Music at Elsewhere
These pages - sometimes with sample tracks and videos posted - introduce and review music which may otherwise go unheard and unnoticed. Subscribers to Elsewhere (free, here) receive a weekly e-newsletter with updates on what's new at the ever-expanding site. Elsewhere: an equal opportunity enjoyer. So enjoy.
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Pickle Darling: Battlebots (digital outlets)
15 Sep 2025 | 1 min read
Elsewhere is usually candid about certain artists – usual young women in contemporary pop whose target market is teenagers and their own peers. We simply say, they don't make music for us . . . although many times we have conceded that but said the album is excellent and worth hearing. We think we can recognise talent if even it doesn't make music for us. Pickle Darling,... > Read more
Human Bean Instruction Manual
Dead Famous People: Wild Young Ways (digital outlets)
14 Sep 2025 | 1 min read
One of the more surprising releases of recent years was Dead Famous People's “Harry” in 2020. As far as we had been aware the band enjoyed a short-lived moment on Flying Nun in the early-mid Eighties, went off to the UK and so on, the disappeared. But now there was an album where Dons Savage showed an assured touch in power-pop and knew the value of a collar-grabbing chorus?... > Read more
In Praise of Right Now
Crystal Chen: You Can Call Me CC (digital outlets)
14 Sep 2025 | 1 min read
Emerging artists often like to make a big statement with their debut album, right from the opening track. It makes sense. Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland's Crystal Chen however is confident enough to go the other way: the opener here Bloom (a gently tinkling instrumental on harp with flute for the first two of its five and half minutes) and follow-up, the sensual, smoky and lightly swinging... > Read more
Let's Kiss, Not Fight
The Beths: Straight Line Was a Lie (Flying Nun, digital outlets)
12 Sep 2025 | 1 min read
The Beths' trajectory from indie.rock favourites to mainstream acceptance – from student radio in 2018 to RadioNZ National with Jesse Mulligan in 2022 who described them as the station's favourite band -- could be a roadmap for young bands. Their debut album Future Me Hate Me (2018) and its follow-up Jump Rope Gazers (2020)delivered exuberant, economic and immediately enjoyable... > Read more
No Joy
Laufey: A Matter of Time (digital outlets)
8 Sep 2025 | 1 min read
In a sassy cover which refers to a classic Julie London album of jazz standards from 1960, this Icelandic-Chinese, Berklee-educated singer and cellist stakes another claim for her style with this further instalment of her sophisticated, orchestrated and gently swinging originals. In one direction she often sits squarely in the lineage of Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan and two years ago,... > Read more
Tough Luck
Lexytron: Something New (digital outlets)
8 Sep 2025 | <1 min read
This new album by a British expat now resident here doesn't exactly live up to the title because the contents riff off some established genres: Elevator is a buzzy slice of New Wave pop (“the missing song from every 80s John Hughes movie” she says); Disco Jenny looks back to the dancefloor when Dexys were going off; My Backstage Life seems to have something Irish about; Stone Cold... > Read more
Is It Because?
Kora: Fifth Season (digital outlets)
1 Sep 2025 | 1 min read
Last year Kora asked “politician, can you make a right decision for all of us? You can talk the talk, but can you walk the walk, will you bring us comfort?” Well, now they've got their answer. Which might explain the opening track Revolution on this new album: “It's time for revolution, it's a struggle trying to find a solution”. As with many bands with reggae in... > Read more
Dancing in the Rain
Geneva AM: Pikipiki (digital outlets)
1 Sep 2025 | 1 min read
When the Howard Morrison Quartet had a hit with Hoki Mai in 1959 it wasn't without controversy. It was an upbeat revision of Henare Waitoa's Tomo Mai which had been written to welcome the men from the 28thMāori Battalion back from the Second World War. Some older folk objected to the cheery Morrison version (which was part of Rotorua's songbook already). Decades later Dalvanius was... > Read more
Pokarekare Ana
Wet Bandits: Bad Tattoos and Weathermen (digital outlets)
1 Sep 2025 | 1 min read
Debut album time for this Australian outfit which revolves around singer, songwriter and producer Finn Roberts formerly of Hawkes Bay. There's an interesting, genre-avoiding quality to Roberts' writing and production: the opener Not Blue for example is a generous seven and a half minutes which takes its time to emerge from a caress of synths and a tension-release guitar part then after a... > Read more
The Record Store
Bret McKenzie: Freak Out City (digital outlets)
1 Sep 2025 | 1 min read
