THE DELI

Deli Readers,

Every year, in the early months, The Deli polls several local "scenemakers" to ask their opinion about the best emerging SF Bay Area based artists that got them excited in the previous year. We therefore list these artists on our local homepage, in a Readers’ Poll whose results contribute in deciding The Deli SF Bay Area’s Artist of the Year.

In an effort to give you more time to check out all the nominated bands, this year we have decided to stretch the readers’ polls a little, and, instead of posting a huge list of artists all at once, we will activate one genre-related poll every five days or so.

We begin today with bands in the Revival Rock/Pop category! You can find the poll on the top right of our homepage and you can cast your vote here.

We see our yearly polls as a fun way to engage our readers and the artists involved, and we hope they will get both to discover new local bands deserving of attention.

The Folks at The Deli

P.S. To group all artists in these categories we had to "stretch" things a little for a few ones that didn’t precisely fit any of the wide musical umbrellas most other bands belonged to – we hope we can be forgiven for that.

Describing themselves as “fiddle-infused pop/rock”, Richmond, VA band Griff’s Room Band has a tight and well thought out sound.  The songs are constructed with some care; with a solid rhythm section, good singing, and nice solos from the fiddle and guitar.  This is a band that sounds like it would be fun to see live.

Here’s Griff’s Room Band with the song “Tie Me Down”.

-Michael Dranove

We were glad to see Tom Petty’s name mentioned in the profile notes of NYC artist DL is OK, because we were going to mention it in this blurb, and sometimes artists don’t like their influences to be revealed (in particular when we get them wrong…) But, hey, there are a gazillion bands out there channeling The Ramones and Pavement, and some of them are nonetheless great and very original, just to say that influences means nothing. Point is, it’s actually very easy to be original and devastatingly boring, while writing a truly good song is a heck of a lot harder, even if you wear your influences on your sleeve. As far as Tom Petty is concerned, the man is incredibly underrated among emerging indie bands, so much so that hardly anybody seems interested in referencing his music. Truth is, he wrote some of the most timeless pop songs in the history of mainstream rock, without every sounding cheesy, forced or contrived. As far as we are concerned, we need more songwriters able to blend americana, pop and rock in earnest and memorable musical nuggets the way he could. DL is OK’s debut EP "Into the Flood" is a promising step in that direction – check out the titletrack below. The band just landed a residency at Pianos during the month of February, starting on the 7th.

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

Computers sometimes make us do things we don’t mean to do – and that’s not always bad. I meant to assign a blurb about band Hiccup to our contributor Dave Cromwell, but my email was hijacked by an auto-complete function… the message reached instead Sonicscoop.com‘s founder/editor David Weiss (who never writes for us about bands). Unexpectedly, he went ahead and replied with this:

"Ready for some rockin’ rockin’ ROCK? Hold on to your rearview mirrors and prepare for a fast ride of poppy punk!!!!! ‘Imaginary Enemies’ by NYC trio Hiccup is FOR REAL, all drums guitar grit and gorgeous that descends on your ears like a beehive buzzzzzzzzzzzin’ with it.

Alex! Hallie! Piyal! Catch them on March 10th at SXSW, March 14th at Sidewinder in Austin, or back in our little cow town of NYC March 26th at Rough Trade. The latter especially apropos, because if you like it ROUGH – and lovely – then Hiccup is what’s up. And don’t keep that on the down low." – David Weiss (Sonicscoop.com)

P.S. Thanks David!