South by Southwest is coming up fast and The Deli Magazine is proud to release its annual print issue for the festival. Featured in the mag will be Baltimore-based New God, one of the best experimental indie groups in the city. Their music is somber and atmospheric, and you’ll feel the work put into carefully constructing their albums. You’ll find their tracks easy to lose yourself in, time passing you by most pleasantly. Keep an eye on them as they announce what are sure to be fantastic shows. -Jonathan Goodwin

In their latest single ‘Nighttime Hunger,’ Overcoats take a simple expression of longing, ‘when the darkness comes,’ and twist the suggestive phrase around until it turns itself into a mantra of foreboding and threat. Laid over sinuous beats and rapturous harmonies. It’s a strong debut from duo Hana and JJ, who only just released their self-titled debut EP last summer and are already playing dates alongside musicians like James Blake and Hozier – and performing live for NPR. Hear the song below and see them when they play at Fat Baby on Thursday, March 3rd. – 
Mike Levine (@Goldnuggets)

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

Changing seasons have seen changing sounds in Let’s Drive to Alaska, but Christopher Garcia’s electronic post-rock outlet remains as verdant as it did in 2005, when it was just a laptop project. LDTA has warped and whittled down, with only the ardent Patrick Haag (ex-Mississippi Men) on drums, percussion, and noise while Garcia multi-tasks synths, loops, and effects—they were a quartet at one time. But through the decade of production struggles and lineup changes, quiet releases and whispered tours, comes an official debut album that breathes new purpose in songs from A Bell and A Mirror (Muerte Pop) and "Indigo Children," and some new ones, to boot. The polyrhythmic blossom "Sejatski (Brother)" is the first released single from LDTA’s 13-song LP In the Fifth House, set to release March 8, 2016. A syncopated beat and motif picks up wind, climbs and falls to the hum of pop-inflected waves—it’s a reaffirmation of the duo’s efforts, a taste of what’s to come, and a resounding sign of life in the quietude of Whittier.

Join Let’s Drive to Alaska for a release party on March 10th at Au Lac in Los Angeles with The Grigori Dance Company, as well as The Littlest Vikingand The New Octaves. – Ryan Mo, photo credit: Jacob Pulido

Deli Readers,

Our Best of Austin Poll for Emerging Artists has been – as usual – a lengthy and painstaking journey which took us through prairies of numbers, horizons filled with band names, and a dense, (mostly) joyous rain of music. We have finally reached our destination and we can announce the final results!

1. CAPYAC

The Artist of the Year for The Deli Austin 2015, the artist voted in by our panel of Austin music folks in the know in tandem with you the public, is the inimitable future funk outfit and Austin standard carrier CAPYAC. To put it as blunt and forward as the good beats this act puts out, the win was no surprise. CAPYAC have taken their sound, their show and their presence in the music scene and have exploded them all to new heights this year. We once called them the ‘smoothest music in Austin right now,’ and not only has this sly scifi-appropriate spacefunk + beats duo lived up to that title with numerous spot-on spaced-out releases since our last review of them, they’ve also added ‘most fun,’ ‘most consistent’ and very possibly ‘best live show in Austin, right now’ to the list of claims they can make on the Live Music Capital of the World’s local scene. Those alone are some damn chops to contend with, but since CAPYAC also had the single that was the biggest repeat play in The Deli Austin’s offices this year with the cherry red, lazer-beats and deep funk glorious “Speedracer,” we really can’t argue with this pick. It’s been, and it continues to be, the age of CAPYAC in Austin, Texas.

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2. Annabelle Chairlegs

If there are two scenes producing at the top of their game in Austin right now that are most visible (out of many such scenes, let’s not short this crazy city its talent), it’d be the beat scene, of which our contest winner CAPYAC is a member, and it would also be the psych rock side of this here music town. Among those acts bending the psych thing back around to new 2016-primed directions, Annabelle Chairlegs is perhaps the most exciting. They’re also The Deli Austin’s #2 Best Emerging Artist of 2015, an accomplishment this young and daring band has achieved due both to its embracing of the spirit of early psychedelic music and for where they branch off from that parent sound to express themselves in their own new and rebellious ways. They’re as much punk and 80s/90s lush indie pop influenced as they are psych; pretty and layered when they’re being edgy and poppy and druggy, and pretty even when they are actually trying to be pretty. It’s hard to do both of those at the same time, but 2015’s Watermelon Summer was a debut album that is very likely to be the soundtrack of this summer in Austin for the young and ultra-hip in the hippy/psych scene, just as it was last summer. These young art partiers, with their bubblegum hair-sporting banshee songstress and dreamy pop singles, are one of the acts we think very well could break out of this city in a big way. With a second place showing in our contest, it looks like the rest of Austin agrees with us.

