Music at Elsewhere
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BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2008 Luke Buda: Vesuvius (Arch Hill)
22 Dec 2008 | 1 min read | 1
This exceptional album by Buda of the Phoenix Foundation may take some getting used to for a few people: it is ambitious (and often lyrically funny or provocative) wide-screen pop which unashamedly doesn't shy from a McCartney-like hook, or deploying lap steel to fine effect -- as well as conjuring up the innocence of mid 60s pop (Electric Waterfall has a melody, guitar solo and vocal harmonies... > Read more
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2008: Moana and the Tribe: Wha (Black Pearl/Ode)
22 Dec 2008 | <1 min read
Across her previous three albums Moana Maniapoto confirmed her status as one of New Zealand's most significant voices whose sound could just as comfortably incorporate politics and culture as seduce with her flowing lyrics in te reo and her astute ear for using the traditional within a contemporary context. This album might lack the obviously powerful and overt statements of material like... > Read more
Moana and the Tribe: Te Apo
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2008: James Hunter: The Hard Way (Universal)
22 Dec 2008 | 1 min read | 1
This Englishman with an unexpectedly soulful voice was one of the first artists posted at Elsewhere back in mid 2006 and that astonishing album People Gonna Talk was easily among the best of that year. But in this country with very little publicity (I saw none) it rose without a trace. Still, those who heard it got a wonderful slice of Sam Cooke/soul-reggae -- and it went on to be in... > Read more
James Hunter: Til the End
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2008: Emmylou Harris: All I Intended To Be (Warners)
22 Dec 2008 | 1 min read | 1
The crystalline quality of Emmylou Harris' voice is often so admired that people can look past that she is also a great interpreter of a lyric and has effortlessly brought traditional or familiar songs together with her originals.This time out she calls on kindred spirits (the McGarrigle sisters, Mike Auldridge, Buddy Miller) with her band which includes keyboard player Glenn D Hardin, drummer... > Read more
Emmylou Harris: Not Enough
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2008 Eli Paperboy Reed and The True Loves: Roll With You (Shock)
22 Dec 2008 | 1 min read | 2
For the past week or so I have been listening to old vinyl by Dusty Springfield and Southside Johnny (a New Jersey bar-band chum of Springsteen and Stevie Van Zandt) and have been reminded again just how many white singers have been immersed in soul/r'n'b.And there seems to be a new wave again with James Hunter, Duffy and Beth Rowley, all of whom have been Elsewhere favourites. Of course Van... > Read more
Eli Paperboy Reid: I'll Roll With You
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2008 TV on the Radio: Dear Science (4AD)
22 Dec 2008 | <1 min read | 5
There are very few bands in rock culture that you could describe as genuinely avant-garde, but this ambitious New York outfit certainly fits the job prescription: they are musically ambitous, possess a sense of history but also a 21st century grandeur in their sonic approach, and write on a big scale. It's enough to observe that there are elements of Prince and Bowie-funk in here as much as... > Read more
TV on the Radio: Golden Age
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2008 Lucinda Williams: Little Honey (Universal)
22 Dec 2008 | 1 min read
After her last, quite exceptional but largely melancholy album West (in part influenced by death in the family) it is almost as if Williams is here staking her claim again to some sassy rock'n'roll threads. The opener Real Love blazes off the disc and the closer is a cover of AC/DC's It's a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock'n'Roll) which, it must be said, she delivers in her... > Read more
Lucinda Williams: Little Rock Star
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2008 Deerhunter: Microcastle (4AD)
22 Dec 2008 | <1 min read | 1
To be honest, this album by Bradford Cox and his Athens, Georgia band -- he's also the man behind his solo project Atlas Sounds, an album reviewed very favourably here some weeks ago -- sounds like a lot of other people, but what a lot of great other people: the Velvet Underground, the Church, the Pixies, the Cure, Mojave 3, Jesus and Mary Chain, early 90s shoe-gazer/paisley underground pop... > Read more
Deerhunter: Nothing Ever Happened
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2008 Mavis Staples: Live. Hope at the Hideout (Anti)
22 Dec 2008 | 1 min read | 1
The last album by the great Mavis Staples, We'll Never Turn Back was picked as one of the best albums of 2007 at Elsewhere, and that was no sympathy vote for one of life's survivors who had grown up with the civil rights movement and has now lived long enough to see Obama heading for the White House. So when she sings "keep your eyes on the prize, hold on", Freedom Highway and... > Read more
Mavis Staples: This Little Light
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2008: The Mountain Goats, Heretic Pride (4AD)
22 Dec 2008 | 1 min read | 3
