Austin

Deli Artist of the Month Continental Drift’s Layered New EP

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Here’s one from August Artist of the Month Continental Drift, who were helped to their win by this excellent new record. The self-titled, two-track EP from Continental Drift here feels like it has more heart and soul than most albums being released these days. Performed by a ten-piece band, the music here centers on Afro beats while flawlessly weaving in funk, soul, and psychedelic grooves to the mix as well. Whether you enjoy all of those genres or none of them, this EP is bound to reel you in and keep you hooked for its short fifteen-minute duration.

The first track, "Afropsychic," starts out with only a couple instruments pitching in, and as the song progresses the rest of the band joins in one by one, almost like a relay race for music. As each band member joins in, the song grows in its drama and intensity, making it feel as though a narrative is being carried, and not just some cool beats. What’s great about it is that it all feels spontaneous, and not just with "Afropsychic" – the quality spontaneity runs through "Conductive" (the second track) as well. Both songs sound like ten people with amazing chemistry walked into the studio and just jammed for twenty minutes. It’s also worth mentioning that even though the EP has only two songs on it, each of those songs carry so much variety that one could mistake this for a four or five track EP.

Give the EP a listen or download for free below, or mark your schedules for the second Sunday of every month and head over to Stay Gold in Austin for their live residency.

Continental Drift EP: Listen/download here!

Nicholas Gomez

@feedbackjunkies

Austin

Wonderbitch Has a Killer Name, and an Excellent New EP

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Austin quartet Wonderbitch has been getting crowds and critics pumped about their brand of music since SXSW, which is not surprising since the indie rock outfit’s music is the equivalent of a swanky post-punk 3-piece suit fitted to perfection then adorned with psychedelic cufflinks and new wave attitude. In fact, they were the Deli’s Artist of the Month for July for their impressive EP, ‘WBlovesyou”- six tracks of snarky pop rock released earlier in the year in the vain of bands such as The Killers and Neon Trees.

Wonderbitch tends to build tracks around a philosophy that energetic upbeat music can be crafted just as artistically and meticulously as their drearier post-prog and alt-rock contemporaries. Songs on the EP range from the Genesis version 2.0 sounding ‘Little Tiger’, to songs like ‘Josanna ‘, which summons up nostalgia of The Clash. The band plays with an infectious energy that jolts the senses, and this factor keeps the music rolling along easily from song to song. The talent the group possesses is obvious, from the groove inducing rhythm section of Evan Wade and Corey Fitzgerald Spears to the new wave crooning of vocalist Alex Chod and the licks of guitarist Colton Hardin — this is a band on the rise. 

You can checkout Wonderbitch’s new EP below as well as the first music video from said EP, and you can catch the boys performing at Cheer Up Charlie’s in Austin on Aug. 28 and at Spider House on Sept. 16, and check back with The Deli for the latest news on the group.

Tavon Perkins

@tavonperkins

 

 

Austin

Wildfires’ Aguas Frescas (Part I) EP is Dreamy Deep Summer Music

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‘Aguas Frescas (Part I)’ is the latest superb EP from Austin indie alt-rock band, Wildfires, The Deli’s March 2015 Band of the Month (check our EP preview from a while back right here). This newest offering takes listeners on a surreal journey of textured soundscapes and ethereal vocals summoning up memories of shoegazing bands of yesteryears such as Sonic Youth or My Bloody Valentine. The understated vocal delivery and dreamy guitar effects present on the tracks takes audiences to familiar psychedelic terrain along with melodies that are charming, yet laconic, Wildfires draw you into their breezy hippie-fueled wall of sound slowly and effortlessly leave the indelible mark of a band acutely aware of what they are. Imagine floating down the river into the fading sunset with a cold beer in one hand and one of those wacky tobacco cigarettes in the other, and you’ll get the feel for the serene and dreamy music the group creates. Check out Wildfires’ EP, ‘Aguas Frescas (Part I), below and come back for updates on upcoming music from the band.

