“Excelsior!” is the first LP by NYC-based singer-songwriter Johanna Samuels. Produced by Sam Evian, the album features contributions by the likes of Courtney Marie Andrews, Hannah Cohen, A.O. Gerber or Lomelda’s Hannah Read. If you’ve followed us long enough, you know this means we’ve already sticked our seal of approval five times. Come for the copious namedropping, stay for some of the best lyrics of the first half of 2021.
Less than one year after the release of the excellent “The Horizon Just Laughed”, Damien Jurado is back with his 14th LP, the first on Mama Bird Recording Co. and Loose Music. It’s impressive how his songwriting keeps getting better with time – Jurado’s output between “Saint Bartlett” and now is arguably the best of his career – and this (mostly) acoustic collection of songs that clocks at a mere 27 minutes is by no means a secondary volume of his immense discography.
Plus: new tracks by Todd Snider, Paper Beat Scissors, Carl Broemel, Richard Hawley, The Mountain Goats, Alex Schaaf, Courtney Barnett, Aldous Harding, Heather Woods Broderick, Mega Bog, Sonny & the Sunsets, Os Amigos dos Músicos, Evripidis and his Tragedies, Trond Kallevåg Hansen, Lily Hayes, Palehound, Jesca Hoop, Lowly, Mutual Benefit, Josh Ritter, John Paul White, Anthony D’Amato, and Adam Carroll.
We told you not to miss it and I hope you blindly followed our orders.
When was the last time you went to a gig and had a reception with free fruit salad on a stick and plethora of drinks to choose from? Lugar Comum, the promoters from the Coimbra show, really did their best to make sure you were in the right mood to properly enjoy some Sonny & the Sunsets, despite the rainy and windy weather outside. In the beginning of the concert, the band sounded a bit sloppy though, indicating that perhaps it wasn’t a very good idea for us to sit down on the ground on a non-seated venue. Bands don’t soundcheck thinking about people sitting on the ground, you know. In spite of that, there’s nothing not to love about songs like “Reflections on Youth” or “Love Among Social Animals”.