It’s been a while since a song happily shocked me with a good screaming section, but local band Breathtaker just did it. This group, of which I had been previously ignorant, submitted their music to us this week, and I put on their newest album Revelations without knowing what to expect. The submission was listed as Indie, the album art suggested maybe something a little avant-garde; only the name seemed a bit more dramatic than most indie groups, but even that, I thought, I could see from some indie groups.

Partway through opener track “Kingsbury,” when I was thinking Breathtaker might be going for a kind-of dreary, melodic indie with a post-rock bent kinda thing (which I was digging, by the way), a wild dissonant note hit and the screaming began . It was actually a little hair-raising in a literal way, after me not expecting it. And that’s because it was good screaming, earned and welcome and well-done, exceptionally balanced against the instrumentation and used as one ingredient in the wider paradigm of a well-structured piece of music. I liked it, and the rest of the 11 track album was thought out with equal attention and care if not quite as surprising as that initial screaming shock.

I wouldn’t dream to genre a band differently than they do themselves, but indie here more represents the “independent musicians” definition than it does a sound for Breathtaker, at least in relation to what “indie” bands in Austin typically sound like. If, however, I were to try and describe Breathtaker to one of my high school friends from Amarillo who were into the surprisingly extensive screaming music scene there in the mid 2000s, I’d say that they’re a band that’s on the artsier side of what some people call hardcore, and which some just call emo. That last term is culturally deficient to describe these guys – it is far too broad and I really doubt they use it to refer to themselves at any point – but it does the trick in 2015 to get you in the right mind of what to expect from Breathtaker. If you are or ever were the kind of person who thought that screaming rock music had something awesome to offer (like we do), Breathtaker is a new entry in that particular segment of Music with Screaming. That people keep making interesting things happen with music like this proves that it’s a segment that is a powerful space where quality experimentation can occur, and out of which some damn good tracks, like "Kingsbury," can come. Get listening below.

As another run of The Deli Austin’s Artist of the Month poll wraps up, we’re lookin’ at the only artist in the competition that we haven’t yet featured on The Deli- the versatile producer Dr Bobby Banner MPC. For those who aren’t electronic music producers (which, in Austin, is fewer people than you’d think), the MPC in Dr Bobby’s name refers to the Akai Music Production Center, a series of powerful and powerfully badass beat-making machines. Presumably, Dr Bobby Banner MPC makes the slick, dynamic hip-hop tracks he’s known for on such machines, and if you go from the artist’s social media pages, Dr Bobby might just actually be an MPC. Or at least, that might be his character, but who knows? In the days of hologram Japanese superstars and with music production tech where it’s at these days, the idea of a beat machine that makes its own music isn’t all that far fetched.

Regardless of who, or what, is making Dr Bobby Banner’s music, the recent output from this man/machine has been downright stellar. Particularly, Dr Bobby’s new album Musicology, released at the end of March, is a chance to hear one of Austin’s brightest beatmakers paired up with an absolute army of quality rappers. Lots of times we see purely instrumental albums come out of the beatmaking scene in Austin, so (as much as we dig those instrumental joints) it’s a welcome change-up to get a 12 tracker packed full of both beat and rhyme. That nod toward the traditional hip-hop song structure is about the only place this album is predictable though, as Musicology has Banner et al. letting their creativity and personal spins on hip-hop running free. For an example of the acrobatic musical forces at work here, take track "David Ruffin" below, whose herky-jerky sample-based beat serves as a playground for spitters Scuare and No1Important to let their words jump up and around and play all over. The rest of the album is equally good, and all available what for your listening pleasure over here. If this shit gets ya noddin’ like it does us, give the rest a listen, and vote to the right to make Dr Bobby Banner MPC our first human/machine hybrid Artist of the Month.

