Music at Elsewhere

Tazman Jack: Eyes Closed (digital outlets)

24 May 2021 | 1 min read

Tazman Jack is certainly talented. For this six-song debut (and the remix of Deeper) he played just about everything (his acoustic guitar playing is sensitive and impressive) and in terms of lyrical content he makes all the moves that so many young New Zelanders like: he comes off as a sensitive guy (Show Me Love); is supportive of mental health issues (Better Than Me with a light reggae... > Read more

RECOMMENDED RECORD: Dianne Swann: The War on Peace of Mind ( /digital outlets)

23 May 2021 | 1 min read | 1

From time to time Elsewhere will single out a recent release we recommend on vinyl, like this one . . . . Because we have recently published an extensive interview with Dianne Swann about this album (and much else besides), let's just cut to the chase. Here are eight, discrete originals across two tight sides of vinyl which embrace global... > Read more

Please Leave a Message

Squid: Bright Green Field (Warp/Border/digital outlets)

20 May 2021 | 1 min read

This acclaimed UK five-piece confound expectations at every turn on this twisting, shape-shifting debut album which has had some labelling it psychedelic (an inadequate and misleading description). But if this were vinyl (and it is available on record, see below) if you dropped the needle at random you'd be referencing Gang of Four, Talking Heads, krautrock, J Mascis, Pere Ubu or primal... > Read more

Chora(s)san Time-Court Mirage: Blues Alif Lam Mim in the Mode of Rag Infinity/Rag Cosmosis (Blank Forms/Soundcloud)

14 May 2021 | <1 min read

Chora(s)san Time-Court Mirage is an ensemble lead by the Swedish experimental composer Catherine Christer Hennix (b 1948) whose credentials are impeccable in that she studied with Stockhausen, collaborated with La Monte Young in New York and, almost inevitably given the minimalist milieu, then studied with Pandit Pran Nath. She's a mathematician and a visual artist as well as a poet and... > Read more

The Chills: Scatterbrain (Fire/digital outlets)

14 May 2021 | 1 min read

Three years ago, on the release of the Chills' album Snow Bound, Martin Phillipps noted people were saying “it sounded like the Chills”, his particular style evident almost 40 years after the band first appeared out of Dunedin. “If there is a reward that I would dreamt of, it is that,” he said. “That there's a signature style and [I'm] being recognised for... > Read more

The Walls Beyond Abandon

Van Morrison: Latest Record Project Vol 1. (Warner/digital outlets)

9 May 2021 | 1 min read | 1

The few Van Morrison's biographies this writer has read could all be titled Bitter From Birth. He might have tapped into some beautiful Celtic soul and mysticism all those decades ago, but he's always been humourless and – even to the present day – harbours grudges (notably about how he was burned by the music business more than half a century ago). There have been some... > Read more

Larry Morris: Amigos (LMM/digital outlets)

8 May 2021 | 1 min read

Larry Morris once said his best album was 5.55am of the early Seventies, which went unreleased at the time when he went to jail for a serious drug offense. He may be right, but listened to now (it is available on Spotify) it seems a bit MOR for a man who made his reputation in Larry's Rebels as a rock'n'soul singer, and alongside the likes of Bunny Walters, one of our best. Him singing... > Read more

Long Time Coming

Amy Shark: Cry Forever (Sony/digital outlets)

7 May 2021 | 1 min read

After seeing Australian Amy Shark's appearance at the 2018 Laneway where she was an exciting, sassy and mature rock artist who commanded the stage and the audience's attention, her debut album Love Monster was a considerable disappointment. It may have won her many, many awards over the Tasman, but it seemed to these ears aimed at a very young demographic (she was in her early Thirties,... > Read more

Cheap Trick: In Another World (BMG/digital outlets)

