Music at Elsewhere

Amy Shark: Love Monster (Sony/usual digital outlets)

23 Jul 2018 | 1 min read

One of the most engaging artists at the 2018 Laneway event in Auckland was Australian Amy Shark because – as Elsewhere said in our review of the day – she looked like she was genuinely delighted to be there, laughed and smiled, and delivered snappy pop-rock with real style. She seemed like a fun adult in a world of many moody kids. So this debut album comes as something of a... > Read more

Never Coming Back

Thundercat + OG Ron C and the Chopstars: “Drank” (Brainfeeder/Border)

29 Jun 2018 | 1 min read

For a guy who goes by the provocatively loud sounding name Thundercat and whose showing the Auckland City Limits festival ran headlong into virtuoso playing and very quickly shapeless jazz-funk noodling, singer/multi-instrumentalist Stephen Lee Bruner's Drunk album of last year was a very mainstream, almost MOR, retro jazz-lite outing with vocal guests Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins... > Read more

A Fan's Mail/Trong Song Suite II (remix)

Erin Cole-Baker: Till the Feeling's Right (usual streaming outlets)

29 Jun 2018 | 1 min read | 1

Earlier this year this New Zealand singer-songwriter was in Kansas City – with assistance from the NZ Music Commission – alongside Anika Moa and Milly Tabak (of the Miltones) at the Folk Alliance International gathering. She played showcase gigs and collected business cards to follow up on. On the evidence of songs here such as the gentle, cleverly minimal and breathy... > Read more

Morning Dove

Various Artists: When the Day is Done; The Orchestrations of Robert Kirby (Ace/Border)

25 Jun 2018 | 2 min read

Every five years or so venerable British music magazines like Mojo, Q or Uncut will feature Nick Drake in an extensive article to try to persuade – or remind – us of his genius, the most recent being Mojo in March on what would have been Drake's 70thbirthday. Drake died in late '74 leaving just three rather beautiful folk albums recorded after mid '69, but despite the best... > Read more

Friend to Me, by Gary Shearston (1975)

Various Artists: Paris in the Spring (Ace/Border)

25 Jun 2018 | 1 min read

Half a century ago the streets of Paris were in a state of active revolution when what was initially a student protest about access to women's dorms by males turned into a protest about the university in general, the Sorbonne was occupied, police weighed in, workers sided with the students, there was a general nationwide strike and it looked like the government would be toppled. The events... > Read more

Baleines, by Francoise de Roubaix

Charlie Rich: Too Many Teardrops; The Complete Groove and RCA Recordings (Ace/Border)

24 Jun 2018 | 2 min read | 1

In a famous interview in San Francisco in December '65, Bob Dylan was earnestly asked about his favourite poets. He was in a playful mood and mentioned his genuine favourites Rimbaud his pal Allen Ginsberg (who was in the audience), but also WC Fields, Smokey Robinson and Charlie Rich, “He's a good poet”. From that list most people only remember he cited (not for the first... > Read more

I Don't See Me in Your Eyes Anymore

Mali Mali: Azimuth (Home Alone)

22 Jun 2018 | 3 min read

The label here may be a pointer: Local artist Mali Mali (aka Ben Tolich) recorded the eight songs for this, his third album, in the basement of his parent's home and the ambience of delay and echo, lo-fi piano and intimacy is ideally suited to these reflective, highly personal and self-referential songs. The idea of “sensitive singer-songwriter” (to adopt the argot of the early... > Read more

Ruru Cry

Virginia Wing: Ecstatic Arrow (Fire/Southbound)

18 Jun 2018 | <1 min read

The previous album by this London duo out of Manchester was an often uneasy amalgam of emotionally cool pop, hard-edged electro-beats and an art school kind of 21st century synth-pop. This time out they look back (to the early Eighties for Glorious Idea and further on the folksy core of Eight Hours Don't Make a Day), sideways (the sax-coloured pop of the immediately appealing The Second... > Read more

Pale Burnt Lake

Barrence Whitfield and the Savages: Dig Everything! (Ace/Border)

18 Jun 2018 | 1 min read

With a name which sounds straight out of the Motown stable in the early Sixties, Florida-born Whitfield (real name Barry, changed to avoid confusion with the Walrus of Love) actually grew up in New Jersey and while studying in Boston put white hot flame to r'n'b rock'n'roll in the Eighties and has barely let up since . . . although there were diversions for album with Americana singer-writer... > Read more

Stop Twisting My Arm

The Last Poets: Understand What Black Is (Studio Rockers)

16 Jun 2018 | 2 min read

University students have grown up in a post-gangsta rap world so taking them back to origins – preachers in the church, street poets, Gil Scott Heron and others – is always a challenge for them. They hear some of it as odd, simple and sometimes compelling. The Last Poets present a particular problem because of pieces like Niggers Are Scared of Revolution where you have to... > Read more

