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With a special knack for balancing bright pop melodies with a drifting sense of melancholy, LA based Johanna Samuels new album Excelsior! is a tender, honest document of the importance of companionship above all else. Named after Dylan’s “Visions of Johanna”, Samuels grew up on the classic songwriters of yesteryear (George Harrison, Tom Petty, Neil Young) and after a healthy dose of Elliott Smith and Jon Brion, has spent the best part of the last decade honing her craft.

Excelsior! was recorded in a small cabin in West Shokan in NY State, in the middle of the winter with her band and producer Sam Evian but it's songs are full of West Coast sunshine. It's Evian's first full album production at his own Flying Cloud Studios. Recorded mostly to tape, the album is as a gorgeous combination of vintage instrumentation, strong melodic hooks, killer harmonies and Samuels’ elegant voice.

Samuels seeks those answers through companionship, exploring the depths of her relationships and then calling upon a handful of womxn to provide the album’s backing vocals - a task she’d always performed herself until now. As such, Excelsior! makes a space for the voices of Courtney Marie Andrews, Hannah Cohen, Lomelda’s Hannah Read, A.O. Gerber, Louise Florence and Olivia Kaplan.

The album takes its name from the signature that Samuels’ grandpa would use before he sadly passed away last December. “He was a very important person to me and he helped raise me,” Johanna explains. “He signed all of his letters and emails ‘Excelsior!’, including the exclamation point. It means ‘ever upward’ and that’s what I wish for everyone: to grow from listening with more empathy and from hearing each other out. I hope this record makes people want to be gentler with each other and themselves.”

I’ve known Alex Bleeker my entire life. Well, okay, maybe not since I was born, but there’s no doubt that I’ve shared a fair bit of memories with him over the years. We’ve acted in high school productions of Shakespeare together, gone on late-night diner runs, argued about which Weezer album is the band’s best, and swapped mutual appreciation for the music of Yo La Tengo on car rides careening around the snaky suburbia of our hometown. Just like his Real Estate bandmates Martin Courtney and Julian Lynch, we attended high school in the New Jersey enclave of Ridgewood, a place where sticky summer days yielded cool nights with a glow so nocturnal that you can practically hear the fireflies buzzing off of this sentence alone.

Indie rock—a type of music that can easily be made or listened to in someone’s garage—often dominates teenage suburban preoccupations, and both Alex and I were no exception. You can hear this legacy of listening on his new album Heaven on the Faultline, which departs from his last full-band outing as Alex Bleeker and the Freaks, 2015’s Country Agenda. Whereas that album had a more full-bodied explicitly folk-y feel, Heaven on the Faultline finds Bleeker getting back to his homespun roots over the course of its 13 songs, from the jangly guitar pop of New Jersey heroes the Feelies and YLT’s hushed, acoustic reveries to the open-hearted folk rock that marks so much of the Grateful Dead’s early catalog.

Written and recorded over the last several years, Heaven on the Faultline’s songs were initially recorded straight to GarageBand in Bleeker’s bedroom before receiving further studio refinement in co-producer Phil Hartunian’s Tropico Beauty space in Los Angeles. With contributions from Confusing Mix of Nations’ Josh Da Costa, Cameron Stallones of Sun Araw, singer-songwriter Kacey Johansing, and Parting Lines’ Tim Ramsey, Heaven on the Faultline achieves a warm and intimate feel that defines Bleeker’s mission for the album: “I wanted to capture the moment in which I fell in love with making music to begin with. This is music for myself—me getting back to music for music’s sake.”

The unsteady times we live in certainly creep into view on Heaven on the Faultline. The deceptively easygoing “D Plus” was written on the day of President Donald Trump’s inauguration with the cursed event in mind, while the anxiety of climate change hovers just above the lovely guitar loops of “Felty Feel.” “The album is very much about dealing with the anxiety of a sense of impending doom,” Bleeker states while discussing the album’s portentous vibes. “When is the hammer going to fall? How do we go forward in the face of such anxiety and experience the complexity of life?”