In the days just leadin’ up to South By this year, Alex Napping, that band with a sound as cute as its name, gave the internet a new single called "Trembles Part I," which is already making a bit of a stir. In the vein of last year’s This Is Not a Bedroom, which we suggested you get into back in October, "Trembles Part I" is another jubilant nod to the glory days of jangly, sunshine-set 90s indiepop. It starts all Pavement-esque guitar and crashing cymbals, and then bounces into something akin to a much less difficult Deerhoofish (that word right there, that was fun to type) experimental, bright and exciting guitar pop sound. This is just a very well balanced song, from band namesake Alex Cohen’s lovely light, pretention-less voice to the interest-grabbing tempo changes to the on-spot instrumentation, and it shows just how true it is that Alex Napping is one of Austin’s top indiepop bands to watch in 2015. Get on into it.

Rough and tumble, that’s what Rugaroux is. And it’s a style and sound in short supply these days in this town; we’re all about the pretty, but what about the gritty? That’s why we’re liking the first material from Rugaroux, a new Austin punk band in the classic vein of fierce and ferocious guitars over a relentless, fist-shake-ready beat. Rugaroux is, by the way, a term that refers to a mythical and revered wolf/human hybrid beast from ex-pat French cultures as found in French Canada and Louisiana, the latter of which it is said to stalk through, roaming the swamps and fields. That Rugaroux the band has a Louisiana connection then makes complete sense, and that their two tracks “Deadly Dance” and “No Desire” come at you all vicious and biting is also fully fitting for their feral name. In a thoroughly punk way, they’re almost wholesome, by which we mean they do a punk’s heart good, hitting all the right, nostalgic feels but putting their own, new twist on the style. In other words, just what you want to hear from a contemporary punk band. Let’s hope this wolf-creature gets howling on a few more new tracks soon, and in the meantime, listen to their first go at recording below.

If you were looking for the mysterious proverbial “fire” that supposedly resides in so many hip-hop mixtapes, you might think the shit is just myth. Most mixtapes are…well, they wouldn’t help much on a cold day, let’s say that. Not so with local LNS Crew’s new mixtape, which packs enough heat to stop a decent sized blizzard. LNS Mixtape Vol. 2 is the goods from three of Austin’s (okay, Denver now, in the case of Cory Kendrix) hip-hop veterans, a series of 21 tracks which feature a rotating cast of Kendrix, Kydd Jones and Tank Washington showing off their undeniable skills at producing and rapping. It’s just April, but this release is assuredly going to sit near if not at the top of the list of ATX hip-hop releases from 2015 when December rolls into January, and that’s why we’ve nominated LNS Crew for our Artist of the Month poll. Music below, and get yer votin’ finger a good workout to the right y’all.

Pyschpop outfit TØMA has just gone and done nice by us local-music obsessed folks by releasing their new EP in its entirety online at their Bandcamp prior to the full album release, which is a’goin’ down at Holy Mountain on March 27. It’s a mix of sounds modern and nostalgic, a bit Of Montreal and a bit of The Zombies, and it all combines into straight-up, good indie rock earworm fun. For those of you fully into the psych thing, you’ll get yer fix here, but this EP also owes a good deal to the 2000s indie scene, like track "Live Forever" that invokes nice memories of when The Strokes were the biggest thing that’d happened in a damn while or "Heartstrings" that has some very Vampire Weekend guitar goin’ on. It’s solid, superbly enjoyable indie music from the Austin scene, and you can get the whole thing bangin’ around in your brain below.

Austin’s premier radio station KUTX (98.9 on the digital dial) recently announced the lineup for somethin’ pretty damn great, and pretty damn Austin, in the form of the Live Vibe Collective presented KUTX Live free all ages concert series. Completely unsurprisingly, this event that happens at local meat n’ booze establishment Uncle Billy’s is particularly well-curated. Frequent visitors to The Deli might notice Hard Proof and Keeper on that list, our own 2014 #36 and #3 finishers, respectively, in The Deli’s Best of 2014 for this city.

