We are ready to declare Latasha Alcindor, popularly known as “LA,” the winner of both our Readers’ Poll and the overall Best of NYC chart (which includes votes from our jurors). 

The rapper has created a solid trajectory for herself.  From SXSW to NY Fashion Week to NYLON, she is garnering attention for her sharp delivery and feminist message.  On the recent NYLON rap session, LA raps, “I switch up to this bigger picture.  These ladies ain’t my competition, this is all militia.  We switching up the paradigm to a femme state of mind, only reason Trump is here, God tellin ‘This is time.’”  In her new video for “Revoke Thee,” LA unleashes a torrent of warnings against the smack talkers out there.  It’s an old school boom bap banger perfect to test the bass on those new headphones.  Latasha is currently an ‘Artist in Residence‘ at Williamsburg’s National Sawdust.

Kudos also to Ela Minus and Raycee Jones, who placed second respectively in the overall chart and in the readers’ poll – you can stream them below!

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Here’s the full list of the finalists in the Electronic/Hip Hop category.

	Akinyemi		6%	81 votes
	Argonaut and Wasp		0%	10 votes
	Ben Talmi		0%	9 votes
	Cafune		0%	3 votes
	Ela Minus		0%	6 votes
	Glassio		1%	24 votes
	King Neptune		3%	44 votes
	Latasha Alcindor		46%	555 votes
	Macula Dog		0%	1 vote
	Maggie Rogers		0%	5 votes
	NOLIFE		0%	1 vote
	Pronoun		1%	17 votes
	Raycee Jones		36%	444 votes
	True Blue		0%	2 votes
	Von Sell		0%	2 votes

Aisha Badru‘s songs are oddly fit for background tracks. They seem tailored for small, sentimental moments that stick to the back of your subconscious. In fact, you might recognize her music from a recent Volkswagen commerical in which it’s used in this exact context. Her voice, piercing through a warm current of acoustic instrumentation, delivers the shiver of intense nostalgia you might feel after visiting your childhood’s neighborhood. It’s a return to a place without its identifiers, a place teeming with the ghostly, ephemeral nature of memory. Aisha recently announced on her Facebook profile that she is negotiating a record deal and has a full length record on its way. – Andrew Strader

Our Best of Nashville 2017 poll began last week with the Roots category and, after you-the-people cast your vote, we have the results to share with you!

Overall Poll winner (Jurors vote + Readers’ vote): Tyler Childers

Readers’ Poll Winner (Readers’ Vote only): New Suede

Tyler Childers offers classic country folk songs that fit the modern context. His lyrics are imaginative and descriptive of elements of life in the country. With blue-grass oriented instrumentation including fiddle, banjo, mandolin, his style brings early Avett Brothers to mind. His songs blend the modern indie-folk impulse with the root elements of the bluegrass and country. Where his vocal tendencies and lyrics use the popular style of the alternative country/folk genre in its current form, the instrumentation and song structures harken back to truly rural country roots of his origins in a rural Kentucky coal mining town. 

New Suede is an act that’s mastered the art of origin digging. "Taxi," the single they’ve released ahead of their new album, is a number heavily influenced by classic R&B and Jazz elements but molded into the form of an indie rock experiment with similarities to psychedelic/jazz/indie outfits like Homeshake or Mild High Club. The makeup of their work so far consists of groovy, easy rocking that dabbles in enough dissonance to keep us on our toes. Be on the lookout for their album, Ocean Drops, coming out on March 11th. 

The full list of nominees can be found under the streaming tracks. 

Here is the list of all the finalists in the Nashville Roots category and their readers’ poll results: 

	Aubrey Peeples		1%	3 votes
	Bird Cloud		0%	1 vote
	Blackfoot Gypsies		0%	0 votes
	Jillette Johnson		0%	0 votes
	Molly Parden		0%	1 vote
	Moon Taxi		2%	7 votes
	New Suede		95%	266 votes
	Panfish		0%	1 vote
	Poly		0%	0 votes
	Strange Rivals		0%	0 votes
	Sisterhood		0%	0 votes
	Tyler Childers		0%	0 votes

NYC’s Birocratic hones electronic production that blends elements of soul and jazz with psychedelic influences. The songs are just dancy enough to keep bodies moving but contain the type of strangeness and complexities that send heads in the clouds. The off-tempo, off-key jazz rhythms and melodies create an atmosphere that owes its origins to great loungy electronic acts like Flying Lotus or Air. Compositions like streaming single ‘Tony’s Belated Breakfast’ are monolithic enough to be instantly gratifying while throwing in tempo and key flares that spice them up and make them interesting. Birocratic offers a holistic take on electronica, crafting sonic spaces that hold both body and mind in their grip. Don’t miss tomorrow’s show at Sunnyvale (03.04) – Andrew Strader

