Well alright, alright, alright y’all. We’ve reached the end of our open submissions for artists looking to be considered for The Deli’s Best of Austin Year End Poll for Emerging Artists. Many thanks and tacos to all those that submitted their work; we took a listen to it all.
After tallying our editors’ ratings for the Open Submissions stage, it’s time to release the results. Please note that to avoid conflicts no local editor was allowed to vote for bands in their own scene.
WHAT’S NEXT: These results end the first phase of the poll. We will soon unveil the artists nominated by our local jurors, and then let our readers and our writers influence the poll with their vote.
Keep creating, keep supporting, and stay tuned for your chance to vote!
A musical act with a good sense of humor (that’s actually fuckin’ funny) that’s also straight killer when making more serious-minded shit is a hard thing to find. Count one more then in the ever-growing lists of reasons why Austin, and the world at large, is lucky to have CAPYAC, the city’s premier future funky outfit and the new group that made arguably the biggest impact on at least this writer’s 2015. With their new EP “Movement Swallows Us” still warm out of the oven, CAPYAC has elected not to rest on the merits of its already classic recent work and has released a new track called “Mama Never Told Me” that reveals that the funky-sexy duo also has a damn silly side to it.
“Mama Never Told Me” is basically about cupcakes, bright-ass colors, the funk, babies and some wildly-bedecked Austinites (including the band itself) gettin’ down to it all like it’s some serious fuk’n bizness. Producer Delwin Campbell is still riding the hothand here with another damn fine beat, this time anchored by a “Mama/Said” sample that is timed with sickness, and as ever Eric Peana is a funk vocalist master, this time with a tongue-in-cheek sexyfunk rap thing going on.
In the end though, the best way to get prepped for this excellent new addition to the catalog of Austin’s most exciting, most future-ready act is to read about it in their own inimitable words:
“Official release statement from Capyac:
Hello from Chez Capyac. Today we have the honor and privilege and honorable privilege to introduce to you our first food-related single. Why sing about food? Because singing and food share a mouth. When we were first approached by world famous director Meredith, we knew she had something. What did she have? Cupcakes. Magic. Studio magic. Ever heard of Hollywood?"
Hey you- are you a sciencefreak? Do you think that space shit is rad, and the more explodey and whacked out it is (say, the more space-tentacles there are involved), the radder it is? Are you into geometry and angles and orbs and all that perfectly impossible math shit? Does the idea of a rocket-packed four-legged robot, zooming constellations and funky angles over a mind-flipping twinkled-out beat get your futuretech boner a’rarin’ to go?
Well maybe you should watch Austin producer Magic Nanna’s sexy-ass techporn futurebeat science freakout of a music video for his track “Malachite.” This is utterly on-point, heady stuff from a highly talented member of Austin’s world-class beatmusic cadre, showing Magic Nanna’s got his brains in weird, deep and far-out places and we’re all lucky the man’s got the musical chops to relate that shit to us through his beats. This could well be your new go-to get high and spaceout track, so get to it below.
The Bishops might sound like the name of a snarky irreverent indie rock outfit, or maybe a math rock group named after the third-most fun chess piece (this is inarguable, and we’ll challenge anyone who says otherwise to a match), but in fact, this brand new Austin act is something far more rare: It’s a hip-hop supergroup made up of people who are real-life family members each with their own career outside of this new collaboration.
And an exciting, badass collaboration it is, coming in the form of synth-ed up single “Blood Ring.” As crooner Cara Bishop says, you get “Not one, not two, but three” Bishops merged together on the track for a hella fun single with equal roots in hip-hop, RNB and modern dancefloor music (especially trap and deep house on the snares and melody respectively).
Cara herself provides the hook and her verse with an RNB smoothness by way of a bit of a Rihanna Barbados structure, while Luv Bishop opens the track with his own bars done in that highly contemporary way of conscious-leaning youthful rappers like Frank Leone with references to big concepts like the third eye and not living “like we should” peppered into a solid modern flow with an edge.
Holding the whole thing together are the bouncing synth-made steel drums and arpeggios and steady trap-influenced beats of the third prong of this killer trident, producer Troy Bishop, who is a pretty prolific and future-looking producer in his own right outside of this collaboration (as well as in it) and one you should definitely get more familiar with.
