Naked Hearts‘ full length debut "Mass Hysteria" was The Deli’s CD of the Month in May 2010. To fully appreciate the duo’s talent for melancholic indie pop gems you might want to wait for the fall – which every stereotype indicates as the most melancholic of seasons. But good music is good music, even in the hottest NYC summer on record. – Read Claire Marie Le Bihan interview with the band here.

Well, we don’t get to mention the word "Emmy" too often here at The Deli – we are way too humble (read "snobbish in some sort of reversed way") to cover that kind of stuff. But Kelly Scarr, an emerging, talented Brooklyn-based singer songwriter, gave us the perfect excuse to mention this Award by being nominated for her work as a composer on the HBO documentary "In A Dream." Kelly met director Jeremiah Zagar at an East Village bar – and that’s when the collaborative spark began. The lady sure has an interesting voice and is not afraid to take the twangy ballad concept to extremes of slowness and intimate intensity. Her debut album "Piece" will be out on Silence Breaks Records on July 27.

We continue our "Best of NYC Countdown", covering every day one of the artists that made our Year End Best of NYC list (a chart compiled by a jury comprised of local bloggers, music writers, promoters, record store personnel, DJs, and our writers and readers).

Brooklyn’s Small Black is a duo (live there are more players involved) that creates synth-y lo-fi love songs (it sounds like love, anyway — maybe they’re singing about hate, but I doubt it) using a couple of casios and some beat machines. The vocals are the kind that, again, sounds like they’re sung from a Fisher-Price microphone. But here, that sound definitely works (sometimes that sound is definitely annoying, as I’m sure you know).
Small Black works better than a lot of the other people rocking the "hot new old sound" of lo-fi because their melodies are just so damn pretty. Sure, there’s some roughness and scratchiness with the way it’s recorded (an aesthetic choice), but really when we talk about Small Black we’re talking about beauty.
So just saying "lo-fi" doesn’t give these guys a whole lot of credit. Gosh, I love pretty songs. Seriously, is there anything better in this life? Pizza is pretty good, but not as good as a pretty song. – www.ohmyrockness.com

Those who work in fields related to music reviewing are familiar with (and often allergic to) the celebratory phrases used by PR people to describe the artists they are trying to pitch for coverage. PR guys of course are doing their job by trying to make you believe that their artists are absolutely outstanding, often using ready made sentences that are supposed to have a certain effect: "catapulted the band into [something awesome here]" is one of the most abused. This is why we couldn’t help but laugh out loud when our Open Blog users El Jefe vs. Demons introduced this fun/creepy video (that would benefit from a chorus by the way) with this blurb:

"This is the new El Jefe vs. Demons video for "Meant to be Creepy" which will be on the new album, which is yet to be titled. The video was shot & edited by none other than infamous filmmaker Joey Angerone, who has done many short films, music videos & documentaries. This album will be the follow-up to the debut album "Death, Blood & the Guts" which catapulted the band into obscurity. Enjoy the video & be creeped out!" – (as posted in The Deli’s Open Blog – post your band’s entries, videos, and Mp3s here).

New Jersey’s Atlantic/Pacific formed in the summer of 2008 when long time friends Garrett Klahn (from Texas is the Reason)and John Herguth (from House & Parish) began kicking around a few songs in Garrett’s Brooklyn apartment. Soon after, Atlantic/Pacific started performing in NY and Europe with projections of 70s skateboarders and surfers playing behind them – will those ever be passe`? The band did shows with Mercury Rev, Neil Halstead, Chamberlain, and Walter Schreifels. Recently joined by Ian Love (Rival Schools), the trio will release in October Meet Your New Love, their debut full length album, under No Sleep Records

A product of that Williamsburg based rehearsal-recording-studio+guitar pedal manufacturing workshop+venue+apartment+record label called Death By Audio, Sisters were one of the first local acts to adopt that non-chalantly lo-fi style that is now commonly accepted as THE Brooklyn DIY sound. Their noise pop owes to Dinosaur Jr and early Pavement (which is basically like saying that these guys know how to write great pop songs and strum an electric guitar) although the "fi" factor is definitely a notch lower here – as you can tell from their gritty myspace tracks. Recently signed to NYC mainstay independent label Narnack Records, the band will release their (overdue) debut CD just in time for CMJ. Check them out at Silent Barn on July 29.