Tavon Perkins

@tavonperkins

Austin

I Am the Albatross’ Playlist Worthy Album “Lonsesome Son”

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Sometimes menacing, at other instances oddly profound, the always loud outlaw rock and rollers, I Am the Albatross’, new album ‘Lonesome Son’ is nasty guitar-lick laden rock played with focused reckless abandon. This latest offering basically grabs you by the throat then pours a welcome shot of bold Americana rock down it. The Austin quartet’s music is essentially Nick Caves and The Bad Seeds bulked up on PED’s with added injections of punk and psychedelic growth hormone for good measure. If Leonard Cohen was a hipster millennial, this would be the soundtrack he played during an epic cross-country getaway to the hinterland of Canada after a bank robbery. Any album that leaves you wanting more is always a winner in my book which is the case with this playlist worthy album.

You can catch I Am the Albatross performing their brand of feral folk rock at the Javelina Bar in Austin on Aug. 20 — bad ass leather duster coats welcomed but not mandatory.

Tavon Perkins

@tavonperkins

Austin

Rain Collectors’ “Unless” is Wistful and Lovely

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In new track “Unless” by Rain Collectors, a simple guitar melody leads us across a bright and calm landscape. The cello, however, soon glides in beneath and we sink into a more wistful state. Vocals by duo singer/songwriter Santiago Dietche and vocalist Blair Robbins are sensual, yearning. A keyboard trails, dreamlike among the cymbals and Gary Calhoun James’ walking bass; like wandering through the memory of a past relationship, or coming aware that a present one is fading, there is a sense of comfortable resignation. With one earphone in my right ear, and the other shared with you, in your left, we walk together through a night that will not last, with “Unless” soundtracking our melancholy stroll. Give “Unless” a listen below, especially if you’re nursing a slightly nostalgic mood like I was this weekend or, if you’re in a more upbeat place, head to their Bandcamp, where I was also pleased to hear the more upbeat new track by them, “Lock The Door” released on Sunday.

A. LaFontaine

Austin

Sweet Spirit Team Up with Spoon’s Britt Daniel on Indie Rockin’ New EP

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When the fascinating sounds from a band’s new music instantly put a smile on your face and goose bumps on your arms, that’s something very special! It’s too early to tell if its love or lust, but whatever Sweet Spirit and Spoon-member Britt Daniel made me feel with their new collaborative EP (called “Sweet Spirit and Britt Daniel”), I leave wanting more. The EP is one Spoon cover, the classic “Paper Tiger,” and one new soul-grabber with Sweet Spirit taking the lead in “Have Mercy,” both of which are solid pieces of indie rock. Sweet Spirit, a quite quirky Austin crew is really making some heads turn with their fine ability to put on a great show, and their violently catchy tunes. With another 4 song EP release around 6 months ago and vinyl release show happening at Blackheart August 21st; Sweet Spirit has a very sweeeeeet looking future ahead of them, and we all know Britt Daniel is just gonna keep doing his killer thing as always. Check out the ever so fun EP below, and get you some of that indie rock sound to make you want to move your feet a bit!

Taylor Mangiameli

Austin

Tone Royal Hits the Scene and He’s Already “Rushing Greatness”

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If you haven’t heard of Tone Royal yet, now would be a good time to catch up with the artist, as he’s just released his debut album and like the title says, he very much is Rushing Greatness. With a few rap contests and live shows under his belt, Tone Royal has started to take Austin by storm, as have the local Austinites featured on the album like Phillip Wolf and others. As if that wasn’t enough, he’s also studying at UT to become a sports journalist, and acting as co-host on Korey Coleman’s entertainment website doubletoasted.com where he’s better known by his real name, Ray Villarreal. The album, Rushing Greatness, provides a wide variety of styles that at its worst sound like Mac Miller, and at its best, George Watsky. But unlike some of Mac Miller’s work, most (perhaps not all) of Tone Royal’s lyrics are quite meaningful, especially on the songs that are more spoken word than actual rap, like “Want You Back” and the end of “Clark Kent.” If nothing else, Tone Royal’s album proves that great rappers are still out there putting their stuff up online for free, in the hopes that their name will get bigger, so be part of the process and listen below.

