Music at Elsewhere

Various Artists: The New Blue, Pixie Williams Reimagined (digital outlets)

17 Apr 2021 | 1 min read

Later 21-year old producer Stan Dallas would recall, “We actually didn't say it, but I think everybody realised we were making history”. That was when in, October 1948, the Ruru Karaitiana Quintette with 19-year old singer Pixie Williams recorded the achingly beautiful lament Blue Smoke. Released the following year when families still mourned the loss of young men... > Read more

RECOMMENDED VINYL: OMC's How Bizarre (2021): Wanna know the rest, buy the album

12 Apr 2021 | 4 min read

From time to time Elsewhere will single out a recent release we recommend on vinyl, like this one . . . . In his excellent 2015 memoir-cum-biography-cum social history How Bizarre: Pauly Fuemana and the Song That Stormed the World, Fuemana-champion Simon Grigg, with clear eyes, wrote candidly of the problems with Pauly Fuemana who had died in January 2010. Pauly was difficult... > Read more

Merk: Infinite Youth (Humblebrag/digital outlets)

12 Apr 2021 | 2 min read

Listening to the recent vinyl reissue of Voom's terrific album “Hello, Are You There?' it was easy to be struck by how many albums, like his, on the Lil' Chief indie label are mercifully free of irony and often aim for an innocent but not naïve reading. Certainly a few have had a frisson of detachment, but for the most part in delivery and text there is a pleasing emotional... > Read more

Yoshinori Hayashi: Pulse of Defiance (Smalltown Supersound/digital outlets)

11 Apr 2021 | <1 min read

The musically eclectic Tokyo-based producer, synth experimenter and more Yoshinori Hayashi has created some of the more interesting and often impossible to define albums in recent years. This new one is no exception as he roams freely between allusive sonic landscapes (threatening, enticing or off-kilter by turns), pieces created out of clatter of drums and synths, dancefloor beats, quirky... > Read more

Learning to Dive: Norwegian Pop (digital outlets)

5 Apr 2021 | 1 min read

For every Bowie Let's Dance in the Eighties there was an Ultravox Vienna, for every New Romantic in bright mascara there was a tribe of white-faced Goths listening to the Cure. The Eighties may have been the decade of We Are the World and Live Aid but, lest we forget, they were prompted by a horrendous famine. The Eighties were dark times: Chernobyl, the Cold War, Thatcherism/Reaganism... > Read more

Godspeed You! Black Emperor: G-d's Pee at State's End! (Constellation/digital outlets)

4 Apr 2021 | 1 min read

Part way between sonic experimentalism, prog-rock and a socio-political manifesto (in the titles of its tracks), this quite remarkable instrumental album by the Canadian band which has been around for a decade and a half delivering what has loosely been called post-rock. In it's most narrow definition post-rock is music using traditional rock instruments to deliver something other than... > Read more

Fire at Static Valley

Misled Convoy: Translations II, Remixes (Dubmission/digital outlets)

3 Apr 2021 | 1 min read

Being a producer means never having to say you're unemployed? Here London-based Mike Hodgson (half of Pitch Black with Paddy Free) delivers a collection of his Misled Convoy remixes and reimagining of material by the likes of such old school New Zealand figures as FreQ Nasty and the Nomad, Auckland singer Sandy Mill, Mike Weston, Tom Ludvigson and Otis Frizzell who are... > Read more

Shine (Misled Convoy remix)

Edward Castelow: Mirth (Banished Music/digital outlets)

1 Apr 2021 | 1 min read

For more than a decade Edward Castelow, as Dictaphone Blues, has been delivering snappy pop-rock albums which have always found favour at Elsewhere for their astute economy, assimilation of influences and enjoyable songs (with lyrics which sometimes take a bit of pleasurable decoding). Here, under his own name and an album title which is loaded with meaning, Castelow departs from his usual... > Read more

RECOMMENDED REISSUE: Voom: 'Hello, Are You There?' (Flying Nun/digital outlets)

31 Mar 2021 | 1 min read

Buzz Moller's Voom were too widely respected and known at the time to qualify as a cult item in the early 2000s, but these days their small catalogue (just two albums, this their second from 2006 on Lil' Chief) ensures that position with a generation which has grown up without hearing of them, let alone their music. For a band which recorded this album on the fly in... > Read more

Adam Hattaway and the Haunters: Woolston, Texas (digital outlets)

28 Mar 2021 | 1 min read

When Hattaway and the Haunters played at the 10thanniversary celebrations for Marty Duda's excellent 13th Floor website last week it was obvious why they would have appealed to New York State-raised Duda. I suggested to him they sounded as American as the Band rocking out with a touch of Detroit/Iggy desperation and energy. And they had two interchanging lead... > Read more