Another name you should most certainly get familiar with from KUTX’s event before you head out to yet more free music (goddamn we are so spoiled guys) is the act ushering in the whole shebang with the first series in the concert. That’d be deep electronic pop act The Digital Wild, who are opening the series on April 5.

To prep ya for these exciting events here’s a bit from the most recent output from The Digital Wild, a group that fits as well into the indie camp as it does the beat-based in the Austin scene. The track is called “Around,” and anyone who ever dug Portishead’s early shit will find something immediately attractive in the slowed down, souled up sound here. The song is without a doubt a sultry pop hip-hop track, a quality that owes much to lead singer Chantell Moody’s alluring elfin voice that has a slight, engaging tinge of someplace cold in Europe to it. But, there’s also an element of cabaret lounge smokiness to “Around,” something especially heard in the slinking, wailing horns whose wavering, off-kilter style has a kinda “Life in Glass Houses” by Radiohead feel going on. That kind of genre blending and bending is The Digital Wild’s wheelhouse, something they do not just well, but seamlessly.

“Around” is just the latest addition to the small but growing digital pile of terrific tracks The Digital Wild has been putting out for about a year now, and it bodes nothing but well for the upcoming concert series. Start whetting that musical appetite now with “Around,” and check out one or five of the KUTX Live events happening soon.

The term “Poser Pop” shows up sometimes in the words Austin’s future-leaning Your Plastic Toys have written about themselves. Check their online shit, and you’ll see those two words more than once, those two descriptors that aren’t really a genre as such, but more a stance by Your Plastic Toys on their own place in music. In our estimation, the idea is that Your Plastic Tree poses at pop, refusing to make the standard plays while still fully playing a pop game. They are as art-aware as they are pop-aware as they are experimentally on point, and their music is at once a serious approach to pop music making and a bit of a mockery of the pop that’s already out there (in the fine tradition of acts like Talking Heads, The Fugs, or the very contemporary PC Music label out of the UK). A band that views the pop rulebook through half-broke virtual reality goggles.

In that same vein, you’ll also see a lot of abstractions and hyper-modern shit on Your Plastic Toys’ various web profiles, like glitchy saturated pixel-heavy images created by the band itself, short thoughts and quotes decoupled from their source and presented as something to be considered on their own, and not a single clear photo of the band to be found. This digital obfuscation of the band, its image, its motives, its views, evokes a highly modern feeling of existing in a never ending swirl of bit-noise and net fuzz, and it’s exactly what Your Plastic Toys’ sound is like.

On the just-released album OOO, shoegaze-gone-modern swells and currents of sound layer over tight digital beats and the vocals are threaded in and out heavily tweaked and disaffected, sometimes even disdainfully so (to great effect, it must be made clear). Your Plastic Toys comes through like a band seen and heard through a diabolical storm of TV snow on a channel that’s shakily fading in and out of a 1990s tube TV in a busted up apartment with a courtyard pool in the summer. It’s music that rides on that bright burning edge of culture just curling out from the future and into the present, and that throws back a tech-addled vision of what it sees to those still lingering in the cultural past. Take a listen to one of Austin’s most forward-thinking bands below, and inject their entire new album here.

Ominous guitar and bass start off the newest track from Redeye, an Austin act that straddles the line between indie pop with a folk bent and full on alt-country, but "Sleepwalk" quickly turns hopeful, if also a bit stark. It’s a track about hope, in fact, and it wonders whether someone will be there for the singer in rough times they seem sure are coming. Redeye caps the lovely and heart-tweaking track with the poignant image of this hoped-for ally being "A fragile light I’ll picture always/A fire burning in the snow," and this attention to scenery and mood are central to the artist’s sound.

