Music at Elsewhere
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Steve Reich: Radio Rewrite (Nonesuch)
4 Oct 2014 | 1 min read
When composers like Philip Glass and Steve Reich objected the label "minimalism" being applied to their music -- which was, frankly, minimal -- you couldn't help but feel the sense of special pleading about a self-inflicted wound. The word was perfectly adequate and although they might have felt it limited the perception of them (and they did explore other less reductive areas... > Read more
Radio Rewrite, 4, Slow
Moana and the Tribe: Rima (Black Pearl)
29 Sep 2014 | 1 min read
For my money the most powerful, enjoyable and important act on the mainstage at this year's Womad in Taranaki – and there were some over-acclaimed but perfunctory internationals – was Moana and the Tribe. They delivered a thumping, visually powerful and cleverly calculated implosion of waiata, haka and electronica-flavoured soul-funk. Moana also won the crowd with... > Read more
Aotearoa
Prince: Art Official Age/Plectrumelectrum (Warners)
29 Sep 2014 | 3 min read
As with Ryan Adams, Prince was one of those artists who was so prolific that neither his record company nor audience could keep up. It's been a while however since Prince graced us with an album but -- as was the case in the Eighties and NIneties when he was delivering at least one album a year -- now we get not one but two albums, Art Official Age (under his own name) and Plectrumelectrum... > Read more
Marz
Dylan Bakker: Atrophic Cascades (RR)
29 Sep 2014 | 1 min read
Expat Kiwi Dylan Bakker wrote to Elsewhere from his home-base in Berlin recently wondering if we'd like to get a copy of his debut CD. We did a quick check of his wide and deep website which is chock full of artwork, prints, photography, a list of his numerous exhibitions and music projects and concluded, "Yes please". The CD duly arrived with hand-written note (in... > Read more
Give and Take
RECOMMENDED REISSUE: JImi Hendrix, Cry of Love (Sony)
29 Sep 2014 | 1 min read | 3
Long out of print (although not unavailable) and derided (unfairly) by some, Cry of Love was the first posthumous, artificially created album after Hendrix's death. Cry of Love has awkward provenance because these songs were possibly intended for a proposed double album (possibly entitled First Rays of the New Rising Sun). The other songs which would make that up were released... > Read more
Angel
Alt-J: This is All Yours (Infectious)
23 Sep 2014 | <1 min read
Much as I liked the debut album by this British outfit An Awesome Wave and said they seemed likely to be the Next Indie.Cult Thing to go bigger, I certainly had reservations about seeing them live. Their music was so studio-crafted and often inward looking that I couldn't see how it would translate live. Well, I saw them and although I concede others liked them much better than I did , but... > Read more
Warm Foothills
Pere Ubu: Carnival of Souls (Fire / Southbound)
22 Sep 2014 | <1 min read
With so much music codified into genres and artists reluctant to alienate an audience, Pere Ubu remain refreshingly abrasive, marginal and theatrically challenging. Frontman David Thomas has barely toned down the confrontational sound they deployed when emerging out of Cleveland in the late Seventies. Their early albums The Modern Dance (an Essential Elsewhere album, see here)... > Read more
Road to Utah
U2: Songs of Innocence (iTunes)
19 Sep 2014 | 2 min read | 1
Because there's often a rush to judgement about U2 -- many hate them so passionately they don't feel the need to listen to them before dismissing an album as rubbish -- I've sat back on this new album released free through iTunes. I will declare my prejudices immediately: I liked very, very little of their work before Achtung Baby (I can be especially scathing about the pretension of Rattle... > Read more
Raised by Wolves
Goat: Commune (Rocket / Southbound)
19 Sep 2014 | <1 min read | 1
Goat out of Sweden have certainly got their psychedelic trancerock-cum-world music references in perfect alignment as they explore territory that many thought might have been left behind in the very late Sixties. But to that San Francisco landscape they pull in tribal tropes, post-rock references, the rolling grooves of bands like Can and set their controls to the heart of Pink Floyd's... > Read more
Talk to God
IN BRIEF: A quick overview of some recent releases
17 Sep 2014 | 2 min read
With so many CDs commanding and demanding attention Elsewhere will run this occasional column which scoops up international artists, in much the same way as our SHORT CUTS column picks up New Zealand artists. Comments will be short . . . and today we turn attention to plank-spankers. Elvin Bishop, Can't Even Do Wrong Right (Alligator): It's one of those odd things that many people think... > Read more
Death Letter
