Music at Elsewhere

Mermaidens: Mermaidens

3 Nov 2023 | <1 min read

When Mermaiden singers Gussie Larkin (guitar) and Lily West (bass) talked with me independently about this fourth album, they spoke with one voice: they wanted an album that was bold, clear and distinct from much of their previous work which had grown out of studio jams. That approach had worked well enough: their 2017 album Perfect Body was a Taite Prize-nominee; they were up for Best... > Read more

Dick Move: Wet (digital outlets)

30 Oct 2023 | <1 min read

Like a ram-raid through the window of a guitar shop, this local band tap into a bratty, stroppy and furious celebration of reductive rock'n'roll which at times – seven of their 13 songs clocking in under 90 seconds, the others not much more -- make the Ramones seem long-winded. It sounds like a joke but their debut album Chop! came in at just 18 minutes, this one is a full four... > Read more

Vanishing Twin: Afternoon X (Fire/digital outlets)

29 Oct 2023 | 1 min read

Elsewhere has previously recommended two albums by the multi-culti experimental UK project Vanishing Twin whose impressive releases seem to arrive at two year intervals and have an interesting philosophical bent. The opening track on this new album is Melty: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profane and we are at last compelled to face, in sober senses, the real... > Read more

Lazy Garden

ONE WE MISSED: Brown Spirits: Solitary Transmissions (Soul Jazz/digital outlets)

29 Oct 2023 | <1 min read

This album by a Melbourne, Australia instrumental trio with footholds in the rolling groves of Can, a touch of spaced-out pop came to our attention quite by chance. There was an ad on the back of a copy of The Wire from June and the description ticked a lot of Elsewhere boxes: Can meets Hawkwind, psyche/krautrock, DIY attitude and punk/post-punk intensity . . . The reference to Hendrix... > Read more

Dinah Lee: The Collection (Frenzy)

27 Oct 2023 | 2 min read

There is terrific footage of Dinah Lee performing the Myer Music Bowl in Melbourne in 1965 before an audience of predominantly young women, many of them barefoot in the front rows. In extended footage however the moment belongs to a girl who is asked what she likes about Dinah Lee. “She's a goat, not a sheep,” she says in a wonderfully Australian analogy meaning Lee went her... > Read more

Summertime

Graeme Jefferies: I'm Not Listening to Your Station (Jefferies/vinyl/digital outlets)

23 Oct 2023 | 2 min read

Few people could have been more surprised than Graeme Jefferies when his album Canary in a Coalmine scraped into the top 20 charts for New Zealand albums for a week in late August. How it managed that is a mystery, especially in the absence of reviews. It may be that this by Elsewhere was the only one. Whatever, it was a pleasure to see it there, albeit briefly. Jefferies (who with... > Read more

RECOMMENDED RECORD: Dimmer: Live at the Hollywood (digital outlets)

22 Oct 2023 | 1 min read | 1

From time to time Elsewhere will single out a recent release we recommend on vinyl, like this double which comes in a gatefold sleeve and a classy cover. Check out Elsewhere's other Recommended Record picks . . . . In 2021 Elsewhere wrote an article about the Dimmer album I Believe You Are a Star which had been released 20 years previous. We said it was “a... > Read more

The Chills: Brave Words Spoken Bravely, The Remix (Fire Records/digital outlets

21 Oct 2023 | 2 min read | 1

About 36 years after its original release Martin Phillipps get to include the Chills debut album Brave Words – by the addition of Spoken Bravely in the reissue's title – into his SB family alongside Submarine Bells, Soft Bomb, Sunburnt, Silver Bullets, Snow Bound and Scatterbrain. When Brave Words was released on Flying Nun in 1987 it was much praised for Philipps... > Read more

Wet Blanket (from Brave Words Spoken Bravely)

Wilco: Cousin (digital outlets)

21 Oct 2023 | 1 min read

It could be said that Wilco -- now almost 30 years into a career and Cousin being their 13th studio album -- have been on a roll lately. But weren't they always? On the release of last year's Cruel Country, Wilco's Jeff Tweedy said they'd never been comfortable about being considered “alt.country”. Fair enough, because their 1999 album Summerteeth was along the axis of... > Read more

Meant to Be

The National: Laugh Track (digital outlets)

20 Oct 2023 | 1 min read

Right about now if you've heard the previous National album First Two Pages of Frankenstein which came out just six months ago and have picked up on Laugh Track you are probably checking the state of lyricist Matt Berninger's marriage to Carin Besser. You might just leap to the idea that maybe the guy needs to get on Tinder or be set up with a blind date. That's because First Two Pages... > Read more