So here's what we might call “The Weird Al Conundrum”: if you love a comedian who delivers very funny parodies of artists and genres – like “Weird Al” Yankovic taking off Michael Jackson, Queen, black hip-hop artists, Madonna, James Blunt and others – would you necessarily follow them into their career when they did their own songs? Would you buy an album... > Read more
Too Young
Bill Morris: In the Limestone Country (digital outlets)
29 Aug 2025 | 2 min read
Singer-songwriter Bill Morris (also a film-maker) hasn't appeared at Elsewhere for quite a while. In fact it has been a decade since we heaped praise on his impressive folk-cum-country album Hinterland which in places turned a harsh spotlight on lives on the margins of society. A decade ago No Depression magazine in the US also spoke highy of Morris' songwriting: “Even [Nashville]... > Read more
Davy Lowston
Water From Your Eyes: It's A Beautiful Place (digital outlets)
25 Aug 2025 | 1 min read
This left-field indie outfit from Chicago – signed to Matador after a brace of self-released albums – was first heard by Elsewhere on the album of Howe Gelb/Giant Sand covers Sandworms. That was just a fortnight ago and we speculated most our our readers wouldn't have heard of them either. Here's them with Gelb's Warm Storm. But we do our “own... > Read more
Spaceship
Mild Orange: The//Glow (digital outlets)
25 Aug 2025 | 1 min read
We were so impressed by the previous album Looking For Space by the Dunedin-founded and globally ambitious Mild Orange that we ran a track-by-track account written by their mainman Josh Mehrtens. It confirmed they were as smart a band as we thought. They arrive at this fourth album of gently assertive dream pop somewhere adjacent to the Church of the 1990s and Slowdive. There can be... > Read more
My Light
RECOMMENDED RECORD: Minuit: The 88 (digital outlets)
24 Aug 2025 | 2 min read
From time to time Elsewhere will single out a recent release we recommend on vinyl, like this which now comes as a double album with four additional tracks added to the original album. Check out Elsewhere's other Recommended Record picks . . . . Even band member Paul Dodge admits the electronica trio are “supposed to be retired”. “But the fact that we... > Read more
Cautiousness
Paul McLaney: The Daylight Moon (digital outlets)
18 Aug 2025 | 2 min read
Regular readers of Elsewhere will be very familiar with Paul McLaney if not the remarkable breadth of all his work, which we have covered quite extensively. Our interest in this polymath from Auckland is because there is a keen guiding intelligence behind his projects, in whatever form they arrive. The Daylight Moon fits somewhere into his folk-ambient output (acoustic guitar, vocals,... > Read more
The Feelings Remain
Roei Hermon: Dálum (digital outlets)
18 Aug 2025 | <1 min read
According to Israel experimentalist and multi-instrumentalist Roei Hermon the title track here comes from a Polynesian word for inside the mind, and he drew inspiration from Ornette Coleman's Lonely Woman. We buy the latter but suspend judgment about that former claim. The accent above the “a” raises a few alarm bells in itself not to mention the letter “d” being in... > Read more
Sunshine
Fran Barton and the Kevin Clark Group: Dancing on a Wavetop (digital outlets)
18 Aug 2025 | 2 min read
It seems a shame that Kevin Clark is not better known outside of Wellington jazz circles. The pianist, trumpeter and composer won two jazz album of the year awards in 2003 and 2005 for Once Upon a Song I Flew and The Sandbar Sessions respectively. Elsewhere picked up on his 2006 album Zahara where he explored Middle Eastern and Latin sounds with singer Fran Barton. That too won the... > Read more
River
Lachie Hayes: Subsatellite (digital outlets)
11 Aug 2025 | 1 min read
As with any broadly defined musical genre – jazz, rock, rap, blues etc – there are invariably subsets within subsets. Country music contains, among other smaller divisions, white Appalachian music, black Southern country, the cowboy songs of Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, Western Swing, the rock-influenced hat acts like Garth Brooks, the legendary Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn and Dolly... > Read more
The Likes of You
The Response: Novel Idea (digital outlets)
11 Aug 2025 | 1 min read
Christchurch's Response had equal billing on the Art School Dropout album by former Goodshirt singer/writer Rodney Fisher two years ago, an album we described as “a sophisticated collection of quiet, crafted, atmospheric guitar-based pop”. That album was pop in its various manifestations (folk-pop, pop-rock, dream pop) so that meant this one had a good entre for us. And... > Read more
Hollow Branches
RECOMMENDED RECORD: Soft Bait: Life Advice (Flying Nun, digital outlets)
4 Aug 2025 | 2 min read
From time to time Elsewhere will single out a recent release we recommend on vinyl, like this which comes with lyrics on an insert sheet and in a framable cover by the band's Joshua Hunter. Check out Elsewhere's other Recommended Record picks . . . . Because Elsewhere is so inundated with full-length albums (and wishes to digress into essays about artists and unusual or... > Read more