Music at Elsewhere

Strawpeople: Knucklebones (digital outlets)

21 Aug 2023 | 2 min read

That this album – Strawpeople's first in almost 20 years – should enter the chart of New Zealand music at number two shouldn't surprise anyone: there's a lot of affection for Strawpeople who, in their heyday of the Nineties and early 2000s, effortless eased from student radio favourites into mainstream acceptance and onto National Radio. Now, without scouring student radio... > Read more

Watch You Sleep

Marc Chesterman: Jean's Piano (digital outlets)

20 Aug 2023 | <1 min read

Fascinating. The name here is that of soundtrack musician/sound explorer Marc Chesterman but in fact the piano being played – a real old-time machine – is from recordings he made of his grandmother Jean Albrecht at her home in Whitianga. But much happens to her sound as he explains. “A phrase of the original recording is selected, it becomes a 'sample', a couple of... > Read more

Jean's Piano #200 drone

Cimeron: 46 Years (Frenzy/Stebbing)

16 Aug 2023 | 1 min read

We've heard about famous “lost” or unreleased albums – you know, those things Neil Young keeps finding in his archive – but more rare is the release of an album that never was. Like Cimeron's 46 Years which is the debut album from an Auckland band which never completed an album in its lifespan but now – yes, 46 years on – has one under its own name.... > Read more

Misled Convoy: Translations III (Dubmissions/digital outlets)

14 Aug 2023 | 1 min read

Elsewhere will concede immediately that we are unfamiliar with all but a couple of the pieces here remixed by Misled Convoy – which is Mike Hodgson of Pitch Black – but that's what we also said about the previous Translations collection. However when Hodgson lays his hands on things – remixing, adding additional effects and/or instruments – we'll always pay... > Read more

Blur: The Ballad of Darren (digital outlets)

14 Aug 2023 | 1 min read

There's a very telling song towards the end of this new Blur album. It is Avalon and in it you can hear the unease which success brought them during those Britpop years when these educated middle-class chaps went head-to-head with working-class Oasis. “What's the point of building Avalon if you can't be happy when it's done?” asks Damon Albarn in an almost defeated... > Read more

ONE WE MISSED: Ringlets: Ringlets (digital outlets)

9 Aug 2023 | 1 min read

With so many young (and sometimes belatedly emerging) artists coming through, it's inevitable we will miss some. How many? Of the 13 artists named on the cover of the May/Jun issue of NZ Musician, Elsewhere had only been aware of – and written about – one them: Hans Pucket. Imagine our surprise also to learn that 23-year old Taylor Roche has had 14.1 million likes on... > Read more

aja monet: when the poems do what they do (digital outlets)

7 Aug 2023 | 1 min read

As with the great Native American poet/musician Joy Harjo, the award-winning aja monet (adopting the ee cummings' style lower case) from Brooklyn, New York isn't well known in this country. And again as with Harjo, that's a shame. Both channel cultural urgency in poems which can be hard-hitting but are finely crafted. monet is in the tradition of The Last Poets, Wanda Coleman and... > Read more

The Clientele: I Am Not There Anymore (Merge/digital outlets)

1 Aug 2023 | 1 min read

This London-based ensemble around singer-songwriter Alasdair MacLean, bassist James Hornsey and drummer Mark Keen wooed and won Elsewhere with their God Save the Clientele of 2007 which was one of our best of the year picks for its charming, whispery pop. Their even more pastoral Bonfires on the Heath three years later was equally seductive. There's always been an understated... > Read more

RECOMMENDED RECORD: Golden Harvest: Golden Harvest (Frenzy)

31 Jul 2023 | 1 min read

From time to time Elsewhere will single out a recent release we recommend on vinyl, like this which comes as a remastered album, the first vinyl reissue of Golden Harvest's sole album. Check out Elsewhere's other Recommended Record picks . . . Elsewhere has written about this cracking New Zealand album from the late Seventies a number of times, so it is a real pleasure... > Read more

Guided by Voices: Welshpool Frillies (digital outlets)

24 Jul 2023 | 1 min read

Pub quiz question: what American rock band formed in 1983 have released almost as many albums as Bob Dylan whose career started more than 20 years before them? Yes, let's raise our glasses to Ohio's Guided by Voice who here clock up their 38th studio album (Bob at 40 with his recent Shadow Kingdom), and their second this year. Not bad for a band which has had two hiatuses, label-hopped... > Read more

Magic Factory: Deliver the Goods (digital outlets)