Albi and the Wolves: Light After the Dark (AAA/digital outlets)

16 Oct 2023 | 1 min read

Albi (singer/guitarist Chris Dent) and the Wolves (fiddle player Pascal Roggen, bassist Michael Young) won best folk artist in 2018 for their debut album One Eye Open and have come a long way musically since then. Through their This is War (2019) and into this especially impressive and diverse third album they have constantly extended themselves. They are folk Jim, but not always... > Read more

Vorsen: A World on Fire (digital outlets)

15 Oct 2023 | 1 min read

We don't call it "Noisyland" because we are quiet. Some of our bands have been exceptionally loud, wild and out of control. From Chants R'n'B and the newly discovered recordings of the impressive Grim Ltd in the Sixties, to hard rockers in the early Seventies and then punk and post-punk search-and-destroy bands (the Plague, No Tag and so on) right up through Shihad and Dead C... > Read more

Donna Dean: Kisses and Other Things (digital outlets)

9 Oct 2023 | 2 min read

Wilco's Cruel Country of last year was a clever sleight of hand: it was a more traditional kind of country music than alt.country, but managed to be somewhere still to the left of the mainstream. Donna Dean – one of this country's most under-acknowledged and understated songwriters – manages that dichotomy too: she's in the folk-country genre but tills similar soil as the... > Read more

Dangerous

RECOMMENDED RECORD: Vor-Stellen: Parallelograms (digital outlets)

9 Oct 2023 | 2 min read

From time to time Elsewhere will single out a recent release we recommend on vinyl, like this which comes as a double album. Check out Elsewhere's other Recommended Record picks . . . . In the world to the left of mainstream guitar rock is a heavily populated region usually referred to as indie or alternative (“Alternative to what?” said Tom Waits when he... > Read more

KMTP: With Love KMTP (Sunreturn/digital outlets)

6 Oct 2023 | <1 min read

KMTP is Tāmaki Makaurau-based Keria Paterson (Te Arawa, Ngāti Raukawa and Ngāi Tahu, they/them) and an interesting bunch of musicians: as a drummer he has played with Dirty Pixels and Dead Famous People And here taps into a kind of indie.Britpop (Walk Out to Space, 2.45), acoustic nostalgia (the opening passages of 2021 Was Fun), a pastoral Interlude instrumental which is nice... > Read more

2021 Was Fun

Oneohtrix Point Never: Again (digital outlets)

5 Oct 2023 | <1 min read

The experimental electronica-cum-art music composer Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never), here once more softly pushes at the boundaries on an album which opens with Elseware and what sounds like a string section tuning up (“it was 56 years ago today . . .”?) before settling on a brief Romantic melody and the we weave into the title track which has a gently unsettling quality of... > Read more

Various Artists: When the Alarm Clock Rings (vinyl only)

2 Oct 2023 | <1 min read

Taking it's title from a song by Blossom Toes which closes this double vinyl and subtitled “A Compendium of British Psychedelia 1966-1969”, this is treasure chest of the eccentric British take on psychedelic music, more Edwardian tea-room than hippie crash pad. It's the left-field compilation for those who like very early Pink Floyd and The Move, and have The Crazy World of... > Read more

Sparklehorse: Bird Machine (digital outlets)

1 Oct 2023 | 1 min read | 1

Ol' Bill Shakespeare was overstating it in Julius Caesar when he wrote, “When beggars die, there are no comets seen; The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.” But we take the general point; the big names get the biggest obituaries, if not comets in the sky. When famous musicians die – Lennon, Whitney, Amy, Tupac, Bowie et al –... > Read more

Julian Temple Band: Tunnels (digital outlets)

28 Sep 2023 | 1 min read

This long-running Ōtepoti Dunedin six piece – almost two decades in the game, this their fifth album in 11 years – don't seem to have captured national attention in the way that their peers Six60 and Summer Thieves have managed. Which is a shame because they are certainly energetic as they cross from solid rock to post-New Wave pop-rock and just enough musically... > Read more

Library

Swallow the Rat: South Locust (digital outlets)

26 Sep 2023 | <1 min read

You can guess from this Auckland trio's name they aren't in this game for the pop hits. They deliver often exciting Nineties post-punk and powered-up pop (Gravois Park), menacingly low-slung material verging on drone-rock (the standout Mind) and yet can unexpectedly seduce with more quiet-loud material (Small Plates) and something approaching uneasy pop-rock (Idea of the South, the... > Read more