Goddamnit kids, there’s just somethin’ about truly earnest music that hits a chord deep within’ yer chesty bits where the soul feels like it lives, and you just can’t fake that shit no matter how hard you try. Twee and cutesy pop were like scientifically condensed versions of cute, yeah, but they really never got away from the saccharine nature that comes with something so deliberately boiled down. It might be cute, but it’s like callin’ one of those whipped cream injected whippersnapper cupcakes at Hey Cupcake! sweet: yeah we all get it, but it’s not the kinda complicated and sticking sweetness-based revelations that, say, your mom’s apricot cake baked in her small town home’s old-ass oven will ever get ya.

All that’s a very complex way to explain somethin’ pretty damn simple, which is that Les Zombies makes music that is just real goddamn cute and entirely earnest-feelin’, and that newest track "Unravel" is without question the most authentically un-heavy and adorable American love song we’ve heard in a damn long time. It’s like a soundtrack for a kind of indie romance film set in the beige-and-green-washed suburbs with a lot of 80s clothes and cars that just doesn’t exist anymore, and which would probably feel real put-on if it was made these days. Somehow this band keeps nailing this sound and sentiment in a pitch-perfect way that makes it feel like you can just go live in that kinda smaller, simpler, cuter world for a while. That ain’t a bad thing in these angry, immediate days, in my opinion. Listen below, and let’s give the past and the idea of love a bit of time to play around in our heads again as a less public, cuter, more personal thing that’s still confusing but maybe more for the simple human parts and less for the whole mess of new problems that a social media, contemporary bae-infused narrative life has put onto shit. It’s cute music that sounds great y’all, get up on it and let it get you feelin’ some good, possibly bygone way.

The idea that "indie rock" actually defines a specific sound is one that wavers back and forth throughout the years from being somewhat reasonable to entirely ridiculous, and right now in this age of the Internet giving us umpteen different subgenres that have merged to some degree or another with that concept, we’re definitely in the "indie rock is a concept not a sound" end of the pendulum swing. However, there’ve been some times when indie rock meant somethin’ that was fairly specific, and one of those was when the term re-broke onto the mass consciousness in the early 2000s with bands like The White Stripes and The Strokes et al., who took a very pared down classic-rock-based-on-blues-guitar unpretentious sound and made it big. Local act Good Field channels the goddamn hell out of this sound, which ditches a lot of the contemporary contrivances (nice as those can sometimes be) of the indie sound and goes much for something that, now almost 14 years from The Strokes’ seminal This Is It, could almost be called "traditional" indie rock in a way that we mean to be quite positive. It’s all jangles on guitars and Reed/Dylan inherited vocalizing that goes great with jeans and flannels and which appeals to most any ear that isn’t exclusively turned off to summer-day guitar rock. The video here is pretty fun too, and of definite high production value, focusing on a robbery a la Funny Games, but with an interesting little 2015 twist where the girls get the upper hand and the guys just kinda shrug it off. This isn’t music that’s gonna blow minds, but it definitely will please ears and snag some hearts, especially if you have a soft spot for that stuff that’s gettin’ closer to being two decades old every day (Jesus Christ, that’s fucking odd). Watch belowgor some good old fashioned indie rock and roll.

Typically when we post somethin’ electronic-leanin’ up in this house, we’re hittin’ the poppier, psych-ier, beat music-ier or hip-hop-ier sides of the style. That’s simply what most of what comes outta Austin these days in the tech-end of the scene (that’s still about the music and not just the party) sounds like. However, there is of course another side, and that’s the structured stuff. We avoid the term “dance music” here because, while the track we’re about to getcha on is well that, the term has a lot of baggage these days. Even the musicians featured here might not like that reluctance to term, but hey. It is what it is to the larger audience.

What local producers VVV and Dylan C do, here heard on collab track “Ricochet Pendulum Scanner,” is just that other side- some pure-minded Electronic Structure music with a hell of a pressure beat, a crunchy 90s warehouse mood and creative chops that obviously have involved thinking out a track much deeper than just tryin’ to make somethin’ to pop a molly and sweat to. If you see a bro in a dayglo tank gettin’ down to this, we’ll be straight shitted; it’s more from the end of electronic music that brings us detalists and genre expanders like Efdemin or Gui Borratto than it is something like David Guetta or even locals Run DMT, though we aren’t trying to say there’s not a place for that Big Party music too in this particular area of music (might as well ask someone to define art; yer gonna get a lotta pissed off folks who ain’t dancin’, head bobbin’ or fuckin’, and we’d argue that ain’t what music is about).

What we do want to do is to put at least what small spotlight we at The Deli have at our disposal onto these two iconoclasts in an Austin scene whose flows generally push strong in very different directions than this, both at large and within the electronic scene itself.

