Music at Elsewhere
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Phil Alvin: Un “Sung Stories” (Ace/Border)
8 Jul 2019 | 1 min read
Although America's Blasters never really got their due in the late Seventies/early Eighties for their full throated blues, rockabilly and rock'n'roll-based sound in the punk era, one of the co-founders Dave Alvin went on to a significant solo career. His co-founding brother Phil didn't pursue much music after the band broke up – he studied maths and AI at university and as a post-grad... > Read more
Daddy Rollin' Stone
Andrew Masseurs: Traveller in the Sky (digital outlets)
7 Jul 2019 | <1 min read
Andrew Masseurs was the lung-power out front of Wellington's quite exceptional four-piece Ammp some years back, and in 2011 Elsewhere recommended their stadium-shaped album Back of the Sun. Now let it be said what he did then and does now, is go the whole Bono on the driving, wide-screen ballads of anthemic proportions. So if you've had your fill of U2 then you probably don't... > Read more
Black Keys: “Let's Rock” (Easy Eye)
6 Jul 2019 | 1 min read
The first time I saw the Black Keys was at a Kings Arms gig when they were just starting out and were being acclaimed by the bFM crowd as some kind of alt.blues band. They were pretty dire and I remember thinking (as I subsequently wrote) that even on a bad night – and I saw him on one – George Thorogood would wipe the floor with them for energy, chops and guitar fury. But... > Read more
Kokomo: Sunset Claws (Boatshed/digital outlets)
30 Jun 2019 | 1 min read
It's been a long time between new albums for this long-running Bay of Plenty band and their gritty blues-grounded pop-rock, country-rock and dark ballads. Three years ago they offered a damn fine career retrospective with Batten Down the Hatches and you might have thought that was acting as fine farewell . . . but no. Here they come again – five years on from their last studio... > Read more
Turn the Lights Down Low
Bob Dylan: The Rolling Thunder Revue; The 1975 Live Recordings (Sony, 14 CD box set)
24 Jun 2019 | 6 min read
When Bob Dylan resumed his Rolling Thunder Revue tour in April 1976 for dates around the South -- four months after the first incarnation had finished playing around the US North-east and into Canada -- there was a very different atmosphere around it. By every account, Dylan in the new year was more serious and introspective, his marriage was in serious trouble, his old folk-days friend... > Read more
One More Cup of Coffee
Jane Weaver: Loops in the Secret Society (Fire/Southbound)
24 Jun 2019 | <1 min read
After considerable interest in her excellent second album Modern Kosmology in 2017, Fire Records out of Britain reissued her '14 debut album for the label The Silver Globe by this electronica artist who has touchstones in late Seventies space-rock, motorik rhythms, ambient drones, dramatic rushes of synths and the post-rave psychedelic dancefloor. It is a heady brew and Elsewhere has... > Read more
Mission Desire
Bruce Springsteen: Western Stars (Sony)
23 Jun 2019 | 2 min read
In his Broadway spoken (and SHOUTED!!!) word show peppered by songs, the man they call The Boss joked that he'd written about those who do the daily working grind, but that he'd never done it himself. Yet from Born to Run – and more specifically Darkness on the Edge of Town – he started to channel the hopes, fears, dead-ends and lives of those out there struggling to survive... > Read more
The Wayfarer
RECOMMENDED REISSUE: Sonic Youth: Battery Park NYC, July 4th 2008 (Matador/Rhythmethod)
18 Jun 2019 | 1 min read
This live album was released as a bonus with Sonic Youth's final album The Eternal in 2009 (one of Elsewhere's best of that year) and reminds you what a seminal band they were. And how much missed they are in the current climate of seemingly unfashionable (if we believe the charts) guitar-based rock. Effortlessly creating a bridge between NYC avant-garde, guitar-noise... > Read more
100% (live)
Flying Lotus: Flamagra (Warp/Border)
17 Jun 2019 | 1 min read
Jazz composer/trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and his cheerleader Stanley Crouch often used to talk about how much “musical information” there was on certain albums. You'd like to hear how they might interpret and decode this one by Flying Lotus aka Steven Ellison: Years in the making; a celebrity collision of guests including Thundercat, Anderson.Paak, George Clinton, Toro Y Moi and... > Read more
Debbie is Depressed
Marianne Faithfull: Come and Stay With Me (Ace/Border)
16 Jun 2019 | 2 min read
On her Strange Weather album in '87 and No Exit (live from 2016), Marianne Faithfull delivered more definitive versions of the song As Tears Go By which Jagger-Richards wrote for her in 1964 when she was a seemingly chaste Catholic schoolgirl full of innocence. Back then she sang it as if in a drawing room, the young Elizabethan girl looking out the world beyond the window and knowing she... > Read more
