Music at Elsewhere
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Yola: Walk Through Fire (Easy Eye Sound)
8 Apr 2019 | 1 min read
The backstory behind Bristol-raised Yolanda Quartey is worth hearing, she's the mid-Thirties singer whose debut album here announces a major talent. She'd grown up with a family which struggled, had been briefly without a place to stay in her early Twenties, sang with a country-rock band, was a backing singer with Massive Attack, Chemical Brothers, Katy Perry and others in the UK . . . but... > Read more
Shady Grove
Richard Ford: Basso Profondissimo (digital outlets)
8 Apr 2019 | <1 min read
British-born, LA-based producer/composer/bassist Richard Ford is the sum of many influences, from Bill Nelson's Red Noise band to soundtrack work, jazz to Latin-influenced music, downtown NYC in the Eighties to remixing for successful Hollywood movies. The soundtrack work perhaps best explains the evocative Dusty Theatre, a brooding and multi-layered piece with a sense of film-noir menace... > Read more
Dusty Theatre
Pumice: Worldwide Welts (Dubbed Tapes/bandcamp)
8 Apr 2019 | 1 min read
This will be brief and quick for a few reasons; some aspects of Pumice's sonic landscapes of synths, guitar, organ, violin etc will perhaps only appeal to those with an affection for Fripp/Eno, early work by David Hykes, the Eraserhead soundtrack, circular breathing drones and other similar waves of sound; and that if you want the artefact you have to be in quick because there were only 34... > Read more
Groeni: Nihx (Project.Mooncircle)
5 Apr 2019 | <1 min read
Wellington's Groeni – Mike Isaacs, Al Green and James Paul – continue their electronica explorations after three EPs with this nine track album which alights on ambient landscapes and Green's soulful vocals, sometimes involves beats with a disconcerting urgency and throughout there's an appealing contrast between the discomforts of reality and the escape into melodic and blissful... > Read more
Warborn
Jim Jones and the Righteous Mind: CollectiV (Masonic/Southbound)
4 Apr 2019 | <1 min read
Formed after the demise of the Jim Jones Revue in 2014, this British outfit implode numerous influences from raw blues and psychobilly through offshoots of Nick Cave, Exile-era Stones, Springsteen after a dose Tom Wait's Raindogs, the Gun Club and measure of Biblical rhetoric. It's a rowdy concoction and titles here include Sex Robot, Satan's Got His Heart Set On You (although the lyrics is... > Read more
Shazam
Over the Rhine: Love and Revelation (GSD/Southbound)
2 Apr 2019 | 1 min read | 1
It's a changed marketplace these days for musicians, and you know it when this husband-wife duo of Karin Bergquist and Linford Detweiler – who are Over the Rhine and have been together making music for three decades and catalogue of almost 20 studio albums – have crowdfunded this typically tasteful country-folk outing. With their large fan-base (their Nowhere Else Festival on... > Read more
Broken Angels
Boom! Boom! Deluxe: TeenageJuvenileDelinquentRocknRollHorrorBeachParty (Plan 9 Trash)
2 Apr 2019 | <1 min read
Well, it's much as it says on the box in that this is a shamelessly retro collection of (mostly) originals which spin off from rockabilly, rock'n'roll, doo-wop, Fifties ballads (the natty V8 Lullaby), harmonica-honkin' rhythm'n'blues and so on. It doesn't aim towards the sleazy and outrageous Cramps end of the spectrum (so no delinquency and horror really) but rather the more tame... > Read more
Against the Law (ft Glen Matlock)
Steady Garden: Steady Garden (digital outlets)
1 Apr 2019 | <1 min read
The name behind – and who is – Steady Garden is expat Kiwi singer-songwriter Tim Guy who has previously delivered some fine light pop settings for his crafted songs, many of which erred to the gentle and/or whimsical, as on the damn fine but probably overlooked Big World in 2010. It was a sound he carried into his last album Dreaming of a Night Mango in 2014, about which we... > Read more
Need Somebody
Brendan and Alison Turner: Ghost of a Friend (vinyl/digital outlets)
29 Mar 2019 | 3 min read
This simply recorded debut album by a duo from rural Northland could almost have come from the early Seventies when this kind of unadorned, honestly-realised acoustic country-folk – in similar gatefold cover with lyrics – were a commonplace. And in their promo sheet they acknowledge as much: “There is something timeless about those late 60s and 70s albums . . . the sound... > Read more
Various Artists: Songs of Our Native Daughters (Smithsonian Folkways/Southbound)
25 Mar 2019 | 2 min read
Elsewhere has written about Native American artists and music (traditional, contemporary, in pop and jazz) and of course a considerable number of black American artists. Rhiannon Giddens (vocals/banjo) who appears here was recently seen in the doco Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World (which also screened on Maori Television) and was one of many drew the link Native American and black... > Read more