Both VVV and Dylan C have been putting out steady, strong series’ of music releases lately, movin’ music to the online masses at a high clip and an even higher quality, and this collaboration is among the best, sounding like somethin’ Richard D. James and Boards of Canada might have dropped in the mid 90s if they’d fallen into a vat of green shit and fused together, button-pushin’ fingers intact. Those who immediately perked at those names have nothing to wait for, get to clickin’ Play, but also those more into the pop side of bleepy music should still find this highly palatable if you want some good thinky music, and especially if you dug Radiohead’s post-OK Computer weird shit (which, wow, is getting really old now and that’s a strange thing to reckon with).

It’s music for the dark nerds and the night people, and you should listen to just about everything they’ve each been releasing. Start with “Ricochet Pendulum Scanner” below (man, even the name sounds like an Aphex track in just the right way), and soak into The Network just like the 90s good and well meant us all to by this ungodly advanced year. It’s a damn sight more productive than runnin’ your desperate eyes over your Facebook feed one more time looking for something actually worth a shit and wondering what the fuck failed, futile and probably deserved future we’ve brought on ourselves, if nothing else. In that way, this track is kinda future music for a future we’re all refusing to let happen, but should have, and it feels real damn good to dive in and let it make you a believer in a badass new millennium again, if even for a a few minutes.

Now this is one we’ve posted before as part of a previous Artist of the Month Poll roundup, but now we’re givin’ local pychpoprock (mmmhmmm, smush them genres) act Three Bones its own damn post because they’ve got a neat lil July residency goin’ on at the Historic Scoot Inn that’s jammin’ along quite nicely. We’ve been quite into this pair (headed by Victoria de Benedicty and Dalt Jacob with Grant Johnson and Mike Stavitz as well) since they put what has been one of the year’s prime headspace occupyin’ tracks and eyeball a’pleasin’ vids out earlier this year with the strummmeriffic and oddly super satisfyin’ “Hold on to Ya” earlier this year. Goddamn psychedelic earworms y’all: in a genre that finds itself in the long-noodlin’ territory more often than not, it’s not somethin’ you really expect for a psych track to be a tight, clean piece of pop that gets right up between your brains and shakes its tail for a week or two, but damn if “Hold on to Ya” ain’t just that.

I think what really gets this track and vid movin’ is that it just feels legit as Texas barbeque; even when hammin’ it up all weird and creepylike for the camera (as Dalt does just freaky fuckin’ well), you get that unfakeable sense of authenticity that tells ya these are some good damn people just doin’ the damn thing thing in the way they damn well wanna do it, and they’re down if you’re down and cool if you ain’t. We think y’should be, and a trip out yonder to Scoot Inn will likely get you on the Three Bones wavelength quicker than a blonde dude in an all white get up can strum a guitar, which if you check the vid, is pretty fuckin’ fast.

Instrumental music is hard to nail if you’re looking for a decent audience in the contemporary age. Either you’re way too technical and/or conceptual, or you’re putting an excessive focus on being weird and experimental, and you alienate a huge number of listeners. Or, you could be Austin duo Chipper Jones, and you somehow both make music that’s both named after a hell of an Atlanta baseball player and which is also instrumental while still being fresh to death and not boring for a second. Their latest work, the Tropics | COSM EP, is not really post-rock, though it can go there in parts of songs like the end of stand-out track "Tropics," it’s not jazz or anything else so well-worn, and it’s not fully pop (that’d take way more of a standard radio structure and some vocals), but it’s somewhere between all of that in all the best ways it could be. At the very least it’s instrumental music with some fucking real energy and little for an ear to apologize for, and you should certainly give the badass "Tropics" a try if you’re a person who can get with the non-vocal music even a tad bit. It’s better than that, but damn, we know it’s hard to convert some of you vocals-needers to the ways of the instrument-only sound. Music is music, g’damnit, but we get that sometimes you just like what you like. Aforementioned all-inclusiveness aside, Chipper Jones is one we think is likely to be a hit with most anyone willin’ to take a swing, and you can below with "Tropics," or you can listen to the whole EP here.

Unless I’m entirely mistaken in my drunk memories of seeing bands in Austin when I wasn’t really plannin’ on it (you know that happens a lot in this town), I first heard Austin hip-hop group Magna Carda when I was vending used books at the now-defunct but formerly-the-shit goods market the Wonder Sale back in early 2014. I was stashed in a corner of a backyard off Cesar Chavez amongst a fuckton of real ATX folks vending real ATX-made objects right by the table where the sponsored and free Shiner was kept (of three types, though one was that not that great non-bock plain Shiner shit you see here and there). Regardless of my own band-hearin’ experiences and whether they are real or entirely dreamed up on 10+ Shiners worth of imagination, Magna Carda is definitely a crew I’ve seen live at some point, and they’re also defintely one that kills it straight dead from the hip-hop perspective. In fact, they just picked up a residency at the sadly soon-to-be-defunct Holy Mountain (Remember when Beauty Bar closing was a bad sign? Yeah, shit is worse now.). They’ve been releasin’ some damn fine hip-hop lately too, like the coolness defining "Banger Jones" that takes some diamond-sharp rapping to instrumentals that kinda sound like somethin’ you’d hear in one of those lava-and-ghost Mario levels in a way that is solid all the way from one piece of the production through to the whole rest of the track. Go see a live-produced Austin hip-hop group that’s as killer and grassroots as it gets July 9, 16, 23 and 30 at Holy Mountain, a bar that’s going the way of the buffalo on October 1, before Austin music just gives the fuck up and moves to California in retaliation.