Robert Plant and the Sensational Space Shifters: Lullaby and the Ceaseless Roar (Warners)
15 Sep 2014 | <1 min read
Although singing a generous number of highly reconfigured Led Zeppelin songs at his 2013 Vector show with this band, Plant continues to distance himself from Zepp's hard rock-cum-folk catalogue, leaving former bandmate Jimmy Page to mine the past while he moves further sideways through world music, American country, rebooted blues and even simple pop. With the Space Shifters discreetly... > Read more
Embrace Another Fall
The New Pornographers: Brill Bruisers (4AD)
15 Sep 2014 | <1 min read
At times sounding filled with the overconfident swaggering, embellished pop of McCartney around Magical Mystery Tour or early Mika and Empire of the Sun glitterball fun, at others chugging like glam-rock or referring to the Mamas and the Papas and widescreen power-pop aimed at stadiums, this enormously enjoyable sixth outing by the Canadian collective around songwriter AC Newman deftly dance... > Read more
Champions of Red Wine
Mirel Wagner: When the Cellar Children See The Light of Day (subPop)
8 Sep 2014 | <1 min read | 2
Pitched somewhere between a weary self-analysing Kurt Cobain acoustic session, Mazzy Star raised on death ballads and P.J Harvey's most introspective work, this concise collection – 10 songs, 32 minutes – comes from an unlikely but powerfully impressive source. Wagner is a 23-year old Ethiopian adoptee who was raised in Finland from the age of 18 months and considers... > Read more
What Love Looks Like
Mahoney Harris: We Didn't Feel Alone (mahoneyharris)
8 Sep 2014 | 2 min read | 1
At the midpoint of this debut album by Auckland singer-songwriter Mahoney Harris there is a lyric that can stop you in your tracks: just when you think you've got her pegged there is Miss You. On a cursory listen this piece -- which comes with an elegant musical setting with guitar by Tom Healy -- seems to be a piece about a former partner: "What would you say if I saw you today, would... > Read more
Miss You
Various Artists: Bowie Heard Them Here First (Ace/Border)
8 Sep 2014 | 1 min read
The glue that barely holds this diverse 24-song collection together -- Paul Revere and the Raiders through Johnny Mathis, Lotte Lenya and Roxy Music -- is that these are the originals of songs David Bowie covered in his long and shapeshifting career. The timeframe is as wide as the songs: It runs from Revere's oddball garageband Louie Go Home which Bowie recorded when he was Davie Jones and... > Read more
I Took a Trip on a Gemini Spaceship
Jonah Tolchin: Clover Lane (YepRoc)
8 Sep 2014 | <1 min read
As enjoyably familiar as this rough-edged country-folk-blues album is, you can't help feel that you have traveled these paths many times from Bob Dylan through the Band and Tom Waits to Steve Earle in bluegrass mode and beyond. With some stellar assistance from the likes of harmonica player Mickey Raphael, Los Lobos saxophonist Steve Berlin and others, Tolchin and his band shift from barn... > Read more
Hybrid Automobile
Willis Earl Beal: Experiments in Time (CD Baby)
1 Sep 2014 | 1 min read | 1
Wllis Earl Beal has released two such different albums -- Acoustmatic Society which were home recordings pulled together from the scores he had made, then the soulful and more straightahead Nobody knows -- that you could never anticpate where he might go next. Beal has also been one of the most insightful and self-aware musicians it has been Elsewhere's privilege to interview and he... > Read more
Traveling Eyes
J. Mascis: Tied to a Star (SubPop)
1 Sep 2014 | <1 min read | 1
The 2012 album I Bet on Sky by Dinosaur Jr – the band singer/guitarist J. Mascis helms with once-estranged Lou Barlow – divided loyalists, some heard it as a return to form and others (like me) thought it obvious. Mascis' albums under his own name have been more consistently interesting since Free So Free (with the Fog) over a decade ago, and especially 2011's Several... > Read more
Drifter
Spoon: They Want My Soul (Spunk)
1 Sep 2014 | <1 min read | 1
For New Zealand listeners, there is a peculiar but interesting cover on this album by the never-predictable psych-cum-alt rockers Spoon from Texas. It is their rather straight version of Ann-Margret's bluesy I Just Don't Understand which the Beatles used to do live and which Tommy Adderley covered in the early Sixties in a very Merseybeat style. It's hardly out of place here on an album... > Read more
Let Me Be Mine
IN BRIEF: A quick overview of some recent releases
27 Aug 2014 | 2 min read
With so many CDs commanding and demanding attention Elsewhere will run this occasional column which scoops up international artists, in much the same way as our SHORT CUTS column picks up New Zealand artists. Comments will be short . . . Various Artists: Country Funk II 1967-74 (LITA/Southbound). The excellent archive label Light in the Attic continues its exploration of this loosely... > Read more