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UNRELEASED HENDRIX STUDIO SESSIONS DISCOVERED (2018): Young man blowing his horn
1 Apr 2025 | 4 min read
When Jimi Hendrix confidante and studio engineer Eddie Kramer told Elsewhere back in 2013 that there were no more studio sessions by Hendrix to be released what he really meant to say was, actually there were more to be released. The new collection Both Sides of the Sky apparently completes the posthumous trilogy started by Valleys of Neptune and People Hell And Angels. But then... > Read more
Kazoo, by stoned Jim and the Funky Monkeys
Ko Samet, Thailand: Lonely days
31 Mar 2025 | 2 min read
Greg would have been hard to miss in most places, but on the small beach at the southern end of Ko Samet -- a tiny teardrop-shaped island off to the east of Bangkok -- he was impossible to overlook. It wasn't just that he was, shall we say, a large man. Or that he was conspicuously gay. And it wasn't even that he carried the pampered Miss Spitty, a white Pomeranian, with him everywhere.... > Read more
LUCINDA WILLIAMS, VIC CHESTNUTT AND BUTTERCUP (2025): Anger and tone revisited
31 Mar 2025 | 3 min read
Vic Chestnutt was a gifted singer-songwriter who was much admired by his peers. He had been in a car crash at 18 and was effectively a quadrapilegic although had some small movement in his hands so he could still play simple chords on guitar. His first two albums were produced by Michael Stipe of REM and a fund-raising album for him had his songs covered by Smashing Pumpkins, Garbage,... > Read more
Van Morrison: On Hyndford Street (1991)
31 Mar 2025 | 1 min read
By the time Van Morrison released his double album Hymns to the Silence in '91, many of his longtime followers had moved on -- some disappointed by so many uneven albums, some just having enough Van in their lives. Over two discs, Hymns to the Silence was just too much Van, and even the most generous reviewers had to note many songs were not a patch on the Celtic soul he had previously... > Read more
Japanese Breakfast: For Melancholy Brunettes (And Sad Women): (digital outlets)
31 Mar 2025 | 1 min read
Korea-born, Oregon-raised 35-year old Michelle Zauner is one of those artists who has something to say and more than one way of saying it. She may be the singer-songwriter of the band Japanese Breakfast but her life was of such interest that her 2021 memoir Crying in H Mart spent more than a year on The New York Times best-seller list. It explored, sometimes through food, what it... > Read more
Winter in LA
D'Animal: Hedonistic Pillow (Thokei Tapes/digital outlets)
31 Mar 2025 | 1 min read
Elsewhere has sometimes had an affection for amusing band names and album titles like this one, a play on Jefferson Airplanes' Surrealistic Pillow. It may be irrational but it can lead you to an artist you might otherwise gone past or not even heard of. That explains an album by Manchester's Jefferson Airhead in our collection. In this case after the amused smile faded we were into the... > Read more
Hollywood Moment
Circuit des Yeux: Halo on the Inside (digital outlets)
31 Mar 2025 | 1 min read
Elsewhere came across Circuit des Yeux – 37-year old Chicago-based electro-rock practitioner and multimedia artist Haley Fohr – purely by chance about seven years ago. She was, as we noted in our review of her album Reaching for Indigo, one of the artists featured on a cover-mount CD which came with an issue of Uncut. We rarely listen to such albums but this one was... > Read more
Truth
Jay Clarkson and the Containers: Falling Through (Zelle/digital outlets)
30 Mar 2025 | 1 min read
Christchurch's Jay Clarkson has had a music career which dates back more than four decades, but it has been intermittent as she juggled other interests: a personal life, a literary career as a poetry and fiction writer, writing her memoir, ill-health . . . With her band of excellent and well-known musicians – keyboard player Alan Haig, drummer Mike Dooley and bassist Tenzin... > Read more
1000 Hours
Jeff Henderson: The Garrulous Sax (iii/digital outlets)
29 Mar 2025 | <1 min read
The title here might be a bit dismissive of this work from the enormously productive saxophonist Henderson: there's nothing trivial or long-winded about his music, certainly not on something as powerful as these solo pieces on various vintage saxophones recorded live in the Stella Maris Chapel in Wellington in May 2021. The location may have inspired a kind of exorcism attack because the... > Read more
Sneeze Up
Jacco Muller and Victor Ghannam: Alhambra by Night (digital outlets)
28 Mar 2025 | <1 min read
Unless you get there when the gates open, it's likely your memory of the Alhambra in Granada will be of tour groups, excitable school kids and noise. I got lucky, I was staying in cheap digs underneath the wall so got there before anyone else and had a leisurely hour almost by myself. So few people that I could take photos with no one in them, that would be rare I'd think. The... > Read more
Where the Sea Meets the Sun
CAT MOTHER AND THE ALL NIGHT NEWSBOYS. THE STREET GIVETH … AND THE STREET TAKETH AWAY, CONSIDERED (1969): The musicians not the music?
