Absolute Elsewhere
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YOUNG FATHERS INTERVIEWED (2023): Heavy heavy on the sources
13 Feb 2023 | 11 min read | 1
Young Fathers are an Ediburgh-based band whose music ranges across a number of styles from funk and pop to hip-hop, raggae and more. The trio of Alloysious Massaquoi, Kayus Bankole and Graham “G” Hastings talk us through Heavy Heavy, their third acclaimed album. . How much did the pandemic shape the record? G: "I think the timing for us wasn't that major of a... > Read more
BOB DYLAN: FRAGMENTS: TIME OUT OF MIND SESSIONS 1996-1997; THE BOOTLEG SERIES VOL 17 (2023): Darkness but a beckoning light ahead
12 Feb 2023 | 3 min read
The 1980s – which began with the murder of John Lennon – was a cruel decade for those who'd made their reputations in Sixties. After his post-Beatles career resurrection with Wings in the 70s Paul McCartney as a solo artist delivered slick but hollow albums, the Rolling Stones seemed to lose heart and direction as Keith Richards and Mick Jagger sniped at each other, Joni... > Read more
Not Dark Yet (live 2000)
THE BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2022: THE EDITOR'S PICKS
19 Dec 2022 | 10 min read
It's that time again when “best of” lists are prepared and people are outraged by the omissions or inclusions. But music tastes vary and art is subjective, so no one is right or wrong. Here's what we believe to be the 30 finest albums we've drawn attention to this past year (hence the link to our review) with the caveat that – as with our... > Read more
THE BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2022: THE READERS' CHOICES
19 Dec 2022 | 11 min read
From where we sat near the stereo, 2022 was an extraordinary year for music. All those “lockdown” albums started pouring through so there were plenty to choose from when it came to particular favourites. Yep, a lousy year for many, especially those like us who endured a seemingly endless and dull second lockdown in Auckland. Last week we posted our picks of the best of... > Read more
AND SO THIS IS CHRISTMAS (2019): Jingle beatle-bell rock
19 Dec 2022 | 1 min read
The Warehouse Stationery outlet store near my place in central Auckland is the last place I'd expect to be surprised by the sounds of their muzak. But a fortnight ago when they played the Beatles' Eight Days A Week it was not just a surprising selection but an enjoyable moment when I looked around at the other customers of all cultural and age demographics. Everyone, and I mean... > Read more
THE BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2022: THE YEAR IN REISSUES
12 Dec 2022 | 4 min read
With rock culture now almost 70 years old, every year – if not every month – is the anniversary of something. And since record companies, artists and accountants discovered the market for reissues, and especially expanded reissues, we've seen scores of them every year roaring at us. Some are comprehensive to the point of being the exclusive domain of obsessive -- like the 19... > Read more
GRAEME JEFFERIES REVISITED (2022): Something's always cookin' in the Cakekitchen
28 Nov 2022 | 4 min read
In a recent correspondence about the vinyl reissue of an early Cakekitchen album, the Kitchen's head-chef Graeme Jefferies said, “my profile in New Zealand is very buried”. Which confirms the adage of the late Ken Nordine: “We all see the world from our own disadvantage point”. We don't mean Jefferies -- he's no doubt right – but Elsewhere's disadvantage... > Read more
Bad Bodied Girl
THE BEATLES' REVOLVER, REHEARSED AND REMIXED (2022): An album of endless invention
21 Nov 2022 | 5 min read
Four years ago the award-winning American composer Laurence Rosenthal, a self-described Beatles fan, said, “I am always fascinated by the fact of their endless creativity, their endless invention”. Rosenthal was 91 at the time and spoke of how the Beatles' music brought his young family together in the 60s “because I could unconditionally admire them”. With... > Read more
I Want To Tell You (rehearsal)
THE STATE OF THE NORTHWEST PACIFIC (2022): People, places and some capital songs
18 Nov 2022 | 5 min read
“Team One, your time starts . . . now! What is the capital of Washington state?” “Ummm . . . Seattle.” “That's incorrect. Team two, the question goes to you. The capital of Washington state is . . .?” “Vancouver?” Unless your specialist subject is American state capitals or the life of Kurt Cobain, the name of Washington state's... > Read more
Satan Made Him Do It
REISSUED ON RECORD (2022): Local artists on vinyl, vinylly
7 Nov 2022 | 2 min read
With the dearth of pressing plants and a backlog of yet another Bowie reissue to be run off, local artists often have a hard time getting their short-run needs met when it comes to having their album out on vinyl. Sometimes it is months after the album's release before it eventually appears on record. And parallel to that problem for newly released albums is the number of older albums... > Read more
THE ROAD TO THE REVOLVER (2022): Say you want a reinvention . . .