Tough questions with few answers, but try not to stress too much. It’s possible to experience such existential doubt while also enjoying the simple pleasures that life has to offer, and that ethos is square at the heart of Heaven on the Faultline. It defines who Alex Bleeker is, too, and is one of many reasons why I’m proud to have known this special person and artist for so long.

After a hiatus of over eight years Fuzzy Lights are making a welcome return. Burials is the follow-up to the critically acclaimed album Rule of Twelfths, and the fourth album from the Cambridge-based post-folk collective.

Their sound has been stripped back to its component parts, deconstructed and rebuilt under less obvious influences. There’s a bedrock of folk-rock - predecessors like Trees and Fairport Convention - but this is then built upon through multiple layers, from the stillness of Talk Talk to the orchestral chaos of Godspeed You! Black Emperor. With Burials Fuzzy Lights have cultivated these sounds and influences into something new and fresh that distances the album from the rest of the folk-rock crowd.

The most striking element of these songs is how intimate they are. Lyricist Rachel Watkins has revealed a lot about herself in these seven songs, which have been written from a very personal perspective. Raw experiences have been distilled into each piece, her translucent vocals often betraying the content of the songs themselves. The album is bookended with the most personal of these. Opener ‘The Maidens Call’ reveals her loss from suffering a miscarriage, whilst album closer, ‘The Gathering Storm’ frames the rallying cry of women’s rights around how individuals must work together now, and in future generations, to destroy prejudice. There is also engagement with humanity’s immediate surroundings and the environment. ‘Under The Waves’ deals with devastation of coral reefs, ocean resources and our natural world, and ‘The Graveyard Song’ imagines the perception of time from the juxtaposed views of a yew tree and a young woman.

As scenarios, paths, and outcomes shift around us, Burials’ amalgam of glowering, intense instrumentation, timeless, weightless melody, and exactingly revealing lyricism carves a very particular path through the world. This is music that tears us away from the everyday not just as a form of escapism, but as a means of self-reflection on hardship and the strategies we develop to overcome it. It is the band’s rawest yet most accomplished statement to date.

Those who pay close attention to DJ Harvey’s sets should already be familiar with NuNorthern Soul’s next single, a fully licensed reissue of a sought-after 1980 promotional seven-inch from legendary Spanish Flamenco singer Manuel Mancheño Peña, better known as El Turronero (‘The Nougat’). Both ‘Las Penas’ and ‘Si Yo Volviera A Nacer’ have long been secret weapons in the sets of dusty-fingered Balearic DJs, with Harvey regularly dropping the tracks during his sessions at Pikes Hotel on the White Isle. Both tracks first appeared on Pena’s 1980 album New Hondo, a set that updated the then veteran Flamenco artist’s sound for the disco era. Whereas most of his previous albums were more traditional Flamenco affairs, New Hondo combined his throaty, effervescent Flamenco singing style with the driving grooves, swooping orchestration and spacey synthesizer sounds of European disco. To promote the album, Spanish label DB Belter pressed up a promotional “45” featuring two of the most club-friendly cuts on the album. It’s this release that is being reissued for the very first time by NuNorthern Soul. A-side ‘Las Penas’ is undoubtedly an off-kilter, late-night disco classic. Built around a flanged, action-packed disco-funk bassline, metronomic beats. soaring and layered female backing vocals, intergalactic synth sounds and stirring strings, the track steps up a level when ‘El Turronero’ takes to the microphone to belt out an infectious, energetic vocal in his trademark Flamenco style. It’s the kind of cut that’s as haunting and intoxicating as it is funky and floor friendly. Flipside ‘Si You Volviera A Nacer’, another of New Hendo’s most sought-after tracks, is another unique and righteous concoction. Looser, groovier and warmer in tone, it sees another sublime, Flamenco style lead vocal from Pena accompanied by even funkier bass, spiralling ’70s synthesizer sounds, sweaty drums and some seriously exotic instrumental flourishes (think sitar and kalimba). It’s every bit as alluring as the more driving A-side, and equally as playable. Both tracks may be unusual in comparison to the artist’s other releases, but they expertly capture a moment in time, when disco dominated dancefloors all over the world and inspired even the most traditional and historic of European musical styles. Quite a number of flamenco-disco records were made in Spain during the late ’70s and early ’80s, but very few are quite as magical as these.