28 Mar 2025 | 4 min read
For the moment let's not worry about the music on this old album pulled from the shelves at random for consideration in this on-going series. The music will make itself known to us as we go. Let's instead just concentrate on the names involved, who they were, where they went and who they became. There is a story worth telling right there. The co-producer of this debut album by the... > Read more
ONE WE MISSED: Skyscraper Stan and the Commission Flats: Those Were the Days (digital outlets)
27 Mar 2025 | 1 min read
This album by Australia-based expat Stan – released in February – didn't so much go past us but was overtaken by other releases on the final sprint to the finishing tape. Although written a few years ago, many of the songs here speak to the times we find ourselves in: Run the Game pokes a sharp stick at the privileged and ambitious (“to you, all of life's a race and... > Read more
Run the Game
RECOMMENDED RECORD: Various Artists: American Baroque (Ace double LP)
24 Mar 2025 | 2 min read | 1
From time to time Elsewhere will single out a recent release we recommend on vinyl, like this which comes as a double set in a gatefold sleeve with extensive liner notes and credits. Check out Elsewhere's other Recommended Record picks . . . . The words “baroque pop” may be inexact but most people get the meaning: pop songs embellished by... > Read more
Barefoot Gentleman, by the Association
Alison Krauss and Union Station: Arcadia (digital outlets)
24 Mar 2025 | 1 min read
It has been 14 years since the last Krauss album with her band Union Station, the impressive Paper Airplane. In the interim she was busy with a solo career, the Raise the Roof album with Robert Plant (the belated follow-up to 2007's Grammy-winning Raising Sand) and – to fill in a bit of time – contributing to Ringo's Look Up. Union Station now includes a new singer Russell... > Read more
Granite Mills
THE FREEWHEELIN' JESSE WELLES (2025): With Bob on his side
24 Mar 2025 | 2 min read
No sooner had Timothée Chalamet been announced as playing the young Bob Dylan in the bio-pic A Complete Unknown than internet naysayers weighed in. The pretty boy from Dune playing Dylan? Willie Wonka as Bob? When the film arrived questions and complaints kept coming. Why was Bob's girlfriend Suze Rotolo renamed Sylvie Russo? (A. Dylan requested the change) Why wasn't... > Read more
Wheel (from Middle)
JASON ISBELL. SOLO AT LAST ON HIS NEW ALBUM, THE ACCLAIMED 'FOXES IN THE SNOW'
24 Mar 2025 | <1 min read
Available now on CD and vinyl from JB Hi-Fi stores nationwide. Just click here to be taken to JB Hi-Fi. What Elsewhere has said of Foxes in the Snow: "Words of wisdom in song from someone who's been through it . . .and is seeing his failings and the possibilities of the future with clarity. And who has crafted it all into a terrific album." To read the full Elsewhere... > Read more
THE VELVET UNDERGROUND & NICO, A TRIBUTE ALBUM: Another look in the art-rock mirror
24 Mar 2025 | 4 min read
Has there even been an album whose cultural influence far outstripped it's commercial impact more than the debut by New York's Velvet Underground? Their 1967 The Velvet Underground & Nico – in that famously provocative banana cover by the band's champion and nominal “producer” Andy Warhol (a phallic pink banana revealed when the skin was peeled back) – arrived... > Read more
Jason Isbell: Foxes in the Snow (vinyl/digital outlets)
24 Mar 2025 | 2 min read
Recently divorced after a decade of marriage to bandmate Amanda Shires and clearly still feeling all the various emotions which such a life-changing event can wrought, singer-songwriter Jason Isbell puts aside his 400 Unit band and -- for the first time since leaving Drive-By Truckers almost two decades ago -- sits down with just an acoustic guitar. The result, recorded over less than a... > Read more
Crimson and Clay
Maxine Brown: Funny (1961)
24 Mar 2025 | 1 min read | 1
There's something very satisfying about don't-care-anymore songs. The world is awash with the luvvy stuff but every now and again a song comes along which says, "Yep, but I'm over you". An Elsewhere favourite is Solomon King's exceptional Happy Again which really put that grand passion into perspective. Yeah, I loved and I lost and am hurt. But jeez, life goes on and I'll get... > Read more
THE LONG AWAITED NEW ALBUM BY ALISON KRAUSS AND UNION STATION, ON VINYL AND CD
24 Mar 2025 | <1 min read
"exceptional musicianship" says Elsewhere. To read the full review go here. To order direct from Southbound Records go here. > Read more