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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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
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
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
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
Jimmy Page and the Black Crowes: Live at the Greek (Vinyl, CD and digital outlets)
17 Mar 2025 | 3 min read
On the face of it, it looked like a case of what Father John Misty had observed on his recent, excellent Mahashmashama album, “Time makes fools of us all”. When reflecting on the 2000 double album Live at the Greek where Jimmy Page joined the Black Crowes for blues classics and a bunch of Led Zeppelin songs, Crowes singer Chris Robinson was dismissive. "I didn't really... > Read more
Whole Lotta Love (live)
THE PATRON SAINT OF HUMMINGBIRDS: Environmental Music Vol 1 (digital outlets)
13 Mar 2025 | <1 min read
This Californian artist – who prefers to remain anonymous – appeared at Elsewhere last year with her ambient Environmental Music Vol 2 and promised Vol 1 would follow. And here it is, a collection of atmospheric pieces recorded during the lockdown era and a restful response to the stresses that some were feeling. Well, stress didn't just evaporate at the end of that time and... > Read more
Meditation V
The Tubs: Cotton Crown (digital outlets)
10 Mar 2025 | <1 min read
This London-based Welsh band come off as a smart marriage of REM's indie.rock jangle, slightly yobby British post-punk pop and a revved up version of Scotland's Proclaimers. In other words, they make smart and memorable folksy power-pop. And there's a real sense of desperation in places (the nervy Illusion, the Pogues-punky Chain Reaction). Singer Owen Williams has some of Richard... > Read more
Illusion
Bunchy's Big Score: Happy Birthday, Daniel Johnston!!! Don't Be Afraid (digital outlets)
5 Mar 2025 | 1 min read
The album title's reference to the late American eccentric and somewhat emotionally damaged pop artist Daniel Johnston – and the childlike cover art – flag that this album is a kind of left-field inspired amateurism by this self-described art-rock trio from Otepoti lead by singer/writer Max White. As with Johnston's often bizarre and sometimes very moving songs, the songs here... > Read more
Harold Budd
Squid: Cowards (digital outlets)
3 Mar 2025 | 2 min read
When Edith Sitwell – no slouch herself in the peculiarity stakes – wrote her 1933 book The English Eccentrics she wasn't short of material. Britain has long had a lineage of the mad, strange, amusing or inventive eccentrics. And they are often celebrated. Being different – even if you are difficult – is more accepted in Britain than, say, in the US. Simply... > Read more
Building 650
Bonnie 'Prince' Billy: The Purple Bird (digital outlets)
3 Mar 2025 | <1 min read
What has Beyonce wrought? Seems everyone is going country, everyone from octogenarian Ringo to young kids putting their first single into the world and hoping to be the next Kaylee or Luke. Will Oldham (AKA Bonnie 'Prince' Billy) has sailed close to country music many times in the past three decades, most obviously on his 2004 Sings Greatest Palace Music recorded in Nashville with... > Read more
Boise, Idaho
Nadia Reid: Enter Now Brightness (digital outlets)
24 Feb 2025 | 1 min read
As we have noted in our review of the new Sharon Van Etten album, artists don't have to change. But most do because . . . They grow, mature, see more of the world, are exposed to different influences and experiences, their tastes change, they have a partner, children maybe . . . As George Harrison once observed, in five years he went from Liverpool to standing in the Himalayas.... > Read more
Cry on Cue
Sharon Van Etten: Sharon Van Etten and the Attachment Theory (digital outlets)
24 Feb 2025 | <1 min read
There's nothing in the contract which says musicians need to grow, evolve and progress. In fact there's plenty of evidence – Status Quo, ZZ Top and Liam Gallagher spring to mind – that staying much the same is a perfectly valid career option. For an audience there's certainty in the familiar, and not everyone is capable of going the whole Bowie. Sharon Van Etten has... > Read more
Southern Life (What It Must Be Like)
Horsegirl: Phoenetics On and On (digital outlets)
24 Feb 2025 | <1 min read
Elsewhere was very enthusiastic about the 2022 debut Versions of Modern Performance by this trio of young women out of Chicago (singer/guitarist Penelope Lowenstein still in high school at the time). It ended up in our picks for the best albums of that year because it was more than just energetic alt.rock. It came with side-helpings of New Wave sensibilities, noise and distortion,... > Read more
2468
Daily J: Scatterbrains (digital outlets)
21 Feb 2025 | <1 min read
With a band name designed to induce a knowing smile, guitar-driven pop which is breezily conventional (verse/chorus) and an album which collects together previous singles and frontloads them, this one gets a tailwind straight away. The band of three brothers – Jayden, Johnny and Jeese Paul with their mate Rick Everard – have a keen pop sensibility (Go With the Flow) and,... > Read more
Dead Gowns: It's Summer, I Love You . . . (digital outlets)
17 Feb 2025 | <1 min read
The full title of this debut album by Maine-based singer-songwriter Genevieve Beaudoin is It's Summer, I Love You and I'm Surrounded by Snow. And that dichotomy of sun and snow is apt on album which should appeal to those who like their alt.folk with a bit of grit, darkness and raw-edge electric guitars in places. Beaudois can deliver with an engrossing weariness which is palpable (the... > Read more
Swimmer
RECOMMENDED REISSUE: Various Artists: Eccentric Soul; The Cobra Label (vinyl/digital outlets)
17 Feb 2025 | <1 min read
We draw attention to this terrific compilation of sixties Tex-Mex, rock'n'soul music because the 28 songs have been issued across double vinyl and digitally. From the opening Spanish-language Wooleh Booleh by Sonny Ace and the Twisters (more familiar in the Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs version) and Searchin' popular with Merseyside bands (here by Texans Mike and the Belairs with Nyolia... > Read more
I Don't Want No Woman, by Little Henry and the Laveers
Thala: Avalanche (Fire/digital outlets)
17 Feb 2025 | <1 min read
The highly productive and still active Juliana Hatfield (Lemonheads, numerous short-lived bands and projects) might take umbrage with the publicity for this second album by Berlin-based Thala: the songs are described as “like a modern day Juliana Hatfield”. The queen is dead, long live the queen? Other references given are Hope Sandoval (Mazzy Star) and Japanese Breakfast.... > Read more
Body to You
Rose City Band: Sol Y Sombra (digital outlets)
10 Feb 2025 | <1 min read
We came upon this band out of Portland – who define the description “mellow” – by chance a while back and their 2023 Garden Party album became a go-to CD for car journeys of some length. This new album of quiet country-rock, pedal steel-coloured material is more of the same if slightly less so in that the pulse is just slightly slower for the most part. But if... > Read more
Radio Song
Matthew Bannister: The Dark Backwards (Powertools/digital outlets)
10 Feb 2025 | 2 min read
No one could accuse Matthew Bannister of lallygagging around. His resume includes albums with Sneaky Feelings, The Dribbling Darts of Love, The Changing Same, The Weather, releases as One Man Bannister and under his own name, a couple of books (his memoir of his Flying Nun days and an analysis of the album Songs from the Front Lawn), various academic papers . . . Much of this in... > Read more