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Noise is back with a bang in the NYC music scene! Brooklyn turbolent Talk Normal are the winners of our Year End Best of NYC poll (the full chart, including 67 emerging artist, can be found here). The band gathered 8 jury and one Deli writers’ votes which allowed them to seal the poll’s 1st position – even if they obviously didn’t promote the readers’ poll (only 5 votes were cast in their favor in that department). Hey, we are cool with that! The fans’ vote, though, was instrumental in assigning positions from #2 to #7 – as these 6 artists all received 7 votes between the jury and the Deli writers. Freelance Whales and Bear in Heaven will therefore need to thank their fanbase for appearing on the smaller cover pictures of the Spring 2010 issue of The Deli. We’d like to bring to everybody’s attention that any of these 6 bands could have won the overall contest if they had placed 1st or 2nd in our readers’ poll – we are saying this because often readers and bands complain about the fact that in our system the readers’ votes don’t bear enough weight.
Curiously enough, Freelance Whales‘ 2nd place seems like a symbolic testament to how wide the NYC scene’s sonic spectrum is: where Talk Normal’s music literally couldn’t exist without electricity, the guys in Freelance Whales pride themselves of being able to play live shows without any amplification – not even microphones (that’s what they did during our packed CMJ party in October – although sure enough some people in the back couldn’t hear much…)
Bear in Heaven (in third place) complete our virtual podium with their texturally rich psych rock. In a rock scene as fragmented as ever (in which attitude more than genre has become the aggregating component) the psych rock and shoegazer community of artists represents an exception; they are part of probably the only genre-defined rock scene in NYC, developing a very defined sonic legacy. Bear in Heaven – an incredibly talented and hard working band – is definitely one of the best expressions of the current NYC psychedelic sound.
64 more bands are listed in our charts, from the world conquering, exotic experimentations of Dirty Projectors to the beautifully sparse and intimate songs of Callers (the two bands coincidentially share the same record label, together with our current cover band Glass Ghost). We will cover all these bands in the spring issue of The Deli and on our NYC site in the following months.
The Deli’s Staff