We continue our "Best of NYC Countdown", covering every day one of the artists that made our Year End Best of NYC list (a chart compiled by a jury comprised of local bloggers, music writers, promoters, record store personnel, DJs, and our writers and readers).

We liked solo Luke Temple just fine. His high pitched vocals on banjo layered records like Hold a Match for a Gasoline World and Snowbeast recalled Sufjan Stevens. Then came side project Here We Go Magic, and the sound of Temple fleshing out his potential. The voice was still considerably frail, but the psychedelic guitars and progressive arrangements beefed up his sound to unrecognizable heights. Still, we never twigged Temple as someone capable of dropping ‘Collector’, the first single off Here We Go Magic’s sophomore album Pigeons. The revolving guitar swirls and muted drums are so hypnotic one can forget what good fun the whole thing is. And that hook!? “I’ve got a mild fascination / for collectors”. It’s basically the only understandable lyric on the whole track, but one that rattles around your head for days. – By Dean Van Nguyen

New York gypsy folk act Aunt Ange are currently giving away the track "Circles" from their upcoming 3rd album "Olga Walks Away" in exchange for signing up for their mailing list. You can sign up via the reverbnation widget here or on myspace. They will also be selling the first single "Crucify" digitally and at all performances starting with their July 29th show at the Charleston in Williamburg with Ellis Ashbrook and Survivalsuit. In case you haven’t heard of Aunt Ange yet, here is a music video for the track "Raining Ashes" form their previous album Apathia. – (as posted in The Deli’s Open Blog – post your band’s entries, videos, and Mp3s here).

Woods are both simultaneously surreal and natural. The mellow, undemanding melodies, accompanied by falsetto vocals and a raw, rugged mountaineer’s attitude, construct a strongly bound and cohesive sound. Woods play a lo-fi, fuzzy soundtrack to a series of mental trips, always creating sounds that are more than the sum of their individual parts. Because they give off such a hip vibe, it’s sometime easy to forget that at the core of the tracks are beautiful vocal melodies – and though they certainly have pop sensibility, it never sounds trite or cheap. Guitar lines and grooves sometimes perfectly matching the melodies, sometimes seemingly random, but always work – just like Brooklyn. – Paul Dunn

The story of Highlife carries many similarities to the one of The Drums: – and a bunch of painters from the early 1900: musicians stressed out by the city’s lifestyle escape to sunny marine location far from metropolitan madness in search of a way of life more conducive to musical creation, find inspiration, make great music and return to NYC with songs that sound like sun and sea – two things New Yorkers should be very familiar with, by the way (perhaps NYC’s sun and sea are not as inspiring as its other virtues…)
Highlife was born in 2008 when Shaw, along with White Magic collaborator Mira Billotte, retreated from New York to the small island of Gaspar Grande off the coast of Trinidad, at the southernmost point of the Caribbean trail. The pair spent long, wandering nights chanting and inducing trance, recording on a portable setup that Shaw had lugged along. The rough demos were brought to a London studio, where Shaw and Billotte re-recorded them and finalized them with the help of producer Harvey Birrel (Crass, Sir Richard Bishop, Buzzcocks). Now back in NYC, the band is readying the launch of the band’s debut EP "Best Bilss" scheduled for the end of September.

Here’s an interesting story of creative Rock’n’Roll marketing… NYC band Julius C doesn’t go on the kind of tour most bands go on. For the last several years, the band has spent the hot months touring summer camps. Band leader Jay Stollar developed the “Rock Star Camp” program to bring more arts activities to summer camps after spending his youth hoping for such an experience. Five years into the program, the band is now sponsored by the Crocs brand of footwear and is traveling to more than two dozen camps on the East Coast where they spend the day with the campers teaching them cover songs and staging a concert with the young singers and musicians.
This year, Julius C expects to perform to almost 15,000 campers and staff. The band returns to NYC at the end of August where they will begin a residency at Rockwood Music Hall to be followed by the release of the band’s "OK, OK" album in October.

For obscure, probably yin yang related reasons, these days we don’t stumble very often upon acts that – like Weep – are inspired by the sound of stylish acts like David Bowie, Roxy Music and Air. It seems like in this musical era the scruffy sound of DIY is WAY more – pardon my French – en vogue. But Weep isn’t afraid of style – how passe`! But isn’t passe` the future, really? Weep just release their debut CD "Worn Thin", check out some streaming songs here – When I’m Wrong in particular..