Music at Elsewhere

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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