A kind of indie rock that seeps into your subconscious, Cotillon‘s music is the background to a sunny day in the park – or maybe it just triggers that thought. It’s fresh and sweet but also nostalgic and blue. Even on a first listen, you intuitively feel like you’ve heard it somewhere before. Blending groovy, irresistible hooks with acoustic-heavy instrumentation, and production from the likes of Al Carlson (St. Vincent, Wild Nothing, Ariel Pink) and Shane Butler (Quilt), Jordan Caros, the man behind the Cotillon moniker, offers us a classic sound we’ve all been missing – without knowing it. The band will be performing several shows in Austin during SXSW, including one at Hotel Vegas on 03.18. – Andrew Strader

We added this song to The Deli’s playlist of Best songs by emerging NYC artists – check it out!

Despite their heavy retro ’60s psycedelic and ’90s alternative rock influences, Vassals is a fully modern indie rock outfit. Their quiet-loud dynamic shifts and hazy, atmospheric guitars are enough to evoke indie and psych classics like The Pixies and Jefferson Airplane, without ever borrowing so much as to sound outdated. "There’s something I’m forgetting," Spencer Shay repeats over and over again on their latest release, "So-Ho". The single perfectly captures the confusion of the urban dweller, using the dread and disorientation of the weekend atmosphere of So-Ho as a representation of the modern existential crisis. As a group, they’ve mastered the art of both sonic and emotional build-up and release, which is sure to be a central element of their upcoming Halogen Days EP, set for release in early April. – Andrew Strader

This artist submitted music for coverage here.

No Ritual is the kind of act you’ll brag about seeing in someone’s basement ten years from now. Their lo-fi bedroom rock flows through the same sonic vein as Beach Fossils or early Sonic Youth. The songs are hook-heavy, pushing catchy little guitar riffs that meander and branch off in different directions. Being a three-piece band, their arrangments are decidedly minmalist. They’ve honed the skill of doing a lot with very little, patching song sections together with subtle accents that serve as satisfying variations. Sometimes setting limitations can open up undiscovered creative pathways, little artistic rabbit holes into which the trio dives without reservation. They know how to create high energy yields with low energy inputs, which is why No Ritual is a band we can all have faith in. Their artistic process is sustainable. 

-Andrew Strader

Our Best of NYC 2017 poll keeps rolling and last week, after you-the-people cast your vote, we had the results of the readers’ poll for he Indie Rock category to share with you!

Readers’ Poll 1st Place Winner: Baby Acid

Readers’ Poll 2nd Place Winner: Rachel Angel 

Our yearly poll winner for Indie Rock, Baby Acid, blends and bends generic conventions to create entire sonic spaces. The accuracy of their self-described "grunge-gaze" immediately becomes apparent upon listening. They use the fuzzy, screechy, heavy-weight characteristics of grunge to layer sound, creating sonic atmospheres that eventually take on the qualities of psych and shoegaze. If you’re a fan of noise rock and grunge classics like My Bloody Valentine, Sonic Youth and Nirvana, Baby Acid serves as the perfect for vehicle for fusion.

Rachel Angel took second place in the readers’ poll this year. She’s the type of artist who makes music out of a sense of necessity. Her songs serve as a form of survival, something solid to hold on to in the overwhelming current of existence. The lyrics adopt the refined aesthetic quality of poetry while the content may as well be pulled straight from personal diary entries, offering a vulnerability that proves undeniably relatable. The sonic niche she occupies rests somewhere between fuzzy indie rock and alt country, with Frankie Cosmos-style guitars resting atop a cushion of atmospheric organ you might hear in the work of classics like Wilco or Phosphorescent. 

Our Best of Nashville 2017 poll began last week with the Alt Rock/Metal category and, after you-the-people cast your vote, we have the results to share with you!

Overall Poll winner (Jurors vote + Readers’ vote): Fable Cry

Readers’ Poll Winner (Readers’ Vote only): Killing Grace

Fable Cry is an alternative rock act that might more accurately be characterized as horror-rock. Their string-heavy compositions and theatrical song structures could easily be soundtracks to psychological thrillers. The band’s style and sound are comically dark. They create a circus-like, psychedelic atmosphere that would please any lover of the occult and revel in pure weirdness. After listening to their work it’s easy to see how they’ve come to develop such a cult following. 

Killing Grace packs a powerful sonic punch. With hard-hitting, distorted guitars, powerful vocals, and complex rhythms and melodies, these Tennessee natives carry on a metal tradition always in search of places to manifest. Influenced by the sound of bands like Avenged Sevenfold and Seether, they maintain and defend a sonic niche in a rock genre increasingly in need of torchbearers. 