I was in Lima, hanging out with collector-extraordinaire Victor Zela, who had spent the previous few years pouring his passion for Peruvian Cumbia into the blog „la cumbia de mis viejos“, a trove of incredible music. But after the birth of his first child, his priorities shifted and he decided to part with some of his rarest LPs. I was one of the lucky few given an early chance to examine his treasures, and when I picked up the album Manzaneando com Manzanita, Victor said: “Take it! its one of the best LPs ever recorded in Perú … easily in the top five”. That was all the encouragement I needed … two years later many of the songs from that masterpiece have made it onto Manzanita y su Conjunto, a compilation of electrifying Cumbia sides from Manzanita’s golden era.

Berardo Hernández – better known as Manzanita – first surfaced during the psychedelic Cumbia craze. At the head of the scene were the magnificent Los Destellos, whose leader, Enrique Delgado, was such a six-string wizard that other guitarists found it impossible to escape his shadow. But when Manzanita arrived, his electric criollo style sent shockwaves through Lima’s music scene and posed a serious threat to Delgado’s dominance as king of the Peruvian guitar.

Manzanita had come to Lima from the coastal city of Trujillo, five hundred miles up the coast – a place where Spanish, African and indigenous populations had been living and making music together for centuries – and came of age at a time when the first wave of psychedelic rock from the US and UK was starting to sweep the airwaves. But the sounds of Cream and Hendrix disappeared from the radio just as quickly in 1968 when Juan Velasco seized control of the country in a military coup. The new regime, which favoured local traditions over cultural ‘imports’ from the north, was a blessing in disguise for the Peruvian music scene.

Record labels flourished as new bands, raised on a hybrid diet of electric guitars and Cuban rhythms, rushed in to fill the vacuum created by the lack of imported rock. A new genre, known as Peruvian cumbia, was born and Manzanita quickly became one of its most original voices.

Starting in 1969, Manzanita y su Conjunto released a steady stream of singles that used Cuban guaracha rhythms as the foundation for dazzling electric guitar lines. After countless 45s and several years on the touring circuit, the band signed to Virrey, an important Peruvian label, and recorded two LPs acknowledged as masterpieces among aficionados of tropical music. Most of the songs on Analog Africa’s new compilation Manzanita y su Conjunto are drawn from those legendary sessions of 1973 and 74.

Although he scored a few more hits in the later 70s, his dissatisfaction with the music industry caused him to withdraw from the scene for several years; and when he finally retired for good, the golden age of Peruvian cumbia was a distant memory. But when Manzanita was at the top of his game he had few equals. Victor Zela was right: this is some of the best music ever recorded in Perú.