6 May 2021 | 1 min read

On the basis of their thrilling show at the Auckland Town Hall about 40 years ago – with a wave of his hand Cheap Trick guitarist Rick Nielsen brought the crowd to its feet in defiance of the local mandarins who wanted to keep the volume low and the audience seated – this band will always get a fair hearing round my way. And they did even when the line-up changed for a while,... > Read more

Sheep, Dog & Wolf: Two-Minds (bandcamp)

1 May 2021 | 1 min read

As we heard on Merk's recent album Infinite Youth, the landscape between adolescence and adulthood can be strange and difficult terrain. In that uncertain limbo, childhood is in retreat -- sometimes romanticised for its innocence and joy -- and an unknown life beyond teenage dreams is ahead as indistinguishable shapes cloaked in shadow. The debut album Egospect by Sheep, Dog... > Read more

Arooj Aftab: Vulture Prince (New Amsterdam/digital outlets)

26 Apr 2021 | <1 min read

Pakistan-born Arooj Aftab is emblematic of the world we live in: She is a graduate of Berklee in Brooklyn (jazz but with a penchant for ambient and minimalist musicians like Terry Riley). On this, her third album, she brings her considerable compositional and arranging skills (and pure voice) to elegant music grounded in her traditions which comes off to Western ears as more than just... > Read more

Gerry Beckley: Keeping the Light On (Tasman/Southbound/digital outlets)

25 Apr 2021 | 1 min read

Gerry Beckley you ask? And well you might, but he was one of the members of the soft-rock band America and before you dismiss them, George Martin saw enough in them to produce half a dozen of their albums. Okay, maybe he just needed a break after the Beatles, but the band was enormously successful and although Beckley wasn't the main songwriter (that role belonged to Dewey Bunnell) he did... > Read more

Calling You

Pharoah Sanders, Floating Points, LSO: Promises (Luaka Bop/digital outlets)

24 Apr 2021 | 1 min read

At 80, saxophonist Pharoah Sanders has had a remarkable career in and out of jazz: As a young man he was in rhythm'n'blues bands, then played free jazz with Sun Ra and Ornette Coleman, joined up with John Coltrane in the mid Sixties (two years before Coltrane's death) , recorded with Coltrane's widow Alice on her spiritual albums, worked with Bill Laswell, the... > Read more

Blair Parkes: new building (bandcamp)

24 Apr 2021 | <1 min read

We've previously been admiring of the polymath that is musician/artist/video maker Blair Parkes out of coastal New Brighton near Christchurch who has considerable pedigree in a number of bands. Two years ago with Little Rapids he delivered what we called “a truly wonderful album of glistening dream-pop”. This time out – as on much of the 2018's Always Running –... > Read more

Various Artists: McCartney III Imagined (Capitol/digital outlets)

19 Apr 2021 | 2 min read

When, last December, Sir Paul released his McCartney III recorded during lockdown, there was considerable enthusiasm and praise. He talked a good game about it (as he usually does) and its experimental nature and so on, and to be fair it was pretty damn good – although those who considered it quite out-there obviously hadn't heard his much more daring projects as The Fireman (with... > Read more

Pretty Boys ft Khruangbin

Joy Harjo: I Pray for My Enemies (Sunyaya/digital outlets)

18 Apr 2021 | 1 min read

We are forgiven for not knowing much if anything about Joy Harjo who is the current Poet Laureate in the US and the first Native American to hold that title. Harjo (Muscogee Creek Nation) has won more accolades than we could count and at almost 70 has built a huge body of written work and half a dozen albums where she reads her powerful work with various traditional and contemporary musical... > Read more

Fear

noemienours: Tardigrade Bounding (bandcamp)

17 Apr 2021 | 1 min read

In keeping with Elsewhere's self-imposed ethos of taking you “elsewhere”, we draw attention to this album out of Sweden which is about as "elsewhere" as we have heard in a very long time. Noemie M Nours (aka Noemie Dal) apparently played at Auckland's Audio Foundation in mid 2019 (with Pumice) but other than this following description on bandcamp we can tell you... > Read more

Cryptobiosis

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