Music at Elsewhere
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RECOMMENDED REISSUE: Buzzcocks: Spiral Scratch/Time's Up (Southbound)
31 Mar 2017 | 1 min read
So here is 40th anniversary edition of the Buzzcocks' famous 1977 four-song Spiral Scratch EP -- "one of punk's most important releases" said Uncut magazine recently. And it is coupled with a furious 11-song live-in-the studio set from that brief moment when Howard Devoto (the prick!) was in the band alongside Pete Shelley (he left with a month after Scratch was released... > Read more
Boredom
Moving Stuff: When I Am Gone (soundcloud)
30 Mar 2017 | <1 min read
Moving Stuff is Auckland singer-songwriter Marina Bloom and her small band whose first single from this album Heroes apparently got more than 30,000 hits when she posted the video of it on Boxing Day. That song is a slightly reined-in and yes, heroic, power ballad but other material on the eight-song album shows a wider reach. Long Distance Love is a quieter piano ballad —... > Read more
IN BRIEF: A quick overview of some recent international releases
27 Mar 2017 | 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. Comments will be brief. Spoon: Hot Thoughts (Matador) The joke over beers recently was that no matter how many favourable words you spilled over... > Read more
RECOMMENDED REISSUE: Stevie Wonder: Fulfillingness' First Finale (Universal)
27 Mar 2017 | <1 min read
Like Bob Marley, who would alternate softer albums with righteous stand-up songs, this '74 album fell between Stevie Wonder's more political Innervisions and Songs in the Key of Life. Stevie – the “Little Stevie” Motown child star – had become a self-contained multi-instrumental adult composer/performer who still threw out challenges (the chart-topping You... > Read more
Bhattacharya, Gronseth, Wessel: Bhattacharya/Gronseth/Wessel (pling)
26 Mar 2017 | 1 min read
Many decades ago Elsewhere fell for the album Karuna Supreme by American saxophonist John Handy and tabla player Ali Akbar Khan, just another in a long line of jazz and Indian music crossovers which started in the mid Sixties with Ravi Shankar's Improvisations (an Essential Elsewhere album) and lead on to the Indo-Jazz Fusion albums by Joe Harriott and John Mayer. Because both jazz and... > Read more
Goodnight Irene
Eliza Carthy and the Wayward Band Machine: Big Machine (Topic/Southbound)
26 Mar 2017 | 1 min read
There has always been more interesting streams of British folk than the hey-nonny finger-in-the-ear style which is how many people often encounter it. At the strange end of the spectrum is the Incredible String Band, then there were the folk-rockers like Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span, the introverted types (Nick Drake), purists like the Watersons and innovators like Tuung,... > Read more
The Fitter's Song
SHORT CUTS: A round-up of recent New Zealand releases
25 Mar 2017 | 3 min read
Facing down an avalanche of releases, requests for coverage, the occasional demand that we be interested in their new album (sometimes with that absurd comment "but don't write about it if you don't like it") and so on, Elsewhere will every now and again do a quick sweep like this, in the same way it does IN BRIEF about international releases. Comments will be... > Read more
Omit: Negative Pulse Logic (End of Alphabet Records)
25 Mar 2017 | <1 min read
Omit out of Blenheim – aka Clinton Williams – was once around the avant-garde/experimental music scene but seemed to disappear for a very long time. For more than a decade by our count (you can find links to earlier material here) and his zines and releases are through End of Alphabet Records out of Wellington, a niche label-cum-labour of love which may well be better... > Read more
Skipper Down
Girls Pissing on Girls Pissing: Songs of Sodomy and the Compost of Aethyr (Muzai)
20 Mar 2017 | 1 min read
For reasons we can't and won't fully explain, Elsewhere has always found something of considerable interest in the archly arty, post-punk/experimentalism and enjoyably indulgent shadowland intelligence of GPOGP which sometimes almost gets close to bleak pop of the Fall/Toy Love/Tall Dwarfs/Pere Ubu kind. Almost. This “double album” – 16 songs which apparently can... > Read more
Pacific Hygiene
SHORT CUTS: A round-up of recent New Zealand releases
20 Mar 2017 | 2 min read | 1
Facing down an avalanche of releases, requests for coverage, the occasional demand that we be interested in their new album (sometimes with that absurd comment "but don't write about it if you don't like it") and so on, Elsewhere will every now and again do a quick sweep like this, in the same way it does IN BRIEFabout international releases. Comments will be brief. ... > Read more