by Nicholas Augusto Gomez Fullerton

@feedbackjunkies

Austin

Opposite Day’s Bouncy, Robot-Filled “AI IOU” Music Video

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This one’s just plain fun y’all. Opposite Day is a staple of the Austin scene that plays some of the most technical and pure fun music in Austin, a combo you don’t often get. This vid is their new track “AI IOU,” and it’s a series of shots that cut between the band doing their hard-playing, wild-beat thing and then a buncha robot shots that feel very MST3K. That’s a pretty good touchstone in terms of era as well, as this track feels quite outta the 90s though all beefed up with some heavier, mathrockier shit, and the idea of a wilder, more indie Barenaked Ladies that plays faster and punkier isn’t far off. It’s fun too to get great tracks that aren’t really about love or social issues or something pretty, but instead just about a cool ass concept that the musicians like; in this case a mufucking robot made from parts of other robots! Check the lyrics: "I am rememebering what happened to the parts that make me/I am a conscious agent assembled from other machines." That’s the good scifi shit. Tune your robot ears and focus your android eyes on this thing below, and let the AI tell you all about its weird ol’ self!

Austin

Vicky Flair the Voodoo Child (vftvc) Hides Nothing on the Raw “sounds of insomnia”

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It doesn’t take long for shit to start getting weird when you’re not on the typical “wake up in the morning, sleep through the night” schedule, especially if you start pushing the time you do sleep further into the daylight hours. And the longer you’re on the vampire grind, and the longer you actually don’t sleep at all, the more things go from just a bit off to a point where you feel almost completely unlike all the people you see in the world who sleep normally. Feeling unreal and like other people and their regularly scheduled lives are completely alien, living in some other universe, becomes the normal.

This is the sentiment that provides the framework for local rapper vftvc’s (Vicky Flair the Voodoo Child) new album sounds of insomnia, which is a deeply candid attempt to explain and share the feeling of being an insomniac, and a drug-using, cynical, conflicted one at that. It’s rough in parts and it’s not hard to see that it’s spawned from a young mind dealing with a lot of issues (and not always in a healthy way), but it is striking for what it does right.

For one, it gets the feeling of insomnia and feeling distant from the world absolutely perfect. The tracks, all produced skillfully by beatmaker forest green, are designed to induce feelings similar to those that come with insomnia; they often drag along, there’s a lot of dreamstate sounds like bells and meandering horns, and the delivery is often very deadpan and low-energy (in a good way that drives the insomnia feeling home) but sometimes goes manic or gets heavily distorted in a psychedelic way (a bit Odd Future-esque).

The lyrics do much the same, often directly talking about the weird unliving state of being an insomniac, such as in the intro for “demons,” which is delivered in a way that makes it sound like an entry in an audio journal by someone losing their mind. In it Vicky delivers, in his standard listless voice and over a barking dog that really places it in a physical place (you can almost see him sitting in a dark room with the light of the day that’s already come again leaking through the blinds) the following, which we’re copying in its entirety because it gives an excellent summation of the feelings at play in this album:

“It’s around the end of July, and sleep has become a total stranger. I try to stay in the good frame of mind throughout this time, amidst all the things falling apart around me. But it seems in those twilight hours, those voices those [something, hard to hear], their influence in my head seems to get stronger and stronger, and I feel it puling me to the dark place. I try to rise above it, but. I don’t know how much longer I can hold on.”

The levels of introspection and honesty here are strong, and impressive for a young creator. Whether or not you empathize with the rapper or support how vftvc deals with and sees life, which is admittedly a dark perspective most of the time, that he’s giving his perspective so fully makes the album rich. He’s not hiding much of anything here, though while he’s revealing the things that are making him depressed or conflicted, he’s also reveling in it a bit, and he doesn’t hide that either. It’s all on the table- the way he both loves and needs drugs and also sees the bad shit they’re doing to him, the way he isn’t sure if he likes himself or not or you or not but is also set in his ways and has developed a sort-of comfort with them, or at least he wants you to see it that way (something he also doesn’t hide).

The album shies away from nothing and will very likely make you uncomfortable for doing so in at least a few places, and some may not connect with it at all either for its roughness or its perspective, but because of that rawness and revelation, it’s also a striking piece of art from a young thinker worth watching. The whole album is well worth a listen, so get doing so below and get ready to feel a little…off.

Austin

billy Makes Weird Electropop, Has a Cat and That’s About All We Know

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Sometimes you come across a bit of music that’s so in its own world and by an artist with so little information available online, that it seems almost more like outsider art than a part of the general scene- even the really obscure parts of the scene. That’s a dead-on description of billy, an (apparently) Austin-based solo artist that does some washed-out, way weird psychedelic electropop and who released his best yet piece this month with the structurally surprising and oddly charming track “mindz.” We couldn’t even get a legit picture of this elusive artist who doesn’t seem to have a Facebook page (at least that we can find); we had to take a screenshot of his Instagram and crop it. That ain’t normal these days y’all, but it kinda does add to this kid’s charm in this age of oversharing.