This is actually what makes “Blood Ring” so damn exciting and fun to come across: it’s not only a stellar track from three members of that youth hip-hop thing that’s making the future of this genre look so bright, it’s also an introduction to three individual artists with impressively deep and deeply impressive catalogs each their own. The Bishops know this too, with the full lyrics to one version of the song’s hook (of a few) saying, “Not one, not two, but three/You can meet me and the Bishops in the ring/Not one, not two, but three/Our blood runs stronger than you could ever be.”
As a track and as an introduction to these talented kids, “Blood Ring” is immensely successful and is restrained in a way that belies the youth of both its members and this group as an existing thing, and it’s the most promising and exciting thing we’ve heard in Austin hip-hop in both this young year and the last. Check it out below, and then peep each Bishop’s personal Soundcloud below, and be prepared to fall deep into a hole of binge-listening your new favorite ATX hip-hop group, like the one we still haven’t crawled out of yet.
Big, bright things on the horizon for 2016 ATX hip-hop with music like this being made, y’all.
After a thoroughly solid indie rock album release in 2015 with Cokomo, that was itself a quick follow-up to a spectacular split with influencer and fellow Austin rocker Britt Daniel of the legendary Spoon, few Austin bands enter this new year as hot as Sweet Spirit. To add fuel to that fire, the act has just released a new, gripping music video for Cokomo track “Baby When I Close My Eyes” that joins Anomalisa in the surprisingly fast-growing “Early 2016 Super Artsy and Emotional Puppet-Based Films” subsection of pop culture.
That upcoming movie with its realism+puppets thing is more of a touchstone to go with when understanding what hitting play on this music vid than something like the Muppets, because this here video is dark and serious, including a good, healthy heaping of violence both puppet on puppet and human on puppet.
Both the video and the track discuss modern life and its troubles, with director John Valley saying about the various storylines in the video, “We weren’t preoccupied with the three plots leading you to a final message, yet the characters all go through a life-altering experience and come out the other end scarred but still in love.”
Singer Sabrina Ellis says about it that “People will either love it or hate it and that excites me,” and you can decide for yourself which way it makes ya feel by taking a peep below.
Wildcat Apollo is releasing 80s pop singles on us right now. Truly, we’ve been living in this time of all past eras of music being re-done and reproached by the contemporary kids as good as or better than they were originally were for a while, and Wildcat Apollo’s second single from their new album “Melt into the Ocean” is exactly that. It’s a Cocteau Twins influenced blast of a romantic pop track, but with the echoing choir indie thing of the early 2000s (itself a rehash of an 80s Paul McCartney kinda thing that itself goes back even further etc.) and a very 2016 approach to old sounds that says this is ours, and we’re gonna take it and make it like we want.
We live in the age of fast-moving everything, and one thing that’s moving so fast that it’s collapsed into itself is pop music, which has developed into music like “Red Roses” that comes off as a kind of retro-contemporary-future pop music all at one time. It’s weird that it does all these different pop things at once and doesn’t ask permission to do it. It might not be fully what many might want from pop music if we were asked to directly lay out the path we think good such music takes, and it isn’t perfect with its almost-too cutesy notes with the echoing choir shit, but it makes up for it by not caring that you might not like that and driving hard at everything the band wants the track to be. It ends up pretty endearingly done, and the track sticks in your head and gets your spirit going a bit upwards whether you’d like to admit it or not (and many will without a single problem).
Wildcat Apollo’s “Red Roses” is of the new rules pop, and it’s good fun, and you should and can listen to it below. Do that or be a stickler, hip kids of this site.
So there you are, sitting around in your bathrobe, feeling like a lost dog, thumbing through NYE photos and wondering, “What the hell happened to 2015?” Well, that shit’s gone. Time to deal with it and accept that we’ve seen the last of that year…at least, that is, for the most part.
It just so happens that one fine thing that emerged at the tail end of last year was a fantastic EP release from the folks of the band Darkbird, one of our co-winners for December’s Artist of the Month Poll. Darkbird released their first EP early December 2015 entitled “I Remember Feeling My Fingers Slip,” and with the alluring voice of front woman Kelly Barnes, and the dark tantalizing sound from guitarist Brian Cole, a listen or two to this new moody record from one of Austin’s best emerging indie rock bands is definitely something to pencil in your 2016 schedule.
You can also catch their next show January 3rd (tomorrow, for those reading this at posting) at The Sidewinder- a free show as part of our city’s very badass “Free Week”. If you can’t catch that show, don’t worry; they have a very busy schedule for free week and are playing multiple shows, so go and check out their Facebook page to see which one of their next shows you can attend. While you’re at it, how about throw them a like so you can keep up and support another great local Austin band, and one that you (that being our dear readers) have voted into glory and fame (or something like that) on this very site.