Lake Street Dive: Obviously (digital outlets)

27 Mar 2021 | 1 min read

Even amidst the smorgasbord of sounds at 2015's Womad in Taranaki, Lake Street Dive – four graduates of Boston's New England Conservatory of Music -- stood out. The infectious energy of singer Rachael Price – whose role models were Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland and Mariah Carey – was engaging and they moved easily from Sixties soul to slippery jazz-funk and persuasive... > Read more

Loretta Lynn: Still Woman Enough (Sony/digital outlets)

26 Mar 2021 | 1 min read

Assured and assertive women frequently populated the often-autobiographical songs of country legend Loretta Lynn who, although 89 next month, doesn't look much older than when she recorded the enormously successful Van Lear Rosewith Jack White of the White Stripes in 2004. That was an important album for White loosening himself from rock. For Lynn it was just another hitching post on a... > Read more

Rough Church: Emergency Breakthrough (Powertools)

26 Mar 2021 | 1 min read

There are credible name-checks in favour of this American power-pop/rocker/indie balladeer/poet Greg Franco to pique local interest. He came to New Zealand's Powertools label with his 2006 album which he'd recorded in Dunedin with the Clean's David Kilgour and Robert Scott, the late Tane Tokona (of Kilgour's Heavy Eights) and Tom Bell (venue owner, engineer etc). Apparently he is... > Read more

Vapour Theories: Celestial Scuzz (Fire/Southbound/digital outlets)

24 Mar 2021 | 1 min read

Bardo Ponds, the fuzzed-out psychedelic project of brothers John and Michael Gibbons from Philadelphia have been at it for almost 30 years but have only ever appeared at Elsewhere once, four years ago with Under the Pines which fell more into the “interesting” than “essential” category. The brothers also run this intermittent and more experimental... > Read more

Nancy Sinatra: Start Walkin' 1965-1976 (Light in the Attic/digital outlets)

17 Mar 2021 | 2 min read | 1

Among my cheaply bought secondhand records is the 1972 album Again by Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood . It was previously in the music library at 4ZB (the cover also has an official NZBC sticker) and someone, presumably the programmer, has written in heavy ballpoint “DON'T PLAY” and drawn a line through the song Down from Dover. Next to the cheery Back on the... > Read more

Danalogue and Alabaster DePlume: I Was Not Sleeping (Total Refreshment/digital outlets)

15 Mar 2021 | <1 min read

Neither of these names may be widely familiar but Danalogue – on synths and keyboards – came to Elsewhere's attention as part of the exceptional Comet is Coming jazz (and elsewhere) ensemble out of London, and he was on Sarathy Kowar's terrific More Arriving album of 2019. Saxophonist/multi-instrumentalist DePlume (Gus Fairburn) we do not know but he seems to move... > Read more

Nick Cave and Warren Ellis: Carnage (Goliath/digital outlets)

13 Mar 2021 | 2 min read

Nick Cave may have alienated some with trenchant comments about the call for a cultural boycott of Israel in solidarity with the Palestinian people. Among other things, he called it an attempt “to bully, shame and silence musicians”, but also asserted that although he and the Bad Seeds played in Tel Aviv in 2017 that shouldn't be read as tacit support for Israel's... > Read more

Opposite Sex: High Drama (Spik & Span/digital outlets)

12 Mar 2021 | 1 min read

Most music has turned into such commodified product that it's sometimes hard to remember the period – before the lifetime of some, of course – when musicians took risks, made the noises they wanted and just went their own way independent of everyone else. Maybe the post-punk period of the early Eighties – the time we refer to here – was an aberration: but it sure was... > Read more

Shoots Me Like a Knife

Loud Ghost: All in a Day (Tone Exchange/digital outlets)

12 Mar 2021 | 1 min read

Loud Ghost is the rock'n'roll outlet for Auckland multi-disciplined Darryn Harkness (New Telepathics, Serafin, From Scratch, poetry collections, artwork) who is now getting close to about 20 albums under his various guises. The previous self-titled Loud Ghost album was more than five years ago but in the interim (as you can tell) he has been busy on other projects, notably the expanded and... > Read more

Adjiri Odametey: Ekonklo/Other Side (bandcamp)

12 Mar 2021 | <1 min read

This delightful 13-song album came to Elsewhere direct from Ghanaian-born, Berlin-based singer-songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Odametey. He seduces you in with the intimate Kootse but then picks up the tempo with the gently joyful bounce of Ghana Groove with that seductive, tickling guitar style from that coast of Africa. (If you haven't a decent album since Paul Simon's Graceland start... > Read more