Music at Elsewhere

Adam Hattaway and the Haunters: Bug Eyes (digital outlets)

12 Nov 2022 | <1 min read

Elsewhere was enthusiastic about this Christchurch band's excellent Woolston, Texas album but less enamoured with the over-long (22 track) follow-up Rooster which, we said, wore its influences from country-rock, the Stones, garagebands and Tom Petty too overtly. The result was “it can be like listening to the b-sides or unnecessary extra tracks in a box set by one of those... > Read more

Thrashing Marlin: Wildlife (Braille/bandcamp)

7 Nov 2022 | 1 min read

An offshoot of the award-winning soundtrack collective Plan 9, Thrashing Marlin are probably too busy with other work to keep this alt.pop outlet going. It's been over a decade since their previous album, Donkey Deep about which we said, “dark songs of crime, punishment, evil-doers and alcohol . . . are rendered as disarming musical spin-offs from country, cabaret, moody folk-rock and... > Read more

Worlds Collide

Dry Cleaning: Stumpwork (4AD/digital outlets)

2 Nov 2022 | 1 min read

In 2021 when we reviewed New Long Leg, the arresting debut album by this London quartet, we put it in the lineage of Eighties post-punk, Wire, John Cooper Clarke and Kae Tempest among others. We noted that while Dry Cleaning had touchstones there, they came up with something which was uniquely witty and observant. When we included it in our Best of Elsewhere 2021 list we said,... > Read more

Daniel Herskedal and Emilie Nicolas: Out of the Fog (Edition Records/digital outlets)

31 Oct 2022 | <1 min read

Award-winning Norwegian composer/tuba player Herskedal here teams up with singer Nicolas (four Norwegian Grammys) for a collection of songs which have Nicolas at times soaring in a soul-jazz manner over Herskedal's cinematic backdrops which occasionally really do suggest the album's title. Elsewhere, as on the airy Found, this approaches a more helium-filled Enya adrift on a gently churning... > Read more

Uneven Terrain

RECOMMENDED RECORD: Princess Chelsea: Everything Is Going To Be Alright (Lil' Chief/digital outlets)

29 Oct 2022 | 1 min read

From time to time Elsewhere will single out a recent release we recommend on vinyl, like this which won this year's Taite Music Prize for best independently released album. It comes in a gatefold sleeve with inner sleeve photos and lyrics. Check out Elsewhere's other Recommended Record picks . . . . Princess Chelsea (Chelsea Nikkel) has delivered a series of delightful... > Read more

Love is More

Bjork: Fossora (digital outlets)

29 Oct 2022 | 1 min read

This free-wheeling and sometimes melodically untethered 10th album by Iceland's uncommonly talented Björk is the final installment of a trilogy after the post-divorce mood of Vulnicura (2015) and the avant-garde escapism of Utopia (2017). Musically the album catapults off past influences: choral passages, big band horns, orchestration, electronica, minimalism, strident hip-hop beats,... > Read more

ONE WE MISSED: Miller Yule: Let it Burn (bandcamp)

28 Oct 2022 | 2 min read

This mainstream rock album by Auckland's Miller Yule arrived at the end of September when Elsewhere was swamped by other projects, so we missed it. But given it works some timeless guitar-rock tropes and is in a lineage which is familiar and comfortable for many, it's not too late to consider it. Hip-hop, R'n'B, grime and other idioms may have changed the definition of a... > Read more

Paul Gurney: Blue Horizon (Tailgator/digital outlets)

27 Oct 2022 | 1 min read

The name might not be familiar but Paul Gurney was the singer and one of the songwriters in the De Sotos whom we previously described as a “heartland band”. They had Midge Marsden (harmonica) and lap steel player Cameron Bennett on their second album Your Highway For Tonight. Stepping out again under his own name – with the De Sotos, violinist Richard Adams, pedal and lap... > Read more

Ricochet

Jyoshna La Trobe: Unity Hours IV (bandcamp)

24 Oct 2022 | 1 min read

Expat singer and ethnomusicologist Jyoshna has travelled some interesting musical, spiritual and literal paths since she first came to attention in the late Eighties with the short-lived group Turiiya. Currently back in New Zealand briefly but living in East Clare, Ireland with her young daughter Isabel (the latter the subject of a lullaby here), she has specialised in the devotional... > Read more

If I Could Swim the Ocean

Racing: Must Be the Moon (digital outlets)

23 Oct 2022 | 1 min read

The Beths' Expert in a Dying Field debuting at number one on the album charts raises speculation if there might be a renewed appetite for guitar-driven rock. If so, Auckland's Racing are in pole position with this heroic, self-produced second album. Racing have considerable pedigree: singer Ed Knowles and guitarist/keyboard player Sven Pettersen were in the chart-busting,... > Read more

