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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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 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 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 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 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 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 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: 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: 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