Rain of Terror

Danny Adler: Bit of Beatles (Ace/Border)

14 Jun 2018 | 1 min read

So here be 10 Lennon-McCartney covers and three originals (tributes to Lennon and Harrison) by a man whose sleeve photos would tell you he was clearly a teenager when the Beatles broke more than half a century ago. American singer-guitarist Adler – who once played with John Lee Hooker and other blues legends in California and the early Elephant's Memory (who later worked with Lennon... > Read more

I'm Only Sleeping

Jon Hassell: Listening to Pictures/Pentimento Vol 1 (Ndeya/Border)

13 Jun 2018 | 1 min read

Trumpeter Jon Hassell came to attention at the dawn of the Eighties via a couple of innovative albums, Fourth World Vol 1/Possible Musics with Brian Eno and the even more interesting Dream Theory in Malaya (an Essential Elsewhere album) in which for one piece he used the rhythmic splashing of water by a Malay tribe as the base for his odd trumpet sound. Both albums had an appealing... > Read more

Slipstream

Various Artists: Jon Savage's 1965, The Year the Sixties Ignited (Ace/Border)

11 Jun 2018 | 2 min read

Our longtime From the Vaults column usually pulls out a single oddity, an interesting track or an artist with an unusual backstory . . . but here is a whole album which could fill our Vaults column for many months. Because this is whopping 48-song double CD (on Ace through Border in New Zealand) turns the spotlight on a remarkable year in pop music when – as Beatlemania was on the... > Read more

See My Friends, by the Kinks

Jonathan Bree: Sleepwalking (Lil' Chief)

8 Jun 2018 | 1 min read

In a cover which suggests the work of Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte's masked figures in paintings like The Lovers and The Heart of the Matter, Jonathan Bree presents and equally mysterious and sometimes gorgeously strange collection of orchestrated songs which deal with seductions, online sexuality, former lovers and . . . So much more in these cleverly coded lyrics which sit in... > Read more

Boombox Serenade ft Crystal Choi

Alien Weaponry: Tu (Napalm Records)

8 Jun 2018 | 2 min read

Spotify is all very well but here is where it let's you down: With the vinyl album by this young (two members just 16), disciplined, experienced (they've been at it three years) metal outfit who frequently sing in te reo. Spotify will only give you a compressed sound but the vinyl version comes at you widescreen and about two centimetres from the end of your nose. The tracks are produced by... > Read more

Raupatu/Confiscated

IN BRIEF: A quick overview of some recent international releases

4 Jun 2018 | 3 min read

With so many CDs commanding and demanding attention Elsewhere will run this occasional column which scoops up releases by international artists, in much the same way as our SHORT CUTS column picks up New Zealand artists and Yasmin does with EPs. Comments will be brief. . Norma Waterson and Eliza Carthy: Anchor (Topic/Southbound) Elsewhere's... > Read more

Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks: Sparkle Hard (Matador)

4 Jun 2018 | 1 min read

Elsewhere has loyally followed the path of former Pavement man Stephen Malkmus and his band the Jicks . . . and that has not always been easy. From bristling and fuzzed-up psychedelic rock to more refined yet still quirky power pop and even dialed back folk-pop, the trail has sometimes lead into blind alleys or very deep and dark woods. But that has kept him of interest and although,... > Read more

Solid Silk

Various Artists: Graceland, The Remixes (Sony)

3 Jun 2018 | 1 min read

The just published biography of Paul Simon by Robert Hilburn – written with the songwriter's full cooperation but without further interference – confirms how meticulously Simon constructed his lyrics and music on albums like the Grammy-winning Graceland. So there's an irony about this album in which Simon's songs are deconstructed by various remixers, DJs and studio boffins.... > Read more

Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes (Thievery Corporation remix)

Hi-Revving Tongues: The Complete Singles A's and B's (Frenzy)

2 Jun 2018 | 1 min read | 1

Elsewhere is prepared to say it knows next to nothing about this New Zealand band from the late Sixties into the early Seventies, aside from a few singles: A Tropic of Capricorn, the heavily phased Elevator and Rain And Tears. And until this 24-song compilation by Grant Gillanders – which comes with a booklet of artwork, and an excellent essay which includes interviews with band... > Read more

A Tropic of Capricorn

The Brian Jonestown Massacre: Something Else (A Recordings/Southbound)

1 Jun 2018 | 1 min read

The title on this new album by the very prolific Anton Newcombe and his fellow travellers is interesting of itself. It may refer to the Beatles album of a similar title (the typically cobbled-togetherSomething New) which came out in the US in '64 because Newcombe has made such allusions in his long career on BJM albums such as Their Satanic Majesties' Second Request, My Bloody Underground... > Read more