Counting
Scott Mannion: Loving Echoes (Lil' Chief)
10 Jun 2019 | 1 min read
Although recorded in Spain, Norway, New Zealand and Wales over six years with a cast of Lil' Chief artists and fellow travelers, this debut album by Scott Mannion – who came to attention with the wonderful Tokey Tones in 2003, and has lived in Spain since 2013 – holds together as a musically coherent work. His reflective and understated lyrics follow the arc of a relationship... > Read more
Somebody Else's Dream
Eli Paperboy Reed: 99 Cents Dreams (Yep Roc/Southbound)
9 Jun 2019 | <1 min read
Channeling the sound and spirit of classic soul (Smokey, young Otis and Marvin, Al Green, Sam Cooke and more), Eli Paperboy Reed -- a white guy originally from Massachusetts, now in his mid 30s – has seriously immersed himself in blues and soul. His track record has been convincing and this album – recorded at Sam Phillips' studio in Memphis with local black backing singers the... > Read more
Lover's Compensation
Vanishing Twin: The Age of Immunology (Fire)
8 Jun 2019 | <1 min read
As the Felice Brothers stare into the abyss of Amerikkka on their current Undress album, this UK-based group of migrant members (Belgium, Japan, Italy, France and the US) – helmed by writer Cathy Lucas – deliver an album which willfully denies the borders erected between people and musical genres. So they offer hope (the seven minute-plus folk-jazz drift of You Are Not An... > Read more
Backstroke
Felice Brothers: Undress (Yep Roc/Southbound)
8 Jun 2019 | <1 min read
After all these decades people still cheer, perhaps more loudly these days, when Bob Dylan sings “even the president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked” in It's Alright Ma. The idea of the trappings stripped away – rather than literal nakedness – propels the opener/title track here where the long-running country-rockers Felice Brothers tear away... > Read more
Socrates
Jimmy Barnes: My Criminal Record (Bloodlines)
7 Jun 2019 | 1 min read
The great Australian rock legend JImmy Barnes has undergone a kind of soul-baring resurrection in recent years with his autobiographies Working Class Boy and Working Class Man, his garrulous interviews and a candour which endears him to an audience which can identify with his fuel-injected years in Cold Chisel and his songs about the harder edges of life which he sings about so persuasively.... > Read more
The National: I Am Easy to Find (4AD/Rhythmethod)
27 May 2019 | 2 min read
For almost two decades the National, originally out of Ohio but these days its members living on various continents, have inspired an almost slavish loyalty from those who, rightly, acclaim their smart amalgam of an almost art-rock approach to edgy but straight-ahead rock. And it has come with just enough of a whiff of avant-prog leanings which found its zenith on their previous album Sleep... > Read more
Roman Holiday
Elroy Finn: Elroy (Rhythmethod/digital outlets)
27 May 2019 | 1 min read
After years playing in various bands with the likes of Lawrence Arabia and Connan Mockasin, in the vanity project Pablo Vasquez, as well as Finn family line-ups (notably on father Neil's dreamy and darkly beautiful Out of Silence album), multi-instrumentalist Elroy Finn releases this, his debut album. Out of those diverse experiences, this self-titled album emerges more along the lines of... > Read more
Stubbleman: Mountains and Plains (Crammed Discs/Southbound)
27 May 2019 | 1 min read
The great and diverse landscape and the lure of the road with the freedom it offers has been a constant in American life since white settlers arrived and wondered what was over the horizon. Great writers and filmmakers have been seduced by it, Native Americans understand it, people plunder it and Europeans often are in awe of the sheer spaciousness of the country and the huge sky is lies... > Read more
Great River Road
Jeff Kelly: Beneath the Stars, Above the River (Green Monkey/digital outlets)
20 May 2019 | 1 min read
Seattle's Jeff Kelly has appeared many times at Elsewhere for over a decade, initially when we made the case for his classy and literate pop-rock with the band Green Pajamas (intelligent indie-pop and sometimes hitting the perfect pop-rock point of the Beach Boys and Beatles 1965-66), then in a different incarnation on acoustic-framed and artistic albums and now . . . His travels to Spain... > Read more
Kiss the Moon Hello
Taking Back Sunday: XX (Craft/Southbound)
18 May 2019 | <1 min read
To be honest, Elsewhere has never previously encountered this New York band . . . which is a considerable oversight given this is their 20thanniversary retrospective. But unless you have a thing for yelping emo-angst and that peculiarly Eighties/Nineties American take on what they called punk rock (No Doubt, Blink 182, Green Day before American Idiot and so on) then you haven't missed much.... > Read more