Here’s something fairly different. It’s not indie, it’s not psych, it’s not electronic (except in the most technical sense), hip-hop or beat: it’s the compositional music of multi-instrumentalist Walter Nichols. It’s fascinating stuff, music that is both obviously deeply technically advanced and that comes at you in forms and lengths and with style that is far from typical radio-ready pop-structured songs, but which also manages to be not overindulgent, tedious or impenetrable. It pulls the fun side of pop and modern music, not shying away from less stereotypically "classial" instruments but instead including things like synths, looping machines and saxophone (and much more), but it ditches the typical "song" rulebook and also pulls from the focus on technical mastery and experimentation and the willingness to use lengthy, complex structures that composed music tends to have. It’s a best of both worlds scenario, really.

I can tell when I listen to Nichols’ pieces that there’s a lot going on here that, as someone with what’s obviously much more limited music theory knowledge than the composer, I’m not fully comprehending or being totally aware of, even while I can still point out to particular elements that seem singularly complex or impressive. Yet, as a student of music history and the relationship between the so-called "high" arts and popular art, I know that what Nichols pulls off here is not easy to do at all, this walking easily between the two worlds of technical composition and music that’s modern and fun for anyone to listen to. .

As a plain listener, playful and rich are the words that come to mind when listening to Nichols’ latest work, the succinctly titled W, which you can hear below in full. Moods are built and played with and never overdone or hammered too hard home, one track is very much a new flavor from the last and yet all work together conceptually and stylistically. It’s glimmering and beautiful at times, harsh and nicely grating at others, and in all a real work-out for the brain.

If you want to push your boundaries a bit, or are already the type to be intrigued by music that isn’t tailor-made to slide right into your preconceptions of fun, modern music but which still has the ability to find its way into that part of your brain (rules be damned), give Nichols a try with W below. It’s well worth a little time to see if it clicks, because if it does, you’ll have some quite nutritious new brainfood to get yer noggin’ snacking on.

Or maybe an android. Something machine wants to be inside you with BOAN’s new record, that is all hard beats that softly fall on the sensibilities, taking the hard tech of the future and giving it emotional action. It’s electronic music with that taint-gripping immediacy of stripped-down punk and, as the Bandcamp description of the record makes note, it was made entirely "using all hardware electronics to sequence and arrange infectious live dance music." That these guys have a specific vision and are capable of wreaking it upon the Texas electronic scene with such efficient skill is not much of a surprise, considering that creators Mariana Saldaña (vocals) and José Cota (beats) have been driving forces in big projects in the state for a while (SSLEEPERHOLD for José, //TENSE// for Mariana, both in Medio Mutante). The fact that these songs are heavily in Spanish is just another point where BOAN sticks out from the rest of the Texas electronic noise, where there’s just so much good going on that it’s hard to always keep up with it all. BOAN is one that is absolutely worth keeping up with, if any are, however, and this latest product is some shit that does the "future is now, and it’s kinda messy" thing just spot on. An album that’s perfect to watch Dark Star to, or maybe to wander around an abandoned and rusting computer factory from the 80s thinking about how the world all went so prettily wrong.

If you weren’t familiar with Beth Israel’s music before, hearing new track “Love” all on its own might easily see you placing this band within the realm of some math-rockier 80s avant-garde synth-using stuff, but it just as easily feels like something that entirely (and almost gleefully) confuses genre labeling. The whole track is so washed out it actually does sound like you’re hearing it through tin, and the 80s comes in hard with the breakdown riff that starts the song and is dropped throughout it, chopping up the steady synthpop beat and the shoegaze drone that is laid over the track. It’s fucking fun shit, and it keeps up the tongue-in-cheek, “not doing it for the praise” attitude that the iconoclastic and semi-secretive Beth Israel has cultivated over the past few years.

“Love” is cut right out of Beth Israel’s recent The Loaner EP (which you can here in its weird-ass entirety here), and it’s one of like three parts of that 15~ minute record that could actually be called a traditional song. The rest is some strange, creative business, so if you’re into the weird factor of “Love” (or just weird abstract shit in general) you’ll find much to get into in The Loaner as well, because “Love” is probably the least weird part of the whole strange shebang (It literally starts with a minute+ of British imperial orchestra music, with no explanation. Our vote is that is pretty awesome, even if it doesn’t make for easy jamming.).