Honorable mention goes to Jay Leo Phillips (second in the overall chart).

The full list of nominees can be found under the streaming tracks.

 Here is the list of all the finalists in the Nashville Alt Rock/Metal category and their readers’ poll results.                    

	Fable Cry		40%	158 votes
	Jay Leo Phillips		0%	3 votes
	Killing Grace		52%	203 votes
	Kinhin		4%	18 votes
	Loss		0%	0 votes
	Tower Defense		1%	5 votes

Lillie Mae is the kind of woman who can knock you off your feet with a fiddle. Her new single, off the upcoming Jack White produced album, Forever And Then Some fills a void in an alternative country and folk-rock space sorely in need of female voices. "Over the Hill and Through the Woods" creates a panoramic view of a wide-open country space, which is refreshing in a music scene dominated by the urban and metropolitan. The song comes at country from a heavier rock angle. Distorted guitars and slap-happy drums carry along the simple but heavy hitting chord changes, while smooth but powerful vocals, complete with wide-panned harmonies ride the melody. If this easy country rocker, serving as a rebellious anthem against Nashville’s country industrial complex, is any indication of the power of the upcoming album, we’ve all got a lot to look forward to from Lillie Mae this April.    

– Andrew Strader

 Our Best of Nashville 2017 poll began last week with the Folk/Americana category and, after you-the-people cast your vote, we have the results to share with you!

Overall Poll winner (Jurors vote + Readers’ vote): Aaron Lee Tasjan

Readers’ Poll Winner (Readers’ Vote only): Taylor Alexander

This year’s Folk/Americana poll winners represent a genre looking back on the past and forward to the future. Aaron Lee Tasjan’s new record perfectly captures the new direction of alternative country while Taylor Alexander harkens back to the genre’s classic roots. 

Aaron Lee Tasjan’s new record, Silver Tears takes a progressive political stance: "There’s a redneck bummer in an H2 Hummer / And he sure does hate the queers / I guess some life choices are cries for help / That nobody ever hears," Tasjan sings on "Hard Life." The genius of Tasjan’s songwriting takes the form of a Trojan Horse. He uses the vehicle of roots country to challenge often destructive established southern cultural norms. Songwriting ability isn’t the only creative muscle Tasjan flexes on the latest record either. There’s a wide variety of instrumentation and production that keeps things interesting. From pedal steel and reverb soaked slide guitar-based rockers to saloon style piano blues numbers, Silver Tears has something to offer country fans of all stripes. 

Taylor Alexander makes the kind of music you’d be surprised to know still thrives in certain niches. Alexander’s retro style is decidedly Nashvillian. With numbers you’d expect to square dance to, the songs occupy a unique space in the city’s country scene and serve as a refreshing reminder of country music’s founding influences. With a country accent and deep cowboy-voice remiscent of George Strait, Alexander tactfully crafts everything from cheerful dance numbers to melancholy narratives about past experiences. 

Honorable mentions go to George Shingleton (second in the overall chart) and Whiskey Wolves of the West (second in the Reader’s poll). The full list of nominees can be found under the streaming tracks.

Real Good At Saying Goodbye

Here is the list of all the finalists in the Nashville Folk/Americana category and their readers’ poll results: 

	Aaron Lee Tasjan		8%	6 votes
	Alyssa Bonagura		1%	1 vote
	Christ Stapleton		1%	1 vote
	David Newbould		0%	0 votes
	George Shingleton		2%	2 votes
	Margo Price		1%	1 vote
	SmithField		0%	0 votes
	Sturgill Simpson		4%	3 votes
	Taylor Alexander		57%	40 votes
	Whiskey Wolves of the West		18%	13 votes
	William Tyler		2%	2 votes

Thad Kopec’s music is the kind of stuff that makes you remember how alive you are. Like a sun-dappled forrest canopy or light reflected on rippling water, his new track captures a moving image. The soundscape is sparse only to let every instrument fully speak. Strings and horns arrive and depart within a frame, merging together and fragmenting in erratic waves, but they all have something equally important to say. "Second Best" is narrative, and the instrumentation is alive to it. If the song is about remembering yourself by making sense of the past, all the disparate sonic elements mesh so well because of the shared purpose of making a story. Kopec’s intuition is to make the unsconscious conscious, to make a pattern of the fragments of memory and dream. If you’re a fan of melancholy Sufjan Stevens-inspired folk that creates a space for reflection and self-discovery, this is what you’ve been looking for. 

– Andrew Strader