Music at Elsewhere
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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
All Ready to Go
The Budos Band: V (Daptone/Southbound)
17 May 2019 | <1 min read
Combining the horn fire-power of the Daptone label with hefty rock guitar, a soul thump and Ethiopian jazz, this nine-piece American band deliver an instrumental album which fairly races out the gate and straight to the dancefloor. However, there's a psychedelic quality at work too (The Enchanter with its dirty guitar part and strange organ) alongside what could be blaxploitation... > Read more
Spider Web Part 1
Peter Doherty and the Puta Madres: Peter Doherty and the Puta Madres (Strap Originals/Southbound)
17 May 2019 | 1 min read
If you believed the British rock press a decade or so ago, Pete Doherty was a lyrically insightful genius who was like Keats, Ray Davies and Oscar Wilde all wrapped up in a rock'n'roll ball of swagger and addiction. With Kate Moss at his side. If that were even remotely true then all we can say is how the mighty fell, and so far. Although there were enjoyably louche and... > Read more
Lamentable Ballad of Gascony Avenue
Death and Vanilla: Are You A Dreamer? (Fire Records/Southbound)
15 May 2019 | <1 min read
This Swedish trio out of Malmo – Marleen Nilsson, Anders Hansson and Magners Bodin – create some deliciously dreamy, quasi-ambient and gentle psychedelia which exists somewhere between delicate drone-pop, the woozy end of the Cocteau Twins, celestial ambience and a nudge of assertive electronica. Vocalist Nilsson occupies the middle-distance in most of these pieces, her voice... > Read more
The Hum
Big Thief: UFOF (4AD/Rhythmethod)
13 May 2019 | 1 min read
At first blush of the opening track Contact on this, the New York four-piece's third album, they seem to conform very much to the doe-eyed, laconic and slightly world-weary figures who lounge limply on the cover: It's all hushed harmonies, gently chiming guitars and “Judi, please turn the page for me . . . wrap me in silk . . . ” Three verses of ennui and the intention seems... > Read more
Strange
Soak: Grim Town (Rough Trade)
6 May 2019 | 2 min read
It has seemed a lifetime (four years) for this young Irish singer-songwriter to follow up her slightly uneven but impressive debut album Before We Forgot How to Dream. If that album suffered a little from some arch poetry it was forgivable, she was 18 when the album came out so those were pieces written when she was 17 and probably still in school. Now 22 and with... > Read more
Knock Me Off My Feet
Sonic Delusion: Anything Goes (Turn Up the Pop/digital outlets)
6 May 2019 | 1 min read
In New Zealand Music Month, magazines and sites like Elsewhere expect to be inundated with requests for reviews by artists who have decided to release their music at a time when everyone else has had exactly the same idea. That seems pretty self-defeating but . . . Artists with an established career or a point-of-difference invariably get the attention. Sonic Delusion out of New... > Read more
Moments in Time
Kevin Morby: Oh My God (Dead Oceans/Rhythmethod)
5 May 2019 | 1 min read
When artists head down a spiritual path they inevitably get comparisons with Bob Dylan in his gospel phase, the more questioning moments of Van Morrison or Leonard Cohen, and maybe a bit of Bono. Most of whom have been invoked in considerations of this album by Kevin Morby whose Dead Oceans debut Singing Saw was something of a quiet if referential alt.country gem. Certainly when the... > Read more
Sing a Glad Song
Versing: 10000 (Hardly Art)
3 May 2019 | 2 min read
In July 2011, the respected UK critic David Hepworth wrote a hilarious column in The Word about indie rock. He started by demolishing the adjective “indie” as essentially meaningless but that we somehow “get it” as a shorthand. Originally it actually meant independent, but these days with streaming services and such just about everybody really is independent, even... > Read more
Ekiti Sound: Abeg No Vex (Crammed Discs/Southbound)
29 Apr 2019 | <1 min read
Anyone looking for something which threads together clever lo-fi London tenement-block beats and sounds with rap'n'chant and the percussive soul of Lagos need look no further. This is an often beguiling amalgam of primitive drum'n'bass, the attitude of Congotronics who created idiosyncratic sonic magic out of cheap instruments and the deep spirit of Afrobeat beyond the obvious Fela... > Read more
ADHD
Gunter Herbig: Ex Oriente; Music by GI Gurdjieff (Bis)
29 Apr 2019 | 2 min read
The itinerant, late 19th/early 20thcentury philosopher and teacher George Ivanovich Gurdjieff (d 1949) was a seeker after fundamental truths (notably who are we and why are we here?) and became a spiritual leader with an interest in esoteric literature and thought. Among his pupils were PD Ouspensky and JG Bennett, and he influenced the likes of Zen teacher Alan Watts, English novelist and... > Read more
Reading from a Sacred Book
Chris Forsyth: All Time Present (No Quarter)
29 Apr 2019 | 1 min read
One part of American guitarist Chris Forsyth's output has been what we might call avant-guitar (atonal, distortion, experimental and so on with Peeessye) but the other part – more evident on this album under just his own name – is in the rock lineage (with the Solar Motel Band, among others). His reference points in the latter start somewhere around Richard Thompson's... > Read more
Tomorrow Might As Well Be Today
ONE WE MISSED: The Skull Eclipses: The Skull Eclipses (Western Vinyl/Flying Out)
28 Apr 2019 | 1 min read
It's widely accepted these days that when it comes to sonic innovation, studio techniques and the post-modern assimilation of ideas from the vast musical past of recorded music, that hip-hop producers have it all over those in the rock and folk genre. Those in the latter two genres who make the most impact borrow more freely from hip-hop ideas than those who faithfully reproduce the past,... > Read more
Yearn Infinite I
Durand Jones and the Indications: American Love Call (Dead Oceans)
28 Apr 2019 | <1 min read
Across orchestrated originals, this band out of Indiana evoke the spiritual ache of Gil Scott Heron (the bleak realism of Morning in America “and I can't see the dawn”), classic Motown falsetto (Don't You Know, Too Many Tears and Court of Love is Smokey/Temptations with drummer Aaron Frazer taking lead vocals on the dreamy latter two), Philly influences (Circles reminds of the... > Read more
What I Know About You
Touki Delphine and Bernadeta Astari: Kitchen Ballads (TCBYML)
24 Apr 2019 | <1 min read
Well, we are Elsewhere and you don't come here for the same-old same-old. So let's just give you something of the backstory and let you find this one on Spotify or wherever if it sounds like your thing. Touki Delphine are a classically-trained Dutch multi-media trio who play as a chamber outfit with electronica, “kitchen machines and simple cookware”. Bernadeta Astari is... > Read more
Les Sauvages
Delaney Davidson and Barry Saunders: Word Gets Around (Rough Diamond/Southbound, digital outlets)
23 Apr 2019 | 1 min read
After his idiosyncratic production work on his own albums and most recently for Harry Lyon on his excellent To the Sea, Delaney Davidson must be the go-to guy for singer-songwriters wanting to get some deeper grit, evocative noir and dirty r'n'b into their sound. Barry Saunders (Warratah, solo artist) met Davidson years ago when on the Churches tour with Marlon Williams and Tami Neilson... > Read more