Right, so this is one that I debated posting for a good minute or two. If you listen, you’ll see why: this is about as bare bones and unpolished as a track gets. It’s often off-key, the subject matter is totally weird and, on top of that, it got submitted to us through some weird-ass service that we never use.
But, Austin has an admirable and strong, if a little voyeuristic, tradition of accepting so called “outsider art” if it’s done authentically, and (perhaps more so) if it’s catchy.
Somehow, through its ultra-minimal drumming, its guitar that’s picked one twangy string after another (and sometimes slightly out of time), and its totally weird vocals about a young reality star, this strange tune by Rick Milisci, obviously a guy a bit older than his subject, on the subject of Kylie Jenner is both authentic and catchy. Somehow, it’s also charming, not creepy, and pretty on the ball when it comes to having an up-to-date look at pop culture. Which, I’ll admit, are not really things we thought I’d think about it when I first clicked it on.
I think what really does it for this song is that, despite not having a lot of production polish, it does have a solid song structure and vision, and it really goes for it. Rick knows what he wants to say, and he can put a song’s parts together, even if they sound a little janky. It comes together in a way that’ll catch your ear and get you talking, whether it’s to say you hate it or, like us at The Deli, to come around and admit that this weird little ditty kinda gets under your skin. Hell, I just took a break writing this to grab some food, and I caught myself singing “Kylieeee Jennner, Kylieeee Jennner” under my breath on the way to the spot. I’m about to meet up with my brother for Christmas, and I’m pretty sure this song just rocketed to the top of the list of shit I want to show him, weird as that might be.
In all, while this isn’t our typical fare at The Deli, this is Austin. Since this is the town that claims Daniel Johnston as one of its own, and since, really, we should each be giving all art a chance if it comes from a place of authentic expression and creativity, here we are presenting you the far, far from leftfield “Kylie Jenner,” a bare-bones, off-kilter, endearing and bizarrely fun commentary on pop culture by one Rick Milisci.
Oh, and if you want to know who the hell this dude is, like we did, pretty much all we can find about him is that his “Biography” on the site he submitted to us says “Smile :),” he calls this song in particular a “Cool Surf Song about Pop Culture in 2015,” for some reason CD Baby says you’d like him if you like Flo Rida, and he has 356 songs on Myspace.
Yep. 356. One of them is named “Zookeeper Licks Monkey’s Butt.” There’s another called “Sandwiches are Beautiful.” So there’s that. Get on this weird train y’all. If nothing else, it sure is interesting.
Botany is the study of plant life, and Botany also happens to be the name Spencer Stephenson records his out-of-this-world electronic music under. The name fits Stephenson well, in the sense that his tripped-out electronic soundscapes burrow their way into one’s consciousness like the seedling’s tendrils tunnel their way through soil to sunlight. Botany’s latest album, Dimming Awe, the Light is Raw, is everything fans of ethereal trip-hop and electro-psychedelic music could want in a record: layered instrumentals, sick samples and nasty breakbeats for the kiddos to nod their heads to.
Botany is a North Texas native, but now resides here in Austin where he records under the Western Vinyl label. Dimming Awe, the Light is Raw would be Botany’s second full-length album, and it’s a rather impressive follow-up to his equally inspiring debut album, Lava Diviner (True Story).
Much like one can stare at a picture stereogram to reveal its hidden 3D image, the scope and outright brilliance of Botany’s music comes into sharp focus as one soaks in the sonic minutiae contained in each track with repeated listens. Fans of artist such as RJD2, Nightmares on Wax or DJ Shadow will appreciate the chilled out bass thumping melodies on Botany’s latest offering for their clarity in purpose and emotive qualities.
“Sounds have archetypal connections to things in nature the same way visual symbols do,” Botany says to explain his creative process. Botany continues, “Low-end might be associated with thunder, or the sound of a mother’s heartbeat as heard from inside the womb.” Personally, I really don’t remember what my mom’s heartbeat sounded like from inside the womb, but I assure you if it sounded anything like Mr. Stephenson’s music, I would have exited the birth canal pop locking across the operating floor.
Botany’s Dimming Awe, the Light is Raw is available now, and you can check out a preview of the album below. Check back for the latest on new music and concerts from Botany here.
Troller is an Austin act that makes music to shatter worlds to. They’ve been around the scene for some years now, creating an extremely unique sound that you’ll understand if the terms “ultra-heavy psychedelic fantasy electronic horror metal” sound like a real thing to you. If that idea is hard to wrap your brainbox around, try out Troller’s newest track “Destruccion,” and you’ll get what we mean pretty fuckin’ quick.