Hot 8 Brass Band: On the Spot (Tru Thoughts/Rhythmethod)
15 Mar 2017 | <1 min read
Out of the many guests at this weekend's Womad you can guess that these guys from New Orleans – who deliver up pop-funk classics alongside originals and familiar tunes with their own twist -- will be among the most popular. They offer the danceable solution, wobble-bottom tuba, stacked up horns, jazz solos, handclap beats and pure entertainment. They are also extremely good.... > Read more
Keepin It Funky
Julie Lamb: Ordinary Days (julielamb.co.nz)
15 Mar 2017 | 1 min read
First a big tip o' the hat to Wellingtonian Lamb's packaging of this album: it comes in CD-sized cardboard box which contain the disc in a gatefold cover (with download code), lyrics on 10 playing card-sized illustrated cards in a small envelope, colourful bulldog clips (again in the themed artwork) and a die in plastic pack, instructions on how to make your own traffic cone (funny given... > Read more
Why Do I Forget
Nadia Reid: Preservation (Rhythmethod)
13 Mar 2017 | 1 min read | 1
Although Elsewhere heard both Nadia Reid's debut EP and first album we didn't write about them because . . . Got busy, got distracted or whatever, and in part because we were less impressed than others (here and abroad) seemed to be, so by the time we came to grips with them the time for comment had long passed. The enthusiastic reviews were in, she'd found her audience etc.... > Read more
The Way It Goes
French for Rabbits: The Weight of Melted Snow (Home Again/Southbound)
13 Mar 2017 | 1 min read
The 2014 debut album Spirits by this central duo of Brooke Singer and John Fitzgerald (here with multi-instrumentalist Ben Lent of Trinity Roots, drummer Hikurangi Schaverien-Kaa and Penelope Esplin, and guests) was a sheer delight and we described it as “not so much shoegaze as folksy skygaze” for its dreamy folkadelic sound. It is well worth finding even now, and... > Read more
Feathers and Dreams
Citrus Clouds: Imagination (bandcamp)
7 Mar 2017 | 1 min read
Recently Elsewhere has happily noted the resurgence of shoegaze . . . but this band which formed in Phoenix about five years ago has their own variant on that description. Their imprimatur on bandcamp – presumably written by themselves – is “desertgaze”. That'll do these ears . . . because this trio has that wide sonic vista we'd associated with... > Read more
The Sun is in My Eyes
The Courtneys: II (Secretly Canadian/Flying Nun)
6 Mar 2017 | 1 min read
The enjoyably reductive guitar pop of the Courtneys out of Vancouver found favour here for their self-titled debut album with its widescreen strum'n'sing, deliberately breezy teenage-whine sound and what seemed a schooling in early Flying Nun. When the template is that secure (and referenced) there's probably no need to mess with it. And so they don't (much) for this follow-up which... > Read more
Country Song
IN BRIEF: A quick overview of some recent international releases
6 Mar 2017 | 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. Comments will be brief. DJ T-Rock:The Sounds in Their Heads (Why) DJ T-Rock appeared at Elsewhere previously with the thoroughly enjoyable Getting... > Read more
Various Artists: Molly; Do Yourself a Favour (Liberation)
6 Mar 2017 | <1 min read
Where the double CD Great Australian Songbook was a handsome package with cover art by Rolf Harris and soaking up big Ocker songs (from Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport through Midnight Oil, the Church, Easybeats and Paul Kelly to Kylie, Delta Goodrem and Wolfmother), this triple set has a broader reach but a narrower focus. These 60 songs across three discs aim squarely at the period when... > Read more
You Just Like Me Cos I'm Good in Bed, by Skyhooks
Lydia Cole: The Lay of the Land (lydiacole.com)
3 Mar 2017 | 1 min read
Elsewhere was more than just ho-hum about Lydia Cole's debut Me and Moon of 2012, we were almost casually dismissive because it sounded like she'd thought no further than her own bedroom where she'd holed up after a relationship breakup. But a couple of advance tracks for this belated follow-up suggested something had happened to her in five years; Call it maturity, a more... > Read more
Time is a Healer
Brian Jonestown Massacre: Don't Get Lost (Southbound)
27 Feb 2017 | 1 min read
Many years ago in writing about the new BJM album Revelation, Elsewhere mentioned the well-known doco DIG! In which BJM mainman Anton Newcombe infamously seemed to be losing the plot, if he ever knew there was one. Not long afterwards he wrote, politely, asking why that needed to be mentioned. The explanation was simple: it was notorious, a ready reference point for readers and added... > Read more