You're Not Alone
Strand of Oaks: Eraserland (Dead Oceans/Rhythmethod)
25 Mar 2019 | 1 min read
Tim Showalter who is Strand of Oaks (that's also the band name) is very Old School when it comes to rock: he likes the dramatic chorus, the ascending guitar line, cannoning drums, the melodrama of life, the idea that this music can be personally cathartic and a shared experience . . . He's post-Seeger, post-Springsteen, post-Nirvana, post-most things. You can hear early Teardrop Explodes... > Read more
Keys
Spiral Stairs: We Wanna Be Hyp-No-Tized (Coolin' By Sound/digital outlets)
25 Mar 2019 | 1 min read
Spiral Stairs – co-founder of Pavement Scott Kannberg (with Stephen Malkmus) and also his band's name – play in Australia in April but so far haven't scheduled a New Zealand date. Maybe too soon after their late 2017 gig here? That's disappointing because this new album is as strong a collection of fist-tight classic rock as you are likely to hear. That's if your... > Read more
The Fool
Insert Name Here: The Line Between Ocean and Land (Stinkbuzz/digital outlets)
22 Mar 2019 | <1 min read
The nom-de-disque for Wellington's Craig Houghton, Insert Name Here kicks off this fourth collection (accrued over five years) with short slice of Robert Fripp/Eno-esque guitar effect of Exordium before dark psyche-folk over a buzz'n'fuzz of slo-mo shoegaze guitar on Losing It and then – after a brief burst of children's laughter – we are into the lo-fi but widescreen guitar... > Read more
Where Do You Stay?
The Cactus Blossoms: Easy Way (Walkie Talkie/Southbound)
22 Mar 2019 | <1 min read
If you don't whisper “Everly Brothers” within 10 seconds of the opening track Desperado (an original) on this album by a duo out of Minneapolis then your music history is woefully lacking. If it isn't, by the fourth track Gotta Lotta Love (another original with a ringingly familiar title) you'll be shouting those words at the stereo. Page Burkum and Jack Torrey pull out... > Read more
I am the Road
Finn Andrews: One Piece at a Time (Nettwerk)
19 Mar 2019 | 1 min read
As the mainman for his band the Veils, singer-songwriter Finn Andrews has turned in a more-than-respectable decade-plus collection of original songs and has rightly been hailed, right from when he was barely out of his teens, as an accomplished and mature songwriter. But any fold-back through his writing would discern some obvious influences, from Morrissey's yearning melancholy in the... > Read more
Love, What Can I Do?
JM Kelcher: Actual Disorganiser (Thokei Tapes)
18 Mar 2019 | 2 min read
John Kelcher was the bassist in the key iterations of Sneaky Feelings (from about '83 to their break-up in '89), left to live in Germany then returned home and currently works at the Nga Taonga sound archive, but most crucially was on the re-formed Sneaky Feelings album Progress Junction in 2017, a wonderful and unexpected return to prior form. But in '91 when back in the country he... > Read more
Sinker
RECOMMENDED REISSUE: Zero 7: Simple Things, Special Edition (New State/Southbound)
18 Mar 2019 | 1 min read
This debut album by the British electronica/production outfit of Sam Hardaker and Henry Binns saw the duo nominated as best newcomer at 2002's Brit Awards (Blue won) and the album nominated for a Mercury Prize in 2001 (it lost to Polly Harvey's Stories from the City/Sea). With its orchestrated cinematic sweeps – real James Bond music stuff or downtempo mood pieces – it opened... > Read more
Likufanele
Graeme James: The Long Way Home (Nettwerk/digital outlets)
16 Mar 2019 | 1 min read
Although expat Kiwi singer-songwriter Graeme James is billed as “modern folk” he in fact sometimes sounds much closer to very old traditions with mandolin, ukulele and violin alongside guitar on his sometimes chirpy melodies and story-telling songs. Way Up High here for example sounds like one of those songs from Woody/Dustbowl days with its refrain "trouble will not find... > Read more
The Difference
Caroline Easther: Lucky (bandcamp, other digital outlets to come)
16 Mar 2019 | 1 min read
Given her impeccable pedigree – the young Verlaines, a classic early Chills line-up, her own Let's Planet, and others . . . and the recently re-formed Beat Rhythm Fashion – singer-songwriter and drummer Caroline Easther has waited a while for this album under her own name. But as we learned from the excellent Spaces Between by former Look Blue Go Purple's Francisca... > Read more
Find Me
Cinematic Orchestra: To Believe (Ninja Tunes)
15 Mar 2019 | 1 min read | 1
It has been more than a decade since the previous Cinematic Orchestra album Ma Fleur and the landscape for lush, soulful, romantic and sometimes quasi-ambient music has changed. Not the least by artists on the Erased Tapes label, for example, who have sometimes a brought a not dissimilar ethos to bear in music which can be, or is, used in soundtracks. For Cinematic Orchestra to still... > Read more