Music at Elsewhere
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The Aliens: Luna (Pet Rock)
6 Jan 2009 | 1 min read
Back in the late Ninenties the Beta Band from Britain were, for some of us at least, the most exciting and promising thing around. They released three charming folkadelic EPs -- packaged on CD as, you guessed it, The Three EPs -- and they were heard at the best barbecues. They were pastoral, trippy, sort of hip-hop if you only had acoustic instruments (although they had a turntablist), and... > Read more
The Aliens: Dove Returning
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2008: Duffy: Rockferry (Rough Trade)
22 Dec 2008 | <1 min read | 2
Funny how the UK rock press works, innit? Just a month or so ago this soulful, young Welsh singer who has a mainline to Dionne Warwick, Spector girl groups and Motown was being hailed as the next big thing/one to watch etc. Her record company had slipped out an advance sampler CD/7 inch which was so terrific it was posted here at Elsewhere about three months back as a very early heads-up.... > Read more
Duffy: Serious
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2008: Van Morrison: Keep It Simple (Lost Highway)
22 Dec 2008 | <1 min read
Another year and another Van album on yet another label . . . And with the reissue of his earlier albums drawing attention to great work like It's Too Late to Stop Now (read about it in Essential Elsewhere) it would hardly be surprising if this one was ignored by even longtime followers, many of whom might be picking up the remastered back-catalogue or one of the new greatest hits... > Read more
Van Morrison: No Thing
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2008: MGMT: Oracular Spectacular (Sony/BMG)
22 Dec 2008 | 1 min read
As regular visitors to Elsewhere are aware, not everything posted here is a work of unalloyed genius which will be treasured down many lifetimes. (Although there are however more than a few like that I would hope.) But sometimes albums just come along that you are very glad to have heard and simply enjoy for what they mean to you on some odd subconscious level. I suspect this one is like... > Read more
MGMT: The Youth
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2008: James McMurtry: Just Us Kids (Lightning Rod/Elite)
22 Dec 2008 | 1 min read
The murky photo of a small, barroom audience on the inner sleeve of this brittle and typically dark album by singer-poet McMurtry might have included me. It looks like it was taken in the Continental Club in Austin where I caught him and his band the Heartless Bastards a couple of years ago playing their regular gig. Since his remarkable debut Too Long in the Wasteland at the opening of... > Read more
James McMurtry: Ruins of the Realm
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2008: Hayes Carll: Trouble in Mind (Lost Highway)
22 Dec 2008 | <1 min read
You'd think with strip malls, fast food franchises, saturation low-cost reality television and the widespread levelling out of mainstream culture that guys like Carll would have been ironed out of American life But he's one of those crinkles in the texture, an alt.country-cum-trad.country guy who is a little early Steve Earle and Joe Ely, and a bit of Basement Tapes Bob Dylan, but also very... > Read more
Hayes Carll: Girl Downtown
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2008: Samuel Flynn Scott and Bunnies on Ponies: Straight Answer Machine (Loop)
22 Dec 2008 | <1 min read | 1
Sam Scott is the singer and main songwriter of the Phoenix Foundation (alongside Luke Buda) and wrote the music for the feature Eagle Vs Shark but this, his second solo album, sounds like a man thoroughly enjoying himself (in a somewhat serious way) out of the confines of both of those. As with the PF this is pop which has a light'n'loose feel (soft drugs I suspect) and a sense of... > Read more
SF Scott and BOP: Sodium Ions
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2008: Fleet Foxes: Fleet Foxes (SubPop/Rhythmethod)
22 Dec 2008 | 1 min read | 2
With its references to late 60s folk-rock, baroque pop flourishes, close harmonies, art-rock progressions and the jigsaw-puzzle of arrangements for voices and a small array of instruments (all deployed with precision, skill and understatement), this extraordinary album seems an unlikely one to have been embraced by hip rock magazines.It is is complex and yet poppy, sometimes oddly... > Read more
Fleet Foxes: Ragged Wood
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2008: Coldplay: Viva la Vida or Death And All Her Friends (EMI)
22 Dec 2008 | 1 min read | 3
One advantage of not listening to commercial radio is that you don't start going off songs or bands through over-familiarity. Which might explain why I quite like this new album by a band which seems to annoy most right-thinking people and serious music writers.But I hear so little of them -- I rarely play the albums I have -- that this one sounds intelligent and like a band prepared to take a... > Read more
Coldplay: Yes
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2008: Ryan Bingham: Mescalito (Lost Highway)
22 Dec 2008 | <1 min read | 1
We live and we learn -- and I have been living and relearning by repeat plays of this exceptional debut by someone called Ryan Bingham of whom I know nothing. And in a way, I'm grateful he has lived whatever he has in my place. The hard lessons he seems to have learned, I'm happy to just hear from this distance. I hear dark alt.country, brittle back-country, outsider art, folk-framed... > Read more
Ryan Bingham: Sunrise