Going from this track and a few other clips released, like this one that features track "Dryland," the upcoming third album "The Memory Layers" by Redeye (set to be released in April) looks like it will fit ideally into the Texas alt-country/folk canon. It hits that key requirement of also fitting so well into the sweeping, heat-affected spirit of Texas itself, and it’s not hard to imagine the swelling fiddles and Redeye’s twanging, yet not exactly country voice accompanying a long road trip across this state, even moreso for the vivid imagery conjured in each song. This album should be quite good, not only for Redeye himself’s work, but also for the impressive list of artists who have also had a hand in it, including folks who have been members of or worked with groups in the past like the Polyphonic Spree, Midlake, Black Angels, Dana Falconberry, and Baptist Generals. That kind of quality roster attached to the unquestionable talent of Redeye will have a hard time creating anything but a good record, and if you’d like to be one of the first to get it in your ears, listen to "Sleepless" below and get to Redeye’s show at The Mohawk with Bee Caves on April 18 for good, Texan music.

The enigmatic and energetic one-man composer Roger Sellers had a big SXSW with The Deli, with not only a cover article in our South By print issue, but also headlining our showcase at the Austin Convention Center. Somehow between doing all of that and his other South By Southwesterly duties, Sellers found the time to chat with The Deli’s own Brian Chidester about his career and his approach to music. Check out what Mr. Sellers had to say below, along with a few of his best recent tracks.

Brian Chidester: You were working in a roots direction not long ago. What brought about the new direction and interest in things like Minimalism, electro and "Pet Sounds"?

Roger Sellers: Minimalism is something that I’ve always been inspired by and practiced in my recordings through the years, but it definitely became more prevalent in Primitives. For my last 3 studio records, I would generally start from scratch to record and write simultaneously. Primitives was a much different approach. Most of the songs on the record had already been written and performed for about 5 years. Primitives was a way for me to release the songs publicly on hard media, so that people could enjoy them in their homes or cars, not just at a show or on youtube. While it does have many aspects of electro involved, most of what you hear was recorded acoustically.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE REST OF THE INTERVIEW WITH ROGER SELLERS

South By is dead, long live South By. Or maybe not, what with the trend this South By being a smaller, more compressed (but still quite corporate) version of itself, with less free shit, fewer unofficial parties and a lot more roadblocks downtown (that last is probably a good thing). Regardless, SX is over, we can all return to being regular levels of alcoholic-ness and taco consumption and maybe actually sleep a little and walk a little less. Speaking of, is it possible to get more and less healthy at the same time? Because all those miles walked have to count as some sort-of workout, but mixed with ounces drunk and pounds of tacos consumed…not so sure.

Now that the SouthBeast is good ‘n slain, it also means the online portion of The Deli is back in full swing. We’ve been goin’ hard as nails on the street at South By Southwest this year, and if you were there, you probably saw somewhere between one and five billion of our print issues, and maybe even our exhibits of synthesizers and stompboxes at the Convention Center, or our showcase with magazine cover-gracer and electronic wizard Roger Sellers. If you did pick up a magazine, or came by one of our events, The Deli thanks you and your wonderful, sexy, good-taste-having self very muchly.

To usher in the post-SXSW year (we might as well just call the day after SX the New Year on the Austin Calendar system), we’ve got somethin’ quite good for your ears that’s also appropriate to what we saw this year at SX. Quite happily for us at The Deli Austin, SXSW 2015 saw what this writer believes was the most hip-hop of the highest quality that the festival has ever seen. This has been a long time coming, and whatever made it happen (people finally realizing there’s an audience for it here? less indie acts shoved into the fest by a smaller corporate presence?), we’re goddamn glad that this city is finally coming around in at least some ways to hip-hop. With that in mind, we present Malik, a young homegrown hip-hopper that’s just the newest and freshest entry into the already excellent and underrated Austin hip-hop canon.