5 Nov 2022 | 3 min read | 2
It's entirely possible that less than a year before they released Revolver, the album many consider a more enduring landmark album than Sgt. Pepper which followed it, the Beatles might simply have called it all off. Exactly a year before Revolver they had released the Help! album to coincide with their knockabout film of the same name – a kind of James Bond spoof as much as a Beatles... > Read more
Paperback Writer (backing track takes I and 2)
LIL' CHIEF RECORDS: TWO DECADES OF MUSIC AND ALBUM ART (2022): Cigarettes and cybernetics
18 Oct 2022 | 3 min read
Auckland's Lil' Chief label first came to attention 20 years ago with the debut album by the Brunettes, Holding Hands Feeding Ducks and the paired release of the Tokey Tones' Caterpillar and Butterfly albums. This was music which was poised, cool, enjoyably effete and well crafted. It was also music which ran against the tenor of the times in local music when garageband rock (the D4, the... > Read more
Bedroom Exotica, the Tokey Tones (2003)
THE BEATLES, REVOLVER REVISITED (2022): Death and taxes
16 Oct 2022 | 3 min read | 2
There will always be those who announce, “I don't like the Beatles”. But that's like saying, “I don't like America”. Which America don't you like? Which Beatles? The moptop Fab Four, the baroque Beatles of Sgt Pepper, the stripped-back songwriting experimentalists, the slick MOR band of the Abbey Road period . . . As someone clever noted, saying you don't... > Read more
Taxman
THE SYRIAN CASSETTE ARCHIVE (2022): Taped and bound
9 Oct 2022 | 1 min read
Despite the conspiracy idiots, people posting photos of dinner or their dog and the usual “me living my best life” photos, Facebook is useful for some things. Recently someone posted a link to the Syrian Cassette Archive which is a project to preserve to music of that beleaguered nation which had appeared on cassette in the years before we associated the country with... > Read more
FRAZEY FORD, INTERVIEWED (2022): When the work stopped, work started
9 Oct 2022 | 6 min read
Gabriola, a small island with a permanent population of fewer than 5000, is a 25 minute ferry trip from downtown Vancouver. This is where singer-songwriter Frazey Ford, who came to attention with the Canadian folk-country band The Be Good Tanyas in the early 2000s but has been on a soul music-inspired solo career for more than a decade, retreats “to... > Read more
THE BEATLES. IN MY LIFE, CONSTRUCTED (2022): The baroque way forward
10 Sep 2022 | 1 min read
When John Lennon wrote Help! in early 1965 (“and now my life has changed in oh so many ways, my independence seems to vanish in the haze”) he was feeling trapped by Beatlemania and the fame he had sought. As he would always say, it was true what he said in the lyrics, it was cry for help. And with that one song, more than any other to that point, he began to realise the... > Read more
SHAYNE CARTER, DIMMER AND A STAR TURN (2021): Groove is in its heart
10 Sep 2022 | 2 min read | 1
About seven or eight years ago when Shayne Carter and I were sharing caregiver duties with Chris Knox – who had had a debilitating stroke in 2009 – our paths would sometimes cross. On one particular afternoon he was very engaged in telling me about Marvin Gaye's Here My Dear – Gaye's acrimonious divorce album – of 1978. I knew of it more than I knew its contents,... > Read more
All the Way to Her
JACKSON BROWNE, INTERVIEWED (2022): The world still in motion
28 Aug 2022 | 8 min read
A year ago when American singer-songwriter Jackson Browne released his 15thstudio album Downhill from Everywhere, the British rock magazine Uncut proclaimed it “as insightful, melodic and artfully measured as anything Browne has done in the past 25 years”. Despite that assessment – Mojo according it four stars – the album didn't sell anything like the quantities of... > Read more
ORNETTE COLEMAN, INTERVIEWED (1996): The gentle genial genius in conversation
22 Aug 2022 | 27 min read | 3
This interview took place on 26 April '96 in the studio of photographer Austin Trevitt, 241 West 36th Street, in the same midtown building as one of Ornette's studios. . For a man who's had his lights punched out, was reviled by critics and audiences, often ignored and -- in latter years -- belatedly recognised as a genius, Ornette Coleman is remarkably slight. Even with his hat on... > Read more
Turnaround (from Sound Grammar, 2006)
ALEC BATHGATE OF TALL DWARFS, INTERVIEWED (2022): Something has happened.
13 Aug 2022 | 14 min read
Alec Bathgate – one half of this country's most idiosyncratic alt.pop group Tall Dwarfs with Chris Knox – is charmingly bashful when talking about the project which has occupied him for almost two years. It is Unravelled: 1981 – 2002, a loosely chronological box set of 55 Tall Dwarf songs spread over eight sides of vinyl. It arrives in a slipcase with a 20-page booklet of... > Read more