clean (4AD)
19 Dec 2011 | 2 min read | 1
The previous album The Shepherd's Dog by Texas' Iron and Wine (Sam Beam) was fully three years ago and was one of the Best of Elsewhere 2007 albums. So anticipation is high for this -- although might have been higher a year ago, but I guess he works at his own pace. And we forgive him because he delivered the excellent Around the Well collection of unreleased song and rarities in mid '09.... > Read more
Iron and Wine: Half Moon
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2011 Juju: In Trance (Real World)
19 Dec 2011 | <1 min read
That alt.world between late 60s psychedelic blues-rock, frantic village folk, and fiery world music is a strange place. It's where LedZepp, speedmetal-folk, Afro-blues, the Mississippi Delta and a fiddle-playing Jimi Hendrix (who isn't Nigel Kennedy) come together and live in . . . if not harmony, then at least the same bar where they drink moonshine and palm wine. This album is... > Read more
Nightwalk
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2011 Jonathan Besser: Campursari (Rattle)
19 Dec 2011 | 1 min read
Since coming to New Zealand more than 30 years ago, the pianist-composer Jonathan Besser has enjoyed a highly successful and diverse career, first with violinist Chris Prosser in the Besser and Prosser duo, with electronic artist Ross Harris in Free Radicals, then his own ensemble and latterly with the small group Bravura. His works have been performed by the NZSO, the New Zealand String... > Read more
Shine
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2011 Ryan Adams: Ashes and Fire (Sony)
19 Dec 2011 | 1 min read | 1
Those with a passing interest in Ryan Adams' highly productive career -- which most recently stretched to published books of poetry -- will be understandably bewildered that there is a new album, given he announced his retirement in '09 . . . and subsequently kept releasing albums from his not inconsiderable song vaults. This solo album however is a return to his career with an album... > Read more
I Love You But I Don't Know What To Say
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2011 Tom Waits: Bad As Me (Anti)
19 Dec 2011 | 3 min read | 4
At the end of the local edition of this exceptional album -- Tom Waits' first studio album in seven years -- there is a disconcerting litany of images entitled with seeming certainty After You Die, but which in fact asks the more pointed question, "what is it like after we die?" Waits yowls through it like a man broken on a rack, and it's a scary ending to an album which touches... > Read more
Satisfied
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2011 Fatoumata Diawara: Fatou (World Circuit)
19 Dec 2011 | <1 min read
Yet another artist out of Mali who confirms that country -- alongside only Jamaica perhaps -- seems to have more gifted and distinctive performers per head of population than any other country on the planet. This debut from the ear-pleasing, hypnotically melodic and folk-framed Diawara is given subtle, warm and clean studio production by label boss Nick Gold in conjunction with Diawara and... > Read more
Bissa
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2011 The Checks: Deadly Summer Sway (Pie Club)
19 Dec 2011 | 2 min read
Auckland's Checks could easily have sat on their Sixties rhythm and blues-based style (think young Stones, Yardbirds, Who etc) and won themselves a wide audience, but they were always destined for something bigger than the familiar. Now 10 years on from their first but enormously impressive gigs as teenagers (I think I first saw them in a kitchen at a flat?) they have shifted their ground... > Read more
Winter Sun
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2011 Gin Wigmore: Gravel and Wine (Universal)
19 Dec 2011 | 2 min read
Although the remarkable Gin Wigmore mostly co-wrote here, you'd have to say it is her voice -- not just her musical voice -- which comes through with utter clarity. And yes, this extraordinary album is full of her stylistic vocal signature . . . but there is something much more interesting and exciting going on here. These days many young artists drown themselves in references: the... > Read more
If Only
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2011 Keith Jarrett: Rio (ECM)
19 Dec 2011 | <1 min read
In one of the most colourful ECM covers in memory comes this equally vibrant solo piano set by Keith Jarrett, recorded live in Rio in April 2011. This richly textured double disc -- six unnamed pieces on the first, nine on the second -- finds the pianist in total command of his gift for rhythmically complex and melodically unpredictable improvisation. Jarrett dips (and frequently dives... > Read more
Rio Part IX
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2011 Wilco: The Whole Love (Warners)
19 Dec 2011 | 2 min read
Artists who make lurching changes of direction often revert to prior form after a while: Certainly after U2's darker trilogy -- Achtung Baby, Zooropa and Pop -- they went back to their familiar stadium-shaped mainstream ballads, and Radiohead's most recent output has been more accessible than the unsettling Ok Computer and Kid A. Even David Bowie -- after the "Berlin trilogy" of... > Read more
Sunloathe
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2011 Wire: Red Barked Tree (Pink Flag)
19 Dec 2011 | 1 min read
In the late Seventies Wire delivered a trifecta of classic post-punk, minimalist and arty albums -- Pink Flag, Chairs Missing and 154 – then called it a day. In subsequent decades they reformed dropping drummer Robert Gotobed to appear as an alt.electro-rock outfit (not much cop), in the past decade their sound became more aggressive and impressive, Gotobed returned -- and now Bruce... > Read more