“Love” is below, The Loaner is here, and Beth Israel is all up in your brain with their whacked out post-punk.

One of the bright young stars of Austin hip-hop has just recently followed up a heavy quality first track (which we liked a lot) with a second, dropping “Only Rapper Alive” a couple weeks ago. Like a pink-hazed dream of a song, “Only Rapper Alive” features some glistening warm production from Eric Dingus, one of the co-owners of Dream Sequence Records and a Texan musician whose tracks regularly pull down 40k+ listens on SoundCloud. Now, metrics don’t make a track good automatically, but that’s tremendously more than most popular groups in Austin ever get. Hell, quick math says the average number of listens on Dingus’ last 10 posts on SoundCloud is exactly 57,212.3, a number that is higher itself than most decently well-known Austin acts get across their entire online catalog.

For a rapper with two tracks out, Plato III is also pulling down both big numbers and big attention himself. This big response from the net is interesting considering Plato’s firm and well-thought-out stance as something different than and a bit critical of most rappers (what a lot of his two existing tracks are about), but really it’s not surprising at all considering his obvious talent for wordplay and musicianship.

A jazzier-affair than career-opener “Natalie Portman,” “Only Rapper Alive” is somewhat of a stream of consciousness style rap, with Plato talking through his own and some other possible perspectives on life and everything from money to fame to strugglin’ to survive to death itself and the afterlife. There’s a lot of info to process in this one, but the gist is that Plato is a deep thinker who sees through the facade of the entertainment industry and the self-absorbed modern life, but who is also not just hating on those things and instead offering a balanced and mature perspective that’s all wrapped up in really pretty, catchy music. And we’re damn into that.

Get on our cultural plane and watch for new Plato III with us at his Facebook here, and put some Austin talent in your ears below.

Later this week we’ve got a piece droppin’ on our latest Artist Poll tiers Slooom (that’s the "people who tied" kind of tiers btw, not the stacked thingies), talkin’ about their drip-beat beautiful new video "Honey," but as a bit of a prelude to that, here’s a new track by CAPYAC, the other big project from (the producing half of Slooom) Delwin Steven Campbell along with Eric Peana. This track is called "How I Feel" and it takes that classic and classically reworked "Feeling Good" hook and turns it into silky fun sexfunk glory. That’s future sexfunk glory, if you want to get specific about it, and "How I Feel" is an immediate hip-mover with its quick-picked melody and bright organ backbone folding right into a big, hip-hopped, chopped-up song that you do wanna get down to. We’ve already known that CAPYAC has that true smooth funkdisco thing, like they vampired it right outta the 1977 Bee Gees, and CAPYAC obviously also has their modern elements of beat construction and electronic instrument-use right on point too. However, with "How I Feel" it’s just been real good and confirmed- we now also know that, undoubtedly, CAPYAC is making the sexiest, smoothest music in Austin at this moment. Thank you CAPYAC for being so clear in your claiming of the throne. It’s nice to have questions settled so easily.

“We can’t wait to meet you,” says the ¿Que Pasa? description of one of Austin’s most anti-pretentious, most-likable rock music bands. That’s not rock referring to the guitar-inflected whatever that mostly associates itself with that agin’ word these days; no ¿Que Pasa? is of the punk (with some post-punk notes and venturing into psych at times) flavored school of this rock thing, and they just put out a pretty damn good modern punk album this last December that is now gettin’ the music video treatment on a couple tracks.

That sentiment of welcome found upon yon FB page is an extension of the band’s general attitude, which presents a kind-of “friendly punks” attitude that, if you’ve ever known any punks that weren’t just into the life for the infamy, is actually dead representative of a certain side of the genre. “Infeliz” is the latest track off album BIG MISTAKE to get visuals, and it shows off a band that you just really wanna go get some P. Terry’s with after and hang out drinkin’ in a park or some shit. I mean, the other track with a vid, “My Family,” literally lists singer Liz Burrito’s friends, including all members of the bands and a few others, and involves cake, board games, beer, bathtub candles and the lyrics “My friends, they are my family.”

Yet, the punk is strong with this one, and the songs are fun and often heavy and harsh, and entirely sincere. Passion + friendliness used to be the unofficial/official Austin creative way, and in the modern muddle that is an Austin where Cheer Ups has to fight to preserve a beautiful natural limestone wall being torn down for no other reason than money, we’re fully into bands that keep alive the spirit that made Austin a destination in the first place and preserve something very Austin. ¿Que Pasa? is what Austin’s about in its soul, and you should all go and be their friends now. Seems like they’d be pretty into it, if yer a non-dick and all. Music video below, full album to be found at their Bandcamp here.