Music at Elsewhere
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Electric Wire Hustle: Love Can Prevail (Every Waking Hour)
15 Oct 2014 | 1 min read
Last month this album -- EWH down now from a trio to Mara TK and David "Taay Ninh" Wright -- got a very nice notice in the New York Times, noting their "knotty, disorienting studio fabrications, surrounding hand-played R&B" are "descendants of [Marvin Gaye's] What’s Going On". True, inasmuch as problems with love and God become intertwined... > Read more
By and Bye
Lucinda Williams: Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone (Thirty Tigers)
13 Oct 2014 | 1 min read
Few artists would dare open an album – let alone a double set – with a spare song based on words of their accomplished poet father . . . especially when the worthy sentiment sounds like the old faux-philosophical hippie poster Desiderata. But Lucinda Williams – decades into an acclaimed career, now on her own label and with a faithful following – can take that... > Read more
Something Wicked This Way Comes
The Seeds: Singles As and Bs 1065-1970 (Big Beat/Border)
13 Oct 2014 | 2 min read | 1
Elsewhere's advocacy of power pop and garageband rock (especially Sixties stuff) is well documented . . . so this collection of 24 songs by the legendary Seeds out of LA was always going to be straight into the player (how I wish I could say "onto the turntable") and the volume knob turned heavily clockwise. The band that gave the world bona fide classics like Pushin'... > Read more
Up In Her Room
Stevie Nicks: 24 Karat Gold: Songs from the Vault (Warners)
13 Oct 2014 | <1 min read | 2
With Christine McVie rejoining Fleetwood Mac after 16 years and the classic line-up touring again, the timing couldn't be better for this collection of Stevie Nicks' previously unreleased songs, most written between 1969 and 87. Using her demos as a guide, she linked up again with producer Dave Stewart, longtime friend/guitarist Waddy Wachtel, Heartbreakers' guitarist Mike Campbell... > Read more
Mabel Normand
Leonard Cohen: Popular Problems (Sony)
6 Oct 2014 | 1 min read
Although he long had the reputation of a “one-man Joy Division” or “Laughing Len” in reference to his gloom-soaked melancholy, Leonard Cohen always had an increasingly self-deflating streak. Just as he opened his Ten New Songs album of 2001 with the whispery and wry In My Secret Life (written and revised over a dozen years) and had the droll Because Of on Dear... > Read more
Nevermind
Engineers; Always Returning (Kscope/Southbound):
6 Oct 2014 | <1 min read
Another on the prog label Kscope -- home to Steven Wilson and his band Porcupine Tree, Blackfield, Anathema and others -- and this double disc (songs on one, instrumental versions on t'other) is mighty impressive, and comes in a hardback cover with lyrics. Engineers -- who have been through a few line-up changes -- are British multi-instrumentalist Mark Peters and drummer/composer... > Read more
Innsbruck (instrumental version)
IN BRIEF: A quick overview of some recent releases
6 Oct 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 brief. The Pineapple Tree; Magnolia (Kscope/Southbound): Prog-rocker Bruce Soord (who essentially is Pineapple Thief) has appeared at Elsewhere previously... > Read more
The One You Left to Die
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