Co-produced by John Vanderslice, the typically opaque lyrics by John Darnielle are given space and clarity so as to bewilder and bemuse you by turns. Not many people write songs with titles like Sax Rohmer #1, How to Embrace a Swamp Creature, Marduk T-Shirt Men's Room Incident and Michael Myers Resplendent. But here augmented by some discreetly dramatic strings and the small band, and with... > Read more
The Mountain Goats: Heretic Pride
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2008: Radiohead: In Rainbows (XL)
22 Dec 2008 | 2 min read | 3
Over the Christmas 07-08 period I heard a radio interview with a young musician denouncing the gross villany of major record companies -- about which I expect he had no personal experience -- and pointing to Radiohead's on-line/download release in October 2007 of In Rainbows (with buyers paying what they liked for it) as evidence the music industry was tottering like a mortally wounded... > Read more
Radiohead:Nude
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2008 Johann Johannsson: Fordlandia (4AD)
22 Dec 2008 | <1 min read | 1
Part romantic and lyrical classical music, part minimalism of the early La Monte Young kind, and deftly orchestrated in the manner of albums on Eno's Obscure label of the Seventies (Gavin Bryars' Sinking of the Titanic comes to mind), this emotionally downbeat but eerily beautiful album is probably of as much appeal to those who like a bit of Mahler as anyone coming from Eno's ambient music end... > Read more
Johann Johannsson: The Rocket Builder
AA Bondy: American Hearts (Fat Possum/Shock)
15 Dec 2008 | <1 min read
From what I have read, this dark folk album isn't what we should have expected from Mr Bondy out of Alabama. It seems he was previously the lead singer of an alt.rock band and drew favourable comparisons with Kurt Cobain. Quite what made him drop the volume, pick up acoustic guitar and harmonica, craft literate and questioning songs, and aim for a place between Dylan (65 and... > Read more
AA Bondy: How Will You Meet Your End?
Tehimana Kerr: Defamation of Character (Capital)
15 Dec 2008 | <1 min read | 1
Over 10 years in the making by all accounts, which means that this is either a mammoth of Floyd-like dimensions or that Kerr is one helluva laidback character. It's the latter if this lazy Sunday outing is anything to go by -- and of course he has been busy as Jetlag Johnson, guitarist with Wellington band Fat Freddys Drop. This is mellow and soulful to the point of being horizontal -- it... > Read more
Tehimana Kerr: Summer 97
Various: Bob Dylan's Jukebox (Chrome Dreams/Triton)
15 Dec 2008 | 1 min read
The influence of the young Bob Dylan (64-66) is evident today in singer-songwriters such as AA Bondy and Pete Molinari (among many others), and you can certainly hear unashamed echoes of Dylan 67 - 72 in the likes of the Felice Brothers and many more in the alt.country, folk-blues vein. So there should be an audience for this 25-track compilation of artists who influenced The Man Himself,... > Read more
Hank Williams: Lost Highway
Tim Finn: The Conversation (EMI)
7 Dec 2008 | 1 min read
Tim Finn has had an interesting solo career punctuated by as many great albums as disappointments. He's done the folk-Irish thing and a bit of Nashville, rocked out, been with an orchestra or back with Neil, and at times you wondered aloud if his voice hadn't really lost it. Some of his best work (the superb Feeding the Gods in 2002 for example) seemed to go past people who embraced his... > Read more
Tim Finn: Invisible
Various: Stars; Do You Trust Your Friends? (Shock)
7 Dec 2008 | <1 min read
Very interesting if a little bewildering, especially if the Canadian band Stars' acclaimed 2004 album Set Yourself on Fire hasn't crossed your path. What they have done is invite friends to cover/remix tracks from that album and so the album is re-presented in the same running order as a kind of self-created tribute. I'm going to flip all the cards and tell you I haven't heard the... > Read more
Jason Collett: Reunion
Brett Dennen: Hope for the Hopeless (Inertia)
7 Dec 2008 | <1 min read
This American singer-songwriter has been an Elsewhere favorite long before Rolling Stone picked him as one of the 10 artists to watch in 2008. Elsewhere was clocking him in 2007 when his album So Much More arrived. Said it previously but he's got a touch of the Paul Simon in his lyrics although he delivers with a more jaunty, open-hearted strum style and has opened for artists as diverse as... > Read more
Brett Dennen: Heaven
CHRISTMAS STOCKING SHOPPING: Tis the season to be repackaging . . .
6 Dec 2008 | 1 min read
In the absence of new "product" or to take advantage of the season of giving, there are a number of repackaged albums and/or bonus collections around right now. For your information they include the following . . . Amy Winehouse's two albums Frank and Back to Black have already appeared as deluxe editions with a bonus disc of extra tracks with each. Now both repackagings have... > Read more
Kanye West, 808s and Heartbreak (RocAFella)
1 Dec 2008 | 1 min read | 1
Because I don't listen to much of the over-produced, schmaltzy, ululating music that passes for r'n'b these days (in my old-fashioned definition I still link r'n'b to the soul of Otis, Sam Cooke and others), and nor do I spend much time with rap outside of some old school 80s favourites when there seem innocent innovation going on, or enjoying the menace of NWA, Public Enemy and Tupac), I... > Read more