Troy Kingi: Year of the Ratbags and Their Musty Theme Songs (digital outlets)

23 Oct 2022 | <1 min read

The sixth installment of Kingi's self-imposed 10.10.10 project (10 albums in 10 genres in 10 years) finds the musical polymath – again co-writing with Delaney Davidson on the banging single Paparazzo -- alighting on the 80s for songs which owe as much to the decade's jittery pop (Age is Just Numerical), upbeat ballads (A Little Knowledge is a Dangerous Thing) and dreamy soundtracks... > Read more

Brian Eno: FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE (digital outlets)

22 Oct 2022 | 1 min read

It has been some while – 17 years in fact – since Brian Eno offered a vocal album and while this is certainly that (eight songs and one instrumental, the beautiful Inclusion) it is, as so often the case with Eno, the sonic landscape he creates which seduces. Here are echoes of his gorgeously weightless ambient works with those translucent synth passages,... > Read more

There Were Bells

Various Artists: Feels Like Home; Songs from the Sonoran Borderlands (Putumayo/Ode)

17 Oct 2022 | 1 min read

Although it is not necessary to have read the memoir by Linda Ronstadt of the same title – available only on Kindle at present – it's likely you would want to after hearing this collection which she has collated with the Putumayo label's founder Dan Storper. In her brief introduction to the useful booklet with the CD, Ronstadt writes of the land of her ancestors in western... > Read more

Barrio Viejo. Ry Cooder with Lalo Guerrero

Goldsmith Baynes: E Rere Rā (digital outlets)

17 Oct 2022 | 1 min read

If we consider the past 40 years a renaissance of Maori culture in the popular arts – approximately from the time bone-carver Brian Flintoff and taonga puoro practitioners Richard Nunns and Hirini Melbourne came to the fore – we can see the evidence in painting, drama, theatre and mainstream popular music. One genre seemed slower on the uptake: jazz. Certainly there were... > Read more

E Taku Tau

Avantdale Bowling Club: Trees (digital outlets)

16 Oct 2022 | 1 min read

In 1995 Auckland saxophonist Nathan Haines' debut album Shift Left opened a door between jazz and hip-hop, delivering sophisticated soul-jazz with beats and scratching from turntablist Manuel Bundy and vocals by Sonny Sagala (aka Dei Hamo) and Pauly (OMC) Fuemana. Shift Left bridged genres, linked South and Central Auckland, won the 22-year old Haines the Jazz Album of the Year... > Read more

Tom Cunliffe: Secret Exhibition (digital outlets)

16 Oct 2022 | 1 min read

This short, elegant, somewhat world-weary third album by Auckland singer-songwriter Tom Cunliffe turns down the tempo and mood of his previous, mostly pop-oriented album Template for Love to find a thoughtful, poetic place between Leonard Cohen and Jim Croce. His pre-Covid travels come through in the oblique mysteries of string-enhanced title track which references Venetian tides, marble... > Read more

RECOMMENDED RECORD: Sola Rosa, Get It Together (Way Up)

11 Oct 2022 | 1 min read

From time to time Elsewhere will single out a recent release we recommend on vinyl, like this reissue which comes as a double album with an insert of album credits etc. Check out Elsewhere's other Recommended Record picks . . . . Sola Rosa (known to his folks as Andrew Spraggon) frequently recalibrated our expectations of local electronica and for this ambitious 2009 outing,... > Read more

Nikki Lane: Denim and Diamonds (New West)

8 Oct 2022 | 1 min read

If the title doesn't tell you this is a country album then you haven't been paying attention. But 38-year old Nikki Lane out of South Carolina is one of those singer-songwriters a few generations removed from even the outlaw movement. She was born the year that Toto won album of the year at the Grammys and Men At Work were hailed as the best new artist. Yes, a lot has happened in her... > Read more

First High

The Beths: Expert in a Dying Field (digital outlets)

2 Oct 2022 | 1 min read

When the Beths played to a capacity crowd at the Auckland Town Hall in November 2020 an excitable group of late-teen girls waited outside an hour before doors opened. However, despite the band's standing with that demographic, they were in the minority. A large proportion of the crowd were in their late 30s and a considerable number unquestionably fortysomething. But many knew every word... > Read more

TWO FROM THOKEI TAPES (2022): George and Roy at home

2 Oct 2022 | 1 min read

Elsewhere has frequently acknowledged the idiosyncratic releases of New Zealand artists on cassette from Thokei Tapes out of Hamburg, Germany. And still they come . . . Fortunately you can hear and buy the music at bandcamp here where a purchase of a tape gets you a free download. So here are the two latest offerings . The GDH Smoke Machine: Booklovers A solo... > Read more