Music at Elsewhere
Subscribe to my newsletter for weekly updates.
Gemma Ray: Island Fire (Shock)
13 Apr 2012 | 1 min read
At a time when many young bands and singers seem nostalgic for an Eighties pop they never knew, it's refreshing in a weird way this British singer -- here on her third album -- is prepared to trawl rather more widely. Gemma Ray effortlessly notches up references to an oddball take on Fifties pop ( the delightful shoop-shoop ballad sound of "you should, should" Put Your Brain in... > Read more
Flood and a Fire
Michael Chapman: Rainmaker (Light in the Attic)
11 Apr 2012 | 1 min read
British folk singer and rather special guitarist Michael Chapman has rarely had his dues outside of his native land, but his edgy style (sometimes with a band so nudging into rock-folk), and fierce intelligence are always worth rediscovering. You can hardly go wrong by starting here if the name is new to you. This is his exciting debut album from '69 reissued with a fine essay and half... > Read more
Thank You PK 1944
Black Seeds: Dust and Dirt (Black Seeds)
10 Apr 2012 | 1 min read
Driving away from the recent Womad I said to my wife I hoped there might be a two year moratorium on reggae rhythms, it is just such an easy default position for so many bands and guaranteed to get people up having a good time. Nothing wrong with a good time of course, but the loping rhythm sometimes seem all bands need to do . . . and it gets kinda dull and obvious when one band after... > Read more
Loose Cartilage
The Verlaines: Untimely Meditations (Flying Nun)
10 Apr 2012 | 1 min read
Of the original Flying Nun bands, the Verlaines – the flexible vehicle for Graeme Downes – are still the most ambitious. Downes' lyrical depth and mercurial melodies deliver durable albums -- like the previous Corporate Moronic -- which bristle with rage rather succumb to the comforts of age. And this one is no exception. Here in the angry opener Born Again Idiot the... > Read more
Beauty is Truth
Dr John: Locked Down (Warners)
9 Apr 2012 | 1 min read | 1
With all due respect to Dan Auerbach of Black Keys who helmed this fine album by one of the living legends into life, we have passed this way before with 71-year old Dr John, notably in '98 with the album Anutha Zone where the likes of Paul Weller, Jools Holland, members of Spiritualised, Primal Scream and Supergrass lined up to direct him back to his classic sound of the late Sixties.... > Read more
Revolution
The Mars Volta: Noctourniquet (Warners)
9 Apr 2012 | 1 min read
Cards on the table. Much as I loved the first Mars Volta album Deloused in the Comatorium and parts of Frances the Mute, much of what they have done since -- this demanding and often annoying album especially -- has left me rather cold. There's a willfullness about their being "different" which infects almost every ADHD track here, where ideas start but rarely reach any completion... > Read more
Molochwalker
The Bombay Royale: You Me Bullets Love (Hope Street)
8 Apr 2012 | 1 min read
Much as I enjoyed the theatrical conceit of this faux-Bollywood outfit from Melbourne at the recent Womad in New Zealand, I could also see immediately why this album of a faux-soundtrack (with a great title, admittedly) would appeal to the Arts Victoria funding agency which supported it. The Bombay Royale have exactly the right balance of irony and authenticity which arts funding people... > Read more
Bobbywood
Various Artists: John Cale, Conflict and Catalysis (Big Beat/Border)
2 Apr 2012 | 2 min read
Although his former comrade in the Velvet Underground, Lou Reed, gets the column inches and slavish devotion, a serious career consideration would say John Cale has made the more interesting music and, as a producer, certainly had his fingerprints on some of the most exceptional and/or interesting albums of the rock era. This non-chronological 20 track collection of some his Cale's... > Read more
Needles for Teeth
Various Artists: Fender; The Golden Age 1950-1970 (Ace/Border)
29 Mar 2012 | 1 min read | 1
Any album which is dedicated to a brand of guitar -- no matter how legendary, as Fender is -- will always be uneven, depending on what kind of music you like. So right at the end in the ad for Fender guitars when country singer Jan Howard hails the brand for being perfect for country pickers, that hardly sits with material like Dale Hawkins' Susie-Q, the Ventures' Walk Don't Run, Booker T... > Read more
I Fought the Law
Fly My Pretties: Fly My Pretties IV (Loop CD/DVD)
28 Mar 2012 | 2 min read
Less a band in the traditional sense and more an umbrella organisation which allows for members of the collective to shine, Fly My Pretties have also taken their own route into the hearts of New Zealand audiences. As with Split Enz all those decades ago, FMP avoid the indignity of boozed-up pub crowds and prefer to play theatre settings where not only do people listen but they can also... > Read more