21 Jul 2023 | <1 min read

Five years after their debut Working With Gold, Auckland's rock'n'roll ensemble take another ride to the stoner Seventies' spirit of Aerosmith, Rolling Stones and soundtrack to Dazed and Confused. With members from Vietnam War, Drab Doo-Riffs, Raw Nerves and other bands, Magic Factory unashamedly deliver play-loud, riff-driven originals which also peel off from the country-rock of Gram... > Read more

Anohni and the Johnsons: My Back Was a Bridge For You to Cross (Rough Trade/digital outlets)

13 Jul 2023 | 1 min read

Formerly Antony and the Johnsons (Antony now Anohni and identifying as a woman), this soulful art-rock outfit from New York has delivered some extraordinary albums, notably I Am a Bird Now and The Crying Light (and the electronica-influenced Anohni solo debut Hopelessness) where queerness, emotional drama, chamber pop and the politics of the personal were bound together under the spell of her... > Read more

It Must Change

Brigid Mae Power: Dream From a Deep Well (Fire/digital outlets)

10 Jul 2023 | 1 min read

Bookending this fourth album with traditional Irish tunes (I Know Who is Sick and Down by the Glenside) and with a penetrating cover of Tim Buckley's I Must Have Been Blind before the midpoint, the remarkable Brigid Mae Power spans the ancient and recent past but brings them into the present in the context of personal songs like the airy Counting Down about being an absent parent while touring:... > Read more

I'll Wait Outside For You

Arthur Russell: Picture of Bunny Rabbit (Audika/digital outlets)

10 Jul 2023 | 2 min read

In 1992 the Point Music label, founded by New York contemporary classical composer Philip Glass, launched itself with John Moran's opera about Charles Manson's murderous “family”. “In hindsight, probably a mistake,” laughed Point's Rory Johnston in Auckland two years later for Jaz Coleman's Us and Them:Symphonic Pink Floyd concert, subsequently recorded with the... > Read more

Alayna: Self Portrait of a Woman Unravelling (digital outlets)

7 Jul 2023 | 1 min read

The title on this debut album from a Rotorua-raised singer might suggest something like an agonising screamfest of aural therapy. But here the soul/R'n'B singer offers thoughtful, intimate lyrics of gentle self-analysis and emotional sensitivity and songs which sit on soft beds of synths. Shaped as much by traditional singer-songwriters (she cites Dylan and Cohen) as contemporary soul,... > Read more

Cherry Tree

Vincent HL: Golden Sun (digital outlets)

2 Jul 2023 | <1 min read

On this album following his absorbingly ragged gloom-rock 2018 debut Weird Days, Vincent H.L. – from Kumeu, south of South Auckland – can no more avoid comparisons with Neil Young than Liam Gallagher with Oasis. The difference being Gallagher was in Oasis. H.L.'s problem is compounded by his style – Neil of the early 70s – being not only up against old Neil but... > Read more

Pickle Darling: Laundromat (digital outlets)

1 Jul 2023 | <1 min read

The lexicon has a new sub-category: “cardigan pop”. That's how the quirky music of Pickle Darling (Christchurch multi-instrumentalist Lukas Mayo, they/them) has been described. Check their 2016 glockenspiel version of Lennon's Tomorrow Never Knows. Although they say Pickle Darling means nothing you'd hope for some vinegar astringency. But the 12 songs on this third album... > Read more

Traditional Aliens: What World Will You Live In (digital outlets)

30 Jun 2023 | <1 min read

This duo of Pateriki Hura (guitars, bass, keys) and Cameron Budge (drummer) from Hastings previously appeared at Elsewhere when they were called Infinity. After a sensible name change (try locating a band called Infinity on the web), they return with their third album of polished, professional and mostly laid-back, slightly jazzy instrumentals which don't owe much, if anything, to... > Read more

Gat Black

Orangefarm: Inheritance (Failsafe Records/digital outlets)

25 Jun 2023 | 1 min read

Although not widely known beyond the capital, Nigel Mitchell's Orangefarm have been around the city for 20 years and now their melodic pop-rock in the lineage of Sneaky Feelings, early Straitjacket Fits and Bike finds fruition on this 13-song debut album. This is often guile-free, observational pop (Conversation with my Grandmother which, delightfully, is about exactly that) and vernacular... > Read more

Open

Jazmine Mary: DOG (digital outlets)

25 Jun 2023 | 1 min read

Even in the broad church loosely described as “alternative”, Australia-born, locally-based Jazmine Mary – identifying as they/them – stands out. Their debut album The Licking of a Tangerine – which won Best Independent Debut in the 2022 Taite Prize – had core elements of alt.folk. But with strings and saxophone embellishments there was also baroque... > Read more