The track itself is equally enigmatic- it starts heavily melancholy in both tone and concept, a piece of slow electronic pop with equally balanced elements all plodding within its simple drum machine beat. Butt then at 1:07, when the chorus pops in, a very Air-esque high-toned, bright and pretty hook comes through hard and just massively changes up the feel of the whole song. It takes it from weird and cute but potentially something that might get overlooked after a few listens to a track that’s just arrestingly unique and which can even get the spine tingling a bit with its lazer-clear tones.

The lyrics continue the trend of ambiguity, seeming to be a reflection on perception and the way it interacts with relationships (“In our minds/We won’t go/In my mind/You want them”), but being deliberately obtuse about it in a way that pairs happily with the way the track’s sound is hard to pin down. All of it makes you wonder who billy is, what they’re all about and what else they can do, and that to us is the sign of a very interesting emerging artist indeed. Try billy’s stuff out yourself below, and if any of y’all have more info on this musician (at the least so we can let them know about the post), feel free to share in the comments. We’d like to know more about this one.

Austin

Sweat Lodge’s Heavy-Ass “Bed of Ashes” Video, Filmed in One of Austin’s Most Drunk Bars

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Sometimes all a straight killer music video needs is a good fuckin’ setting, a cool ass scene of folks into the shit in front of them, and a few dicks, fart clouds, battle axes, demon tongues and horns ’n skeletons drawn all over the frames. That, at least, is the winning combo for the new vid by long-hair havers and dive-bar rockers Sweat Lodge, who (in conjunction with Kash Powers) used to make the visual accompaniment to the deeply early metal of track “Bed of Ashes.” Speaking of the young days of the big-chord, reverbed-up, psych-on-edge version of metal, this video reads like the music-and-quick-cuts intro to a movie about metalhead kids in those simple, patched denim vest loving days, being slammed full of fuck-off attitude, booze and weed and characters aplenty partaking in both of ‘em and what’s obviously a show that everyone is pretty fuckin into, all with hair a’bangin’ in the dingy, slightly-vomit scented air of one of Austin’s least 6th Street bars, The Grand on Airport Boulevard. All stories I know of and have been part of that take place at The Grand are on the “what even is sobriety” end of the debauched scale, and from the looks of things, Sweat Lodge and their crew of merry friends are there these days makin’ damn sure the place doesn’t go and do somethin’ dumb like getting more respectful or whatever.

Looked at as a peak into a very different kind of scene than that which you’ll typically find at the more mainstream venues in town, this video ain’t just a hell of a track to throw one back to and get raucous with, it could also be taken as an invitation to a scene in Austin that doesn’t give a fuck about flannels or manscaping, if of course you can find it and you ain’t an asshat. The Deli wants more of this, and Austin’s soul kinda needs it. Please keep it up Sweat Lodge, and the rest of y’all turkeys need to switch out some of those quiet ass records you got for somethin’ louder ASAP, ya hear? This is a hell of a good place to start.

Austin

We’ll Go Machete’s FIrst Album in a Long Time is a Summer Screamer

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MMMmmmmmmmyayah, some heavy shit for ya up in this hot ass week. We here at The Deli dig showin’ off some of the genres that aren’t always as much in the limelight in Austin as others, and so we’re gotdamn pickled to be able to throw you some good ole damn ole hard rocking music today, compliments of Big Chords and Shoutyscreams act We’ll Go Machete. These guys released their first album in a while, the (we assume) jokingly titled Smile Club, on July 7, and anyone who was ever into post-hardcore shit like Fugazi, At the Drive-In etc. will eat this shit up they was Jaws from James Bond and metal was a viable foodgroup. There’s somethin’ artsier and weirder in here as well, with some really strange structures and experimentation with making guitars churn out some fucked up noises, and that the band name checks both Melvins and Slint in the info about this album says a lot about what you can expect. If you gots some pent up aggression and frustration goin’ on this summer (who are we kidding, it’s 2015, that’s everybody) and wanna churn and burn along with some fucking music from the heavy side of the city, you can’t do better than Smile Club.