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2008: Paul Weller: 22 Dreams (Shock)
22 Dec 2008 | 1 min read
A couple of months ago I was invited to give a lecture to Auckland Uni music students about a contemporary songwriter of my choosing whose catalogue of work was interesting and worth studying.I picked Paul Weller on strength of this quote from him about his forthcoming album: "It takes in soul, rock'n'roll, there are some folky moments, some psych bits, a classical piece, some avant free... > Read more
Paul Weller: Echoes Around the Sun
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2008: Beck: Modern Guilt (DGC)
22 Dec 2008 | <1 min read
For my money there are only two indispensible Beck albums: Odelay of '96 and Mutations of two years later. That said, there are another couple I'd prefer not to live without -- and this one produced by Danger Mouse shapes up to be one of those, and is still climbing in stature on repeat plays.As always this gifted, musical changeling and sonic shapeshifter filterfeeds his way through... > Read more
Beck: Replica
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2008: Teddy Thompson: A Piece of What You Need (Verve)
22 Dec 2008 | <1 min read | 1
This son of Richard and Linda keeps good company: among his friends and fellow travellers are the Wainwrights (Rufus, Martha, and their father Loudon), guitarist Marc Ribot, the Band's Garth Hudson and other hip congnoscenti.His last album Upfront and Down Low was mostly a country covers outing. And despite possessing the same kind of effete world weariness and post-sexual languor that infects... > Read more
Teddy Thompson: In My Arms
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2008 Micah P Hinson and the Red Empire Orchestra (Inertia)
22 Dec 2008 | <1 min read | 3
This slight American singer-songwriter impressed hugely on a brief New Zealand tour a few years ago when he delivered his reflective acoustic songs and wry between-songs banter to very small but appreciative audiences.Cult figure then -- and much the same today I am guessing.Here with a small string section (and his own impressive catalogue of keyboard and string instruments) he takes his dark... > Read more
Micah P Hinson: Sunrise Over the Olympus Mons
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2008 Willard Grant Conspiracy: Pilgrim Road (Southbound)
22 Dec 2008 | <1 min read | 1
For some people the radar-avoiding WGC are like an alt.country version of the late and lamented Australian band the Go-Betweens. Not for any similarity in sound, but in that if you discovered the songwriting skills early you tended to follow the central members' every move (solo or with the band).WGC has largely been the vehicle of Robert Fisher with now-departed Paul Austin and the 2004... > Read more
Willard Grant Conspiracy: Malpensa
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2008 Bond Street Bridge: The Mapmaker's Art (Monkey Records)
22 Dec 2008 | 1 min read
Opening with an arresting, one minute challenge of scraped and stabbing violin you could be forgiven for thinking the one-man band of Sam Prebble who is Bond Street Bridge is being beamed at you from the Contemporary Classical department. It’ll certainly grip you, as will dark alt.folk drone Black Market Soul Transplant which follows (“the devil got me drunk . . . woke up... > Read more
Bond Street Bridge: Rain
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2008 Bob Dylan: Tell Tale Signs, Rare and Unreleased 1989-2006, The Bootleg Series Vol 8
22 Dec 2008 | 1 min read | 4
After the less-than-essential Vol 7 which accompanied the brilliant Martin Scorsese Dylan-bioflick No Direction Home (if you got the DVD you could probably pass on the CD) this on-going series of unreleased/rare/alternative versions hits another peak with this exceptional collection. There are a number of reasons for that: look at the period it covers and you may see it is the late-career... > Read more
Bob Dylan: Tell Ol' Bill
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2008 Emiliana Torrini: Me and Armini (Rough Trade)
22 Dec 2008 | 1 min read | 1
Only the most diligent Elsewhere reader with perfect recall might remember this Icelandic singer who appeared on the Next Brel compilation/tribute to the singer-songwriter Jacques Brel which appeared here some time last year. Torrini was one of the standout performers on that album and she has certainly drawn enormous praise for her previous albums released in he UK. Of her last one the... > Read more
Birds
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2008: The Felice Brothers: The Felice Brothers (Shock)
22 Dec 2008 | <1 min read
These three actual brothers (and a friend) weighed in with the Tonight at the Arizona which made the Best of Elsewhere 2007 list and turned up as many a critic's favourite Americana album.This long-awaited sequel follows an interim album sold at gigs, and a few of those songs are now available on this self-titled album (and some other tracks were, confusingly, recorded before their debut... > Read more
Felice Brothers: Murder by Mistletoe
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2008: Loudon Wainwright: Strange Weirdos (Universal)
22 Dec 2008 | 1 min read
Longtime cynic, straight-shooter and occasionally misanthropic singer-songwriter Wainwright shows no sign of losing his touch even though he is now in his 60s. His subjects will always provide plenty of material: they are life in general, himself, his family, and sometimes astute socio-political observation. He is a sensitive singer-songwriter -- if that also means being sensitive to... > Read more