Music at Elsewhere
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Fatcat and Fishface: Birdbrain (Jayrem)
6 Dec 2009 | <1 min read | 3
This irreverent outfit who sing songs ostensibly for children but with major adult appeal, have appeared at Elsewhere previously with their very silly The Bestest and Most Horriblest Songs for Children. They are more Spike Milligan and Monty Python than Teletubbies and Play School. This one is aimed rather further up the kiddie demographic than Bestest (8 to 14 would be my guess) because it... > Read more
Fatcat and Fishface: Kea
Brilleaux: Decade (Brilleaux)
6 Dec 2009 | 1 min read | 2
You -- well, I -- admire a rock'n'roll r'n'b band that names itself after the late lead singer of the British pub rock band Dr Feelgood whose Stupidity album from '76 is mandatory in any Essential Elsewhere collection. And this four-piece who make their energetic pub-rock sound at jazz and blues festivals (and I am guessing excellent parties), don't stray too far from the Feelgood... > Read more
Brilleaux: It Wasn't Me
Rupa and the April Fishes: Este Mundo (Cumbancha)
6 Dec 2009 | 1 min read
The implosion of Latin American party music, gypsy-swing, klezmer jazz and loping reggae is familiar enough in this country: from Kantuta, the Nairobi Trio and the Jews Brothers Band to the Mamaku Project and the somewhat questionable Benka Boradovsky Bordello Band we in New Zealand have been seduced, educated, charmed and dragged onto dance floors. We seem to like it, although the... > Read more
Rupa and the April Fishes: La Estrella Caida
Robyn Hitchcock: I Often Dream of Trains in New York (Yep Rock/Southbound DVD)
30 Nov 2009 | 2 min read
Robyn Hitchcock is one of those enjoyably intellectual, slightly eccentric English singer-songwriters who are either central to your life or barely come to your attention. He first made his name in the punk era with the folkadelic punk band the Soft Boys, and there were few bands of that era which wrote songs with titles such as It's Not Just the Size of a Walnut, Where are the Prawns?,... > Read more
The Renderers: Monsters and Miasma (Last Visible Dog)
29 Nov 2009 | 1 min read
Once known as “the only country band on Flying Nun" (Trail of Tears in 90, their sole album for the label), this on-going project of Brian and Maryrose Crook has progressively taken a darker and deeper path the past decade. These 10 songs owes debts to old murder ballads, the Velvet Underground and the Doors, acoustic Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, Townes Van Zandt and Marianne... > Read more
The Renderers: A Little to the Left
Bert Jansch: The Essential Bert Jansch (Union Square)
29 Nov 2009 | 1 min read
In the liner notes to this 26-track double CD collection Jansch says, "I only know how to play a guitar and write songs. I don't know anything else when it comes down to it." The likes of Jimmy Page who was influenced by Jansch's acoustic folk style and fans such as Devendra Banhardt, Johnny Marr, Graham Coxon and dozens of others in the new folk movement (Fleet Foxes etc) would... > Read more
Bert Jansch: In This Game (1972)
Pylon: Chomp More (DFA)
29 Nov 2009 | <1 min read | 1
Anyone taken by the jerky and anxious sound of the Essential Elsewhere album by the Feelies, Crazy Rhythms, might find this one a similarly enticing proposition. Released in '83 by a four-piece out of Athens, Georgia fronted by Vanessa Briscoe's yelp'n'edgy vocals, this was the second album for Pylon who were much admired by the young REM. But it is the tense, sometimes surf-guitar... > Read more
Pylon: Gyrate
Graham Coxon: The Spinning Top (Transgressive)
29 Nov 2009 | 1 min read
Damon Albarn has had the more visible profile outside of Blur -- Gorillaz, his Mali Music album, The Good, The Bad and The Queen -- but for the band’s former guitarist Coxon (who left after Think Tank of 03) The Spinning Top is his seventh solo outing and extends his interest in Anglofolk of the Nick Drake, Bert Jansch and Richard Thompson kind. To Blur, Coxon brought US indie-rock... > Read more
Graham Coxon: In the Morning
Port O'Brien: Threadbare (Dew Process/Isaac)
29 Nov 2009 | 1 min read
I have been to pretty, but pretty dull Cambria in California where the core of this group hail from and I can understand why they might want to take to the road. They did and seem to have spent a lot of time in Alaska where one of them is a fisherman and the other works as a baker in Larson Bay. Then they started touring and touring after their debut album in 2008. They are a small... > Read more
Port O'Brien: In the Meantime
Karen Hunter: Words and Groove (Rawfishsalad)
29 Nov 2009 | 1 min read
Those who have followed Auckland singer-songwriter Hunter's long career will confirm that she has progressively moved from a kind of alt.indie outsider status with albums such as The Private Life of Clowns ('98) and Inside Outside ('03) which bristled with ideas from rock, spoken word, jazz-blues and alt.folk to something closer to mainstream jazz cabaret and boho-Beat poetics on her '07 album... > Read more
Karen Hunter: Purify
