For those of y’all lookin’ to squeeze just a little more live music out of yer homebase before fuckin’ off to someplace dismal for the holidays, Austin psychpop outfit Wildcat Apollo is playing an end of the year show at Hole in the Wall on December 15 with Whiteman Dancing, The Wheel Workers and The Sunshine Feels. As a nice lil prep for that, here’s the first track released by the group online in some time, which is some good genre colliding stuff. There’s something a little Pixies and a little MGMT about Wildcat Apollo’s new track “Kaleidoscopic.” Layered, floating vocals and shimmering guitars sit on a bed of crunchy, tight electronic-style beats, taking as much from the world of recent indie electropop as from classic psychedelic music, but with the result being a song that feels more like a Pixies “Wave of Mutilation”-esque track (complete with big, twanging bass and lyrics about going “into the ocean”) in a way that takes that spirit and does its own, more modern thing with it. It’s pretty and full of little moments of balance that bely a lot of talent here, so get a listen on, and check out the show if you need yer Austin fix one last time before the Yuletide drowns us all.

Get into The Succulents, a sparkling new band that looks like might get some traction in Austin with two new tunes of lovely lady-created, soulful Southern indie music. This trio of ladies have laid down two smoky, bluesy indie tunes, dropped ’em online for ya as a teaser taste for their upcoming album Stories from the Moon, and we’ve got each here today. There’s a nice bit of flavor coming off of these, a flavor that’s a bit dark and certainly adventurous with some real Western tones (the horns are an especially good bit of added flair), and we wouldn’t be surprised to see this group quickly rocket to the top of bills around the city if the rest of the album and their live show are as well put together as these two tracks. The fact that (full disclosure!) one of these fine, talented women was once an intern at this very site is somethin’ we are more’n a little proud of. Take yourself to a porch outside somewhere when the moon is lit up fine, and settle back with these two tracks below playing to get familiar with The Succulents, and keep an ear to the ground for their upcoming full-length. 

It ain’t no secret that artists can pretty easily slip into being, to put it about as blunt as it needs to be, shitass pretentious as fuck. If you’ve been in Austin more than five minutes, you know this. ManOfTheDown, a member of Austin’s excellent electronic beatmaking brigade, knows this, and his new music video for the irreverently named track "#FUCKAGENRE" takes a goofy, lighthearted swing at overblown, self-hyped artistic bullshit. It’s goofy as fuck and low budget (in fact, I saw MOTD posting looking for extras for it probably three days before it came out) on purpose, basically just a motley crew of folk humping and thrusting awkwardly but committedly in a pretty Texas hill country setting, and it’s damn fun. I especially dig the be-suited thrusting duet between the ManOfTheDown himself, Eli Good, and his fellow beatmaker Chris Medders (Feedback Alliance/Sole Glow Collective/Eversive/More). The addition of the monologue on pretention from a performance of John Logan’s play "Red" (about pomo painter of big ole blocks of color Mark Rothko) is a nice touch, as is the expectedly on-point, badass production on the track itself. Ditch yer airs and thrust your way to glory with "#FUCKAGENRE" below, and if you dig the sound, find more MOTD here.

Posting holiday-themed music really isn’t something we expect to do often here at The Deli, but we’ll be fucked if we’re not about to put up the second seasonal track in a week. This time we’ve got a weird-ass indie rock track about that very most truly American of holidays, Ghormeh Sabzi’s new single "Black Friday." The irreverent, hard track is a big mixed-up sound collage that’s got everything from big pounding guitars to snarling, to vocals a bit like a more-punk more-angry Billy Corgan, to a dystopic newscaster-style sample about the fucked up day in question to (what ends up being the weirdest element) a fierce-playing gypsy element to the song complete with violins and tinny acoustic string instruments. Hell, if I was trying to pick out any element that really sounded like any other group, I’d say the vocal delivery and complexity are somewhat reminiscent of Destroyer, but that really won’t tell you what this group or this strange, good track is like.

Ghormeh Sabzi is that off on its own path with this one, dicking around in the Woods of Musical Weirdness having a goddamn good time getting fucked up with its weird self. There’s a bridge in the middle that does little more than nod at the concept of being a traditional, pretty pop bridge and is instead just more weird fun, and that musical shaking of the dick at rules is a good encapsulation of what this most un-corny of holiday songs is about. For those who think holiday music is only ever hateful schtick, "Black Friday" is a track that might just shake up that stereotype for you nice and hard. Get on it here below.

Right y’all, so The Deli covers emerging artists that are on the way up to stardom, and usually that means folks with a few hundred hits max online for each of a half dozen to a dozen tracks. Sometimes though, a new local musician comes in hot as a comet and goes straight from having zero available music to having tracks with thousands and even tens of thousands of listens overnight.

