Music at Elsewhere
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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
All Fall Down
Norah Jones: Begin Again (Blue Note)
22 Apr 2019 | 1 min read
This seven song compilation acts as a neat stop-gap and tour promotion (she's here this week, see below) and is a collection of material Jones has recorded with others. She's been down this path previously with the Featuring Norah Jones album of 2010, but as with her every release there's always something sound, thoughtful and professional about it. The opener here is the breathtakingly... > Read more
My Heart is Full
Sophie Mashlan: Perfect Disaster (digital outlets)
22 Apr 2019 | 1 min read
This young singer-songwriter is in her final year as a pop music student at the University of Auckland, but while others are getting singles together she leaps out with a fully-fledged, professional and mature album which has elements of dark country woven through the sometimes heroic pop-rock songs and the literate, reflective folk. Given she's already sprung a couple of singles (included... > Read more
Murray McNabb: e-music (Sarang Bang)
19 Apr 2019 | 2 min read
This beautifully presented double vinyl in a gatefold sleeve comes from Auckland's excellent Sarang Bang Records and -- as with their earlier The Way Out is The Way In and Every Day is a Beautiful Day -- presents innovative music from the vaults of the late composer/keyboard player Murray McNabb. A jazz player of local renown by the cognoscenti, McNabb was also musically curious and... > Read more
Billie Eilish: When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? (Interscope)
15 Apr 2019 | 1 min read
Talking about current pop music with some university music students last week (all a third my age) I mentioned sevenTeen-sensation Billie Eilish. And we agreed “she were crap, mate” when she played the Auckland Laneway Festival in 2018. I said that frankly she couldn't sing and couldn't dance (she danced as badly as me, 'nuff said) but one student defended her... > Read more
Xanny
Drugdealer: Raw Honey (Mexican Summer/Southbound)
15 Apr 2019 | <1 min read
Whatever the reason – DJs seeking out rare groves, compilations of deep cuts, the aural clutter of Spotify – a lot of people like obscurer-than-thou artists and songs. Well, Drugdealer – aka Michael Collins of LA – is one of those underground artists who has played with those on the fringes of Ariel Pink so he qualifies as usefully obscure. But the sunny... > Read more
Lost in my Dream
Second Prize: The Heel Turn (digital outlets)
15 Apr 2019 | <1 min read
As the man said in his e-mail, it's not often that Glenfield College (on Auckland's North Shore) is a useful old school tie! True. He was a student there a couple of decades ago and said he used to get out odd library books and was always a bit confused because on the slip of previous borrowers “one of them was invariably the mysterious "Reid (Staff)". And that... > Read more
Waiting for a Spark
Anderson.Paak: Ventura (Aftermath)
14 Apr 2019 | 2 min read | 1
To click that it's the great Smokey Robinson in the backdrop of the lovely and yearning Al Green-influenced Make It Better here might seem a little strange, especially when the vocal by Anderson.Paak is about how he and his woman used make love at the drop of a hat but now things have changed. Some might consider Smokey's presence here just a bit creepy, especially given he's 80 and A.Paak... > Read more
Reachin' 2 Much (ft Lalah Hathaway)
Maggie Teachout: Maybe I'm Still Just Peter (Green Monkey)
14 Apr 2019 | 1 min read
On the small but admirably persistent Green Monkey label out of the US Pacific Northwest (Seattle, Olympia) comes this debut by 18-year old singer-songwriter Maggie Teachout who fires off a 13-song volley of rocking indie-folk and more intimate ballads where at the upbeat end of her spectrum sounds she like a one-woman Violent Femmes (Colourblind, Lemonade Day) and at the other the... > Read more
Waltz for My Daughter
Snapped Ankles: Stunning Luxury (Leaf/Southbound)
14 Apr 2019 | <1 min read
A post-punk collective from East London which dress in what they style as pagan costumes and offer a kind of Fall-lite tribal chant and tribal beats alongside synths (which they put inside logs for the whole package). They sound more interesting than they are however because this slightly grimy punk-pop with a spoonful of white funk doesn't go anywhere much, too often relies on energy... > Read more
Rechargeable
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