“The two latest reissues to spin off from our acclaimed Imaginational Anthem Volume 8: The Private Press feature the solo guitar compositions of Russell Potter, recorded in the last waning days of the initial American Primitive explosion. A then obsessed teenaged devotee of John Fahey, Robbie Basho, and Leo Kottke at a time when Punk and New Wave were ascendant, Potter harnessed a similar DIY ethos to his own ends by starting his own label & self-publishing his first record, 'A Stone’s Throw’, while a freshman enrolled at Goddard College in Vermont in 1979. Assembled at the legendary Boddie Records in Potter’s hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, and sprinkled liberally with references to his heroes, from the initial record label name of Fonytone (which more than a little recalls Fahey’s earliest record label, Fonotone), to the arcane song titles and references to obscure rags. Even as he looks to his elders, Potter’s debut release nimbly evinces a complete mastery of his form and is all the more remarkable for one of such tender years, as only the chutzpah of youth can account for such moves as successfully grafting one of your own composition to one of John Fahey’s, as he does here. There’s a very immediate, lovely, and real homespun quality to Potter’s chiming twelve-string compositions that puts it in the realm of those classic records that seem to simply exist outside of time. Shortly after ‘A Stones Throw’, Potter produced & released a 45rpm single by an Ohio bluegrass band featuring the cult singer songwriter Bob Frank performing a cover of Devo’s ‘Mongoloid’, before moving on to his second (and sadly final) album the following year, ‘Neither Here Nor There’. Following an independent study with a Goddard College ethnomusicologist, Potter’s compositions and performance only deepened on his second release — the recording quality steps up a little but loses none of the immediacy, the playing gets more exuberantly virtuosic —but then more reflective too, particularly on the tunes that are influenced by the gorgeous traditional Irish slow airs. He’s still tipping his hat to Fahey occasionally as well, this time with an audacious electric guitar setting of the classic “Dance of the Inhabitant of the Palace of King Philip XIV of Spain.” Though these albums landed at a time when American Primitive guitar music’s 1960s & 1970s heyday was in the rear view mirror, they absolutely look ahead to the genre’s eventual 21st Century resurrection, anticipating both in form & content many of the same concerns you find in the great contemporary work of the last two decades by Jack Rose, Glenn Jones, Daniel Bachman, et al., and as such provide about as fine a stepping stone between these two eras as you’re likely to find.”—Michael Klausman

“The two latest reissues to spin off from our acclaimed Imaginational Anthem Volume 8: The Private Press feature the solo guitar compositions of Russell Potter, recorded in the last waning days of the initial American Primitive explosion. A then obsessed teenaged devotee of John Fahey, Robbie Basho, and Leo Kottke at a time when Punk and New Wave were ascendant, Potter harnessed a similar DIY ethos to his own ends by starting his own label & self-publishing his first record, 'A Stone’s Throw’, while a freshman enrolled at Goddard College in Vermont in 1979. Assembled at the legendary Boddie Records in Potter’s hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, and sprinkled liberally with references to his heroes, from the initial record label name of Fonytone (which more than a little recalls Fahey’s earliest record label, Fonotone), to the arcane song titles and references to obscure rags. Even as he looks to his elders, Potter’s debut release nimbly evinces a complete mastery of his form and is all the more remarkable for one of such tender years, as only the chutzpah of youth can account for such moves as successfully grafting one of your own composition to one of John Fahey’s, as he does here. There’s a very immediate, lovely, and real homespun quality to Potter’s chiming twelve-string compositions that puts it in the realm of those classic records that seem to simply exist outside of time. Shortly after ‘A Stones Throw’, Potter produced & released a 45rpm single by an Ohio bluegrass band featuring the cult singer songwriter Bob Frank performing a cover of Devo’s ‘Mongoloid’, before moving on to his second (and sadly final) album the following year, ‘Neither Here Nor There’. Following an independent study with a Goddard College ethnomusicologist, Potter’s compositions and performance only deepened on his second release — the recording quality steps up a little but loses none of the immediacy, the playing gets more exuberantly virtuosic —but then more reflective too, particularly on the tunes that are influenced by the gorgeous traditional Irish slow airs. He’s still tipping his hat to Fahey occasionally as well, this time with an audacious electric guitar setting of the classic “Dance of the Inhabitant of the Palace of King Philip XIV of Spain.” Though these albums landed at a time when American Primitive guitar music’s 1960s & 1970s heyday was in the rear view mirror, they absolutely look ahead to the genre’s eventual 21st Century resurrection, anticipating both in form & content many of the same concerns you find in the great contemporary work of the last two decades by Jack Rose, Glenn Jones, Daniel Bachman, et al., and as such provide about as fine a stepping stone between these two eras as you’re likely to find.”—Michael Klausman