It’s not everyone who can pull off this kinda grime to prime time goddamn music magic; it’s somethin’ that takes talent, timing and a fucking good managing team to get done.

Mobley is an Austin pop artist that looks like he probably has all three of those components, and happily for this day and age, it seems pretty clear from his musical output thus far that of the three his raw natural talent shines brightest by far.

Mobley’s new track "Swoon," presented for you here, hits you with the knowledge that this kid is real fucking talented fast, as it comes in with its hard runnin’ pop beat and driving bass and soulful vocals. It’s a song that’s good off the bat, doing its fun modern take on a relationship song well with a bit of cynicism, a materialistic edge but some romance, and then around 0:45 it really gets going when a melodic island drum sound that really rounds it out and gives it that perfect arty fantasy feeling that makes for some of the best possible pop music.

Make no mistake, Mobley isn’t just going to blow up, he already has for all intents and purposes. Expect to hear his shit played somewhere in the next while, because this complex multi-genre-accessing pop that has the hipster/indie/artsy edge but is also completely inside the wider world’s pop/hip-hop culture is some good shit. It’s pretty hard to imagine it missing with the public, honestly. It’s just on top of its game on many levels, so get in on it now while this kid just has three songs and a ridiculous 100k listens. Newest track below, and find more from Mobley over at his SoundCloud.

Here’s a group we don’t know much about, except that they dropped this solid track of pretty shoegaze in our inbox. "It’s a crime to call you mine," sing Safe Places in this cute track with a thrilling, screaming wall of sound backing its punkish vocals. There’s something youthful and a bit thrilling in a wistful, looking at kids doing the young in love thing kind-of way about this track, and you get the sense that these kids are a bit wrapped up in their own adventures, but for once it’s simply endearing. The song’s a nice little encapsulation of a feeling and a mood that blasts the same hard, solid and pretty sound from the first seconds to the last, which fits a good art punkish pretty song just fine, and we’d damn well like to hear more about this band.

Truth be told, Christmas ain’t much of a hip holiday, what with all the religion and family and money and general mainstream weirdness associated with it, but that hasn’t stopped more than a few artists outside the "regular" culture from taking capitalism’s favorite holiday and doing something interesting with it. You’ve got yer Sufjan Stevens Christmas songs, your Gremlins, your Nightmare Before Christmas and (in the particular vein of that last entry in the field of holiday oddities), you’ve now got Tele Novella’s spooky/jolly Snowflake 10, a 45 with two tracks of Christmas music from a top quality Austin pop group.

In particular, Side A on this festive bit of music-ery is an X-mas themed original by Tele Novella called "Christmas Spirit" that you’ll know is something a bit different from the regular holiday fare when it starts out with Natalie Ribbons (with certainty one of Austin’s best crooners) singing "All the meanest criminals, bank robbers, crooks and killers/Buried in the cemetery are celebrating Christmas." It’s cute, creepy and’s got that Tim Burton cool done through Tele Novella’s spaghetti-Western ready trademark sound. If you’re looking for something not lame and overdone to getcha feelin’ all Christmassed up, take this short lil fun thing with ya on your holiday venturin’, and also check out B-Side Marvin Gaye cover "Purple Snowflakes" and the other Snowflakes Christmas 45s on SoundCloud. Gotdamned Chrizzmas, kids. Up in yer wallet, and now all up in yer ears, but this time in a good way.

The Vegetable Kingdom is an extreme electronic music deconstructor, and he’s got a new track for you.

For those that aren’t familiar, Vegetable Kingdom typically makes tracks (a good many of which are found for free on his SoundCloud) that are heavily abstract and minimal in their elements. His songs are low on concurrently running parts and high on making those parts each play out together exactly. The result is a song-creation style based in rich and complex soundscapes that play on the idea of electronic music by breaking it down, which for some of us is a form of the genre that plays right into the kind-of intellectual and artistic edginess that, for all of its other good qualities, the poppier sides of the medium don’t generally have the capacity to reach.

The new track we’ve got for our listenin’ today is about as solid of a connection to more well-known and regularly structured stuff that The Vegetable Kingdom gets- a “remix” of Sufjan Stevens’ “Drawn to the Blood,” but you get those quotes because the VK version of the track warps the living fuck out of the original song. Vegetable Kingdom takes Sufjan’s melancholy indie prettiness and makes it into a heavy-hitting melodic electronic tune that’s overwhelming and badass for being so. It kind-of reminds me of the power in the darker, more complex hymns out there (I just heard a bunch at a funeral, so they’re on the mind), with both those and this track going for a really sensory attack and a mindset that’s all big, crashing, cosmic and dangerous.