“Destruccion” is heavy, awesome, and fantastical as fuck. With its electronic, metal and fantasy influences swarming together in one track, it’d go equally as well as the soundtrack to a flyover of Mordor as it would a brutal dystopic future cityscape. Shit is unrelenting, with vocals like the chants of a death cult of spacemonks, but it also has a brilliant point at 2:39 where a major-key bridge switch gives an unexpected burst of lightness and prettiness, like a plane bursting up out of a thick smog and into the sunlight to breathe fresh air and see the sparkle off the clouds below for just a brief moment before an Icarus-esque crash back into chaos. The dark crescendo the track ends on is ideally created by a group who knows their sound (that being big, thundering, epic and terrifying), and knows what to do with it.
Troller, as I’m sure they’d tell you themselves, is not for everyone, but if you dig metal, weird electronics or, better yet, think trip-hop and chillout are genres that could do well with more fantasy, heavy and experiemental elements addded in and then done live by a troupe of badasses, you’ll eat Troller the fuck up. This is some damn good weird electronic-y music y’all, and we’d expect nothing less of another band off of the great Holodeck Records. Listen below, and get ready to go on a gotdamn journey with this one.
Like a really cute carving knife you’d find on Pinterest, The Dizzease is adorable with an edge, and they’ve just put out a fun-as-fuck eponymous debut album that you need to hear if cute badasses are your thing. We stumbled across these guys about a week ago at a show at the very nice Wake the Dead coffee shop/venue in San Marcos, and they pretty much stole the night with their high-energy surfy/punk cute songs about things like a cute girl at a grocery store and one of those goofy sticky hand things you get from coin machines.
Lo and behold, these guys dropped all of the songs they played and more on their Bandcamp just days after that show, and it makes for one of the most instantly likeable albums of the year for the area. The coin-machine goodies-based “Sticky Hand” is a true standout track, just about as fun and pared-down as you can get for a twee-ish punk track, and that’s whether or not it actually IS a ridiculously cute metaphor for masturbation (we at The Deli offices here can’t decide if that was the intention, or if we’re just total creeps). The rest of the album is a mix of being totally adorable and lighthearted (there’s literally a track about how awesome one of their dogs is, and it’s actually really fun) and having a bit of a non-mainstream edge, such as track “Grocery Store Girl” which takes the “cute indie crush” song archetype and makes the gender sexual orientation of the crush-haver totally irrelevant (yay 2015!).
In all, this cutepunk effort feels fresh, authentic, adorable and not a bit affected, a four-punch combo that’s really damn hard to do in this cynical, self-aware age, and it’s an album you really should give a shot. If you got a heart, and especially if you feel nostalgic for the simple romance of your rebellious teens, this shit will give you all sorts of goodtime, happy day feels.
Get on it below, and if you’re in the area of their current tour, definitely go see these guys live. We can personally guarantee, they’ll put on a show that’ll make your media-chilled dead-ass millennial heart feel … well, things, and shit for once.
Out of one of Austin’s best labels, the heavy and heady Holodeck Recs, comes a badass new music video from Flatliner for their 80s by way of the future track “Blasted Highway.” This is retrofuture shit done hard and right and right hard, a bit like a darker Mylo, a bit Vitalic (which is, I suppose, like a better, darker French Mylo anyways).
Flatliner reference the unabashed futurelove of the 70s and 80s scifi thing with the look of this video, such as having lots of purples and pinks and weird abstract close-up faceshots, but totally embrace it without a sense of irony, because honestly the way that era did scifi and future shit was just fucking cool. That sentiment really extends to the whole song and the group itself, who make this bloopy hardcore electronic synthy shit that’s all 80s done from a modern sensibility and whose tracks basically ask you to get into it or get gone.
We’re into it at The Deli, always are when this kind of fearsome, ballsy future shit is done right, especially when it nails going retro (hard to do). There was something truly perfect about that 80s scifi aesthetic, with its purples on blacks, its straight-lined cars, its heroes with sunglasses and big hair and wife beaters under open shirts, and in turn, there’s something pretty perfect about what Flatliner have done here. Pressing play is akin to throwing your head back and gargling a torrential downpour of lazer beams, but like, through your eyes and ears, and if that sounds to you like as good a way to spend five minutes as it does to us, you need this in your headspace and quick. Get on it below.