Old Crow Medicine Show: Live at the Orange Peel and Tennessee Theatre (Shock DVD)
27 Nov 2009 | <1 min read
The rocked-up country-cum-bluegrass outfit haven't ever fully convinced on CD, although the best of their previous outing Tennessee Pusher certainly explained why they are such a potent live act. This DVD of shows filmed in Asheville, North Carolina and Knoxville, Tennessee capture them touring that album but generously throwing in some real oldies (a country cover of Down Home Girl which... > Read more
The Gladeyes: Psychosis of Love (Lil' Chief)
23 Nov 2009 | 1 min read | 6
In a recent article for an art magazine I wrote about some of the work I had seen by young painters in Sydney: I noted there was a frequent and conspicuous retreat into whimsy which seemed an early admission of defeat, as if these young talents were abdicating from the demands of making any serious statement. It was as if cute of itself was enough and that it would be elevated into importance... > Read more
The Gladeyes: Monika
Volcano Choir: Unmap (Jagjaguwar)
23 Nov 2009 | 1 min read | 1
This album was on repeat play while I was at my desk and after a few times through I thought it one of those projects where people just make a interesting noise but haven't actually got a tune that is memorable. It seemed like a very pleasant art school project by some probably very nice people who had listened to a bit of new folk from the likes of Fleet Foxes and Bon Iver, enjoyed creating... > Read more
Volcano Choir: Island, Is
Rickie Lee Jones: Balm in Gilead (Universal)
23 Nov 2009 | 1 min read | 2
Ms Jones has slipped so far down the totem pole of public attention in the past decade that her last album -- the ambitious Sermon on Exposition Boulevard of 2007 in which she meditated on Jesus and other things -- went straight past most. Jones works her own territory: one part jazz, a nod to pop, sometimes soulful or almost spoken word, and that distinctive voice which you either love or... > Read more
Rickie Lee Jones: His Jeweled Floor
Living Colour: Chair in the Doorway (Megaforce)
23 Nov 2009 | 1 min read
With their 89 breakthrough debut Vivid, Living Colour were hailed as the first black rock band, the politics of race/the media around them was talked up by the Black Rock Coalition, and guitarist Vernon Reid repeatedly noted now they were through the door the media (MTV, Rolling Stone etc) would close it. One black rock band was enough, thank you. He was mostly right. Living Colour... > Read more
Living Colour: Young Man
Caroline Herring: Golden Apples of the Sun (Ode)
23 Nov 2009 | 1 min read
The previous album by this Atlanta-based singer-songwriter, Lantana of last year, was a revelation: her crystalline vocals conjured up the purity of Joan Baez but her sometimes dark subject matter took her into that emotionally unsettling area where the likes of Gillian Welch, Lucinda Williams and Eilen Jewell sometimes set up shop. The contrast between Herring’s delicate clarity and a... > Read more
Caroline Herring: The Great Unknown
Jim Ford: The Unissued Capitol Album. Big Mouth USA; The Unissued Paramount Album (both Bear Family)
23 Nov 2009 | 2 min read
As Nick Lowe recently observed, he's supposed to be an expert on American music but there are still any number of artists and albums being unearthed and brought into the light again. Ford might not exactly be in that category -- he was a major influence on Lowe and his stuff has been floating around among cognoscenti for a couple of years -- but these two albums might give him his time in... > Read more
Jim Ford: Mixed Green
Atlas Sound: Logos (4AD)
23 Nov 2009 | <1 min read
The previous outing by Atlas Sound, Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel, was a real find: ambient and cinematic but with hints of hazy pop, and at the time I noted I hoped Brandford Cox -- who is Atlas Sound and also of the equally interesting band Deerhunter -- would make more such solo albums. He almost didn't. The backstory here is that his computer was... > Read more
Atlas Sound: Washington School
Tom Russell: Blood and Candle Smoke (Proper/Southbound)
16 Nov 2009 | 1 min read
Tom Russell is a cinematic singer-songwriter whose storytelling is compelling, and whose whisky’n’grit vocals can take you to the heart of Tex-Mex territory. The poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti said he was “Johnny Cash, [poet and novelist] Jim Harrison and [barfly writer] Charles Bukowski rolled into one“. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Russell spent time in Nigeria... > Read more
Tom Russell: Crosses of San Carlos
Leonard Cohen: Live at the Isle of Wight 1970 (Sony CD/DVD)
16 Nov 2009 | 1 min read | 3
“We have a fire on stage. If there’s any firemen in the area . . . “ This isn’t an announcement you hear too often at rock festivals -- but nothing was beyond possibility at the volatile Isle of Wight event in 70 when non-ticketholders stormed the site, the enraged promoter abused them for being ungrateful pigs and 600,000 concert goers watched artists as diverse as... > Read more