Malik’s dropped three tracks in the last month on Soundcloud, and listening across the three you can get a taste for what this kid can do and what he’s got to offer. And what Malik has to offer is smart, attractive hip-hop. From the most recent track, the chronologically-named "March 9th," you know that he’s music aware, with that beat based on a sample from classic Outkast ("Vibrate"). You know from track "On My Own" that Malik can toe that Drake-associated pop/hip-hop line, but that Malik falls more firmly on the hip-hop side while hittin’ the pop bullseye just as nicely as the Degrassi vet. And you know from all three tracks that the man can spit quite clever and thoughtful, with lines like "I can’t lie, you the baddest that I ever seen/But it’s sad to say that your tree of life is far from evergreen," on track "Life." It looks like Malik is about to drop more music soon, so get up to speed below with "On My Own" and keep a lookout for more from this top-notch example of the Austin hip-hop world. SXSW 2015 is just a start; there’s a hell of a lot more hip-hop to come from this town going forward.

Ooh boy y’all, we just picked up boxes containing 10,000 copies of The Deli’s SXSW 2015 print issue, featuring the enigmatic and supremely badass Roger Sellers on the cover, and we’re about to drop these bitchin’ little pieces of literature all over Austin. Chances are you’ll find yourself in possession of one or five copies if you’re taking part in the festivities, and if not, you can check out the whole thing online here.

As an extra special delicious bonus treat for all you sexy, sexy readers, we’ve put up an extended version of our article on venues not on 6th Street, which you can read at the link below. Check it on out, and get yourself to some awesome spots that ain’t covered in crowds and vomit this SX. Or, at least, a little less crowds and vomit. Have a great fest errbody!

Positively Not 6th Street

By Trevor Talley, photos by Xavier Villalon

If math is a real thing, you’re either on 6th Street in Austin at South By Southwest right now while you’re reading this, or you’re not. That’s just facts, straight to you from your friends at The Deli. We’re glad to be of service to your brain.

If you’re are at South By, and you probably are because we’re handing out 10,000 of these magazines to cool people with haircuts just like you during South By this year, we at The Deli wanted to give you somethin’ useful to use around our fair city through this magazine. Somethin’ that shows you a bit of the town that you might not normally have seen, that gets you wandering the scene and seeing what the whole of our city has to offer. That’s this here article, which is all about venues Not on 6th, because, let’s be honest, those 6th and Red River spots really don’t need much help from anyone to get boots in the door during SXSW.

Austin, though, is a big place these days that stretches far beyond the booze and vomit of 6th Street, and it’s one that’s growing as we speak. Growing, as it were, at the rate of over 100 people every day (an actual fact). Another fact: 100% of the people who move here will not see all of Austin before they leave or, more likely, they die. There’s just too much of it out there for even us locals to see, much less anyone who is only here for a wild week in March.

So to cut down on your researchin’ needs while at SXSW, and to show you a bit about the music scene as it exists in our Hill Country town outside of the primary party areas (which everyone is already pretty damn aware of), here are some excellent venues Not on 6th to give a try. Each and every one is a true representation of the music culture here in Austin, and most certainly worth the trip over. Get to ‘em, and have a great SX y’all.

Trailer Space

Website

1401 RoseWood Ave.

Any location that has blue underwear prominently framed on its wall, good pizza next door and an honest-to-god Area 51 arcade cabinet among its many fine public offerings is a place that automatically makes this list. Trailer Space, though, is more than just a spot with good ass video games and the venerable East Side Pies as a next-door neighbor. Set deep on the north end of the East Side, Trailer Space is a record store and music venue with the spirit of the 90s (in Austin, not that other copycat city) alive. By that I mean that they seriously care about local music and creating an authentic experience, and they also carry VHS tapes. Crossing the threshold of this venue bears immediate gifts: local records, loads more records of all kinds, the aforementioned tapes and DVDs, a bunch of scrawny kids hanging about picking through the crates, and music industry shit all over the walls that lets you know you’re not just dealin’ with a bunch of young hipsters into retro music, you’re in a place run by people who’ve actually been there in Austin’s music scene for a long time, and who’ve brought a bunch of awesome shit back to prove it. The shows here are much the same, curated, played and attended by real-deal Austin music lovers. That there is pizza within 10 feet at all times does not hurt, either.

///CLICK HERE FOR THE REST OF THE ARTICLE\