This track is definitely from the school of remixing that produces an artist’s impression gathered from a song’s parts rather than a repackaging of the song; for instance, for a whole song fully of syllables (that Sufjan sure can stuff a song with words), the VK remix features just one small snippet of singing repeated infinitely over the wild and unhinged reworking of the instrumentals. Doing that with finesse enough to create a track that stands alone as a more abstract piece is hard, but The Vegetable Kingdom does just that with this entry. It’s good weird shit for sure, and music that is probably best experienced when talking isn’t going to happen for a while (Grade A thinking tunes), and we highly recommend that if you weren’t familiar with this artist’s music before and if you’re also into good weird shit, that you use this track as an introduction to a ferocious electronic artist.

Rough and lo-fi are alright by us here at The Deli, especially when that rawness is coupled with some appropriately weird composition. Apropos of that, here’s a new vid of retro oddness and lo-fi psych blues rock by Tom Florida & The Episodes for you out there who share our proclivity for the delicious strangeness that can come from those on the wacky lo-fi side of town. Tom’s music falls into that weird crack between genres where truly unique music is able to thrive like a flowering weed on the sidewalk, particularly playing around between the psych and electronic and folky genres, but really being all its own thing. Like many other iconoclastic acts, Tom Florida & The Episodes are obviously very familiar with their influencing sounds, but also a bit irreverent, and the resulting music is fun, freaky and far-out. We especially dig the 80s tech aesthetic in the band’s visuals and the electronic parts of their tracks (hear more at their Bandcamp here, where they have a new EP out as well), subjects that other psych bands often steer clear of, perhaps due to a misguided sense of trying to recreate the golden age of psych. You’ll get no such limits with Tom Florida and crew, who seem happy to stick just about anything they like from any genre or era into their work, which benefits from that freedom greatly. Put some weirdness in your eyes and ears below with “True,” y’all.

Here’s a voice from the singer-songwriter and folky sides of Austin’s musicsphere to watch. Hot Cotton is the name that local musician Eva Mueller’s solo work is released under, and after a couple tracks released a few years ago, Mueller is releasing Hot Cotton tracks again in spades on her SoundCloud page. Mueller’s work is emotional and resonates with undeniable authenticity, and sound-wise it lives somewhere around Jenny Lewis or Neko Case’s more pared-down, folskier stuff, perhaps a bit more bent away from country and toward the acoustic indie of the 90s (Neutral Milk Hotel etc.). Take a listen to one of our favorite tracks from the many Hot Cotton have just put out below, and if you like what you hear, keep tabs on Hot Cotton over at her FB page. From what we can tell, these tracks are just demos, which means there will probably be some other versions and/or more tracks coming soon, which can’t be anything but good news for those of you who dig smart, well-crafted revelatory music.

Austin’s all about the band, but damn do we have some ferociously strong solo acts here. One of those is the inimitable Eyelid Kid, who’s sometimes known in a more business-facing capacity as Paul Grant, record label manager at Raw Paw. Under the Kid moniker, Grant’s been slowly releasing stellar electronic pop content over the last year, and he’s just put out another lovely little track called “Open Up” for us to bop to.

“Open Up” plays in the same vein of themes as Eyelid Kid’s other so-far released tracks “Shadow Talk” and “On Your Mind,” presenting a portrait of a thoughtful, melancholy young man who carefully observes the world about him while he looks for happiness. Also true to form, Kid’s new track is shimmering and pretty and is a nice bit of electronic pop that’d be equally at home on the dance floor and coming through the car speakers on a good drive.

Grant has made it quite clear with the three Eyelid Kid tracks so far that he’s a musician that knows how to balance all parts of a song, giving aesthetics, structure and content each the attention to detail that they need, and the result is consistent and perfectly crafted pop music, which is just what you get with “Open Up.” Listen below, and keep an ear out for this kid. He knows what he’s doing.

Spacefolk/musicians Total Unicorn dropped a quite nice future freakout track a couple weeks ago as the single for their just-released album Relaxation Tape, and we’ve got it in all its lovely pangalactic glory for you here today. “Whole Lotta Louvre” sounds like something straight out of a hip irreverent scifi universe (like if Fifth Element had a unhinged experimental edge to it), starting out with a grippingly odd alien choral performance that gives way to an equally extraterrestrial hard rap. None of it sounds like English, or really like anything familiar at all, but all of it is good weird spacefuture shit that’ll get your interstellar daydreams firing off instantly when you hear it. Get listening below to a delicious piece of electronic weirdness, and check back here for a post on the full album from one of the most unique groups in town sometime soon.