Space Cadet
Various Artists: Time to Go; The Southern Psychedelic Movement 1981-86 (Flying Nun)
27 Mar 2012 | 2 min read | 5
When I wrote the liner notes to a couple of collections of New Zealand psychedelic music from the late Sixties/Early Seventies (see here), I was obliged to offer the uncomfortable reminder to cooler-than-thou people who were "there at the time" that the drugs which inspired the movement in the USA and UK were not as readily available in this country as many might have thought, or even... > Read more
Russian Rug
Lee Ranaldo: Between the Times and the Tides (Matador)
26 Mar 2012 | 1 min read
Anyone who doesn't hear a throbbing Flying Nun band turned up to 11 here -- Bats, Clean, some solo Chris Knox even -- just hasn't been paying attention. There is a frisson of familiarity about the powerful chords and driving momentum of some of these songs (Lost, but Off the Wall especially where Ranaldo sounds like Michael Stipe fronting a Bats-Clean supergroup) but that takes... > Read more
Xtina As I Knew Her
Michael Kiwanuka: Home Again (Universal)
26 Mar 2012 | <1 min read
London-born to Ugandan parents, Michael Kiwanuka has become something of a "next big thing" in the British music scene, but on the evidence of this quietly confident debut album he seems to vindicate the praise being heaped on him. It's not just that he connects to the soul and spirit of Van Morrison's Astral Weeks (the Afro-horn influenced opener Tell Me a Tale), and a folk-soul... > Read more
Rest
Farrar/Yames/Parker/Johnson: New Multitudes (Universal)
26 Mar 2012 | 1 min read
Some context? Woody Guthrie – whose words prompted this album by an alt.country semi-supergroup – died in 1967, around the time Taylor Swift's parents were born. A model for the young Bob Dylan (now 70) and the folk movement of the early 60s, Guthrie also inspired Joe Strummer (who called himself “Woody” in his pre-Clash) and Springsteen. About 15 years ago... > Read more
Chorine
Sam Gray Singing; Songs About Humans (Raw Onion)
26 Mar 2012 | 1 min read
This album by an expat New Zealander currently in Austria (but clearly itinerant in Europe and he tours, the album recorded in Oslo and released through a company in Denmark), is one which may delight, bewilder and annoy in just about equal proportions . . . and is quite uncategorisable. For want of a better term I would suggest "post-prog avant-classical alt.rock" and should tell... > Read more
Scratches
Jim White: Where It Hits You (Yep Roc)
19 Mar 2012 | <1 min read
The idiosyncratic Jim White – whose music is suffused in the dark Southern literary tradition as much as alt.country (more alt than most alt.country) -- was the central figure in the remarkable doco Searching for the Wrong Eyed Jesus as he traveled around backroads and broke-down townships ruminating on Christianity and country music. A troubled man for troubled times, and now... > Read more
Epilogue to a Marriage
Dion: Tank Full of Blues (Blue Horizon)
19 Mar 2012 | <1 min read | 1
Dion's first hits – the classics Runaround Sue and The Wanderer – came before the Beatles even got into a British recording studio and by then, in his early 20s, he'd already been treated for a heroin habit. In the mid Sixties -- because the Beatles-lead British Invasion swept aside artists like himself -- he quit aiming for the pop charts and delved into blues and for... > Read more
I Read it in the Rolling Stone
Field Music: Plumb (Shock)
19 Mar 2012 | <1 min read | 1
Having been spectacularly underwhelmed by the much acclaimed previous albums by this British band doesn't mean I don't come to another hoping for the best. But the best here has always be the property of their predecssors and it would only be the most short-concentration span -- or 15-year old -- reviewer who didn't start ticking off the accumulation of source material (Beatles and Beach... > Read more
Is This the Picture?
The Eastern: Hope and Wire (Rough Peel Records/Rhythmethod)
12 Mar 2012 | 1 min read | 3
The self-titled 09 debut and Arrows ('10) by this Christchurch band alerted many to their poetic, political and bare-knuckle country-influenced songs which sit alongside Springsteen's working class balladry, the rambunctious Pogues, whisky-voiced Steve Earle, pub rocking Dr Feelgood and Cold Chisel's open-road truths. Their range is given full rein on this ambitious but exceptional... > Read more
The James Girl
Bruce Springsteen: Wrecking Ball (Sony)
12 Mar 2012 | 3 min read | 6
By design and sometimes by chance, Bruce Springsteen has frequently tapped into the emotional state of the American republic. He has documented the lives of outsiders and the dispossessed, the blue collar workers, lost boys and lonely girls, and – when more recently linking with the Pete Seeger tradition on the album We Shall Overcome; The Seeger Sessions – the lost spirit of... > Read more