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3. Tomar and the FCs

The thing about real, good soul is that it says it right there in the name: it’s gotta hit you in the soul. That shit can’t be faked; though many try to achieve it, soul isn’t something that can be tried at or denied when it’s heard in its real form. It hits you, in your own soul like a burning weight, and you know you’re hearing it done right. And, when you hear it done right, you know just why it is so good, and why that’s important. Tomar and the FCs, our third place band this year, are soul. They’re soul, and they’re good, and it’s cool as fuck. They put out songs that sound like new classics, like the guys writing and performing them know their musical history and just went and inserted themselves into the soul canon through the sheer quality and dedication and, to bring it back to the point, the pure fucking soul of their music. Hell, Tomar and the FCs, aren’t trying to bring soul back, they’ve done it. They are soul, and it’s just plain feel good badass sing-it-out music. To do what they do with an old sound in a day that’s so aware of what’s come before, and to make it feel fresh and damn fine to boogie down to, is tremendous, and Tomar and the FCs well deserve the showing they’ve made in our poll.

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Check out our poll’s top 15 below, and don’t forget to get even deeper, exploring all the finalists organized by genre:

ALT ROCK – FOLK ROCK – HIP HOP + FUNK – INDIE POP – INDIE ROCK –PSYCH – PUNK/METAL – ROOTS MUSIC – SINGER-SONGWRITER

BEST OF 2015 POLL FOR EMERGING NKC ARTISTS ****** FINAL RESULTS – TOP 15 ******

ARTIST J OS R TOT   1 Capyac 8.5   0.012 8.512 2 Annabelle Chairlegs 7.5   0.028 7.528 3 Tomar & the FCs 6.5   0 6.5 4 Loteria 6   0.015 6.015 5 Cross Record 5.5   0.005 5.505 6 Carl Sagan’s Skate Shoes 5.5   0.004 5.504 7 Super Thief 5.5   0.001 5.501   Mayeux & Broussard 4.5   0.014 4.514 9 The Cuckoos 3   1.5 4.5 10 Daniel Eyes & The Vibes 3   1 4 11 The Halfways 3.5   0.372 3.872 12 Sailor Poon 3   0.01 3.01 13 Hard Proof   3 0.003 3.003 14 Aaron Miller aka Multi-Tracker 3   0.002 3.002   Katy Kirby 3   0.002 3.002 Legend: J = Jurors, R = Deli Readers, OS = Open Submissions

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If you wonder how this chart came into existence, here is how it all went down: first, we let the local bands submit their music (for free), and got our Deli editors to pick the nominees. Then we polled a list of 15+ Austin scene expert (our jury) and asked them to nominate 3 more bands of their choice each (3 points for the top choice, then 2 and 1). Then we polled our readers. We tried to keep things open for each single genre, from Indie Rock to Roots Music to Hip Hop.

If you are a geek interested in all the subtelties related to how this poll works, you can read its rules here (happy reading!). But if all you care about is the awesome new music Austin produced in the year 2015, this list is all you need. Enjoy!

Many Thanks to our Jurors: Trevor Talley (The Deli Austin), Howdy Darrell (The White Horse), Austen Bailey (The Parish), Tyson Swindell (Red 7), Jason McNeely (Hotel Vegas), Ashley Bradley (Ovrld) Ben Webster (The North Door) Alice Geaccone (Witchxxdoctor) Matt Reilly (KUT Austin) Maggie Lea (Cheer Up Charlies) Margaret Galton (C3) Diane Scott (Continental Club) Shelley Neuman (ATX Streetstyle) Marcus Lawyer (Transmission Events) Jonathon Gaylon (American Icon Records) Gillian Driscoll (Sound Dessert) Alexander Dubois (Self)

Hope you’ll find some awesome new artists you weren’t aware of!

The Deli’s Staff

It may be a little late to make you change your plans for the night, but we just found out about this cool Brooklyn band called Milan to Minsk and they are playing the Mercury Lounge tonight, celebrating the release of their self titled debut EP. Even though the band’s name conjures up images of gray, cold cities (Milan isn’t Rome, my friend!), their elegant lo-fi pop features exotic accents that seem to preannounce the summer. 

Brooklyn based band Psychobaby broke into the NYC scene with an unapologetic banger in “Baby” and its accompanying video in December of 2015. A few weeks later, the band won our Best of NYC Readers’/Fans’ Poll for Emerging Artists in the Slacker Rock category (even though they are not really slackers, but it was the best fit by approximation). With the release of their new EP, "Rough Start," (premiered below) we are introduced to two new songs that give us a better idea of this group’s sonic spectrum: second track "Believer" dabbles in dream pop territory, with Juliet Garrett’s polished vocals delivering her most uplifting melody to date. "Flower Hat Man" explores  post punk atmospheres through dissonant guitars and a more aggressive attitude, but doesn’t come across as natural and accomplished as the first two tracks, which paint a picture of a band with potential. Psychobaby will be performing these and other songs on March 3rd at The Gateway in Bushwick, go check them out! – Adriana S Ballester

The latest trend in electronic music has been… to make it soulful, less machine-like. That’s a stance the fathers of the genre (namely, Kraftwerk and Devo) would find borderline heretic. Shouldn’t electronic music BE about the machine? Shouldn’t it be a celebration of it? Luckily for all you synth worshippers, Brooklyn already has the antidote to the de-mechanization of electronic rock, and it’s called Operator Music Band. The quartet just released their second EP, appropriately titled ‘Matérielmusik‘ (i.e. ‘material music,’ not music of the soul!), which puts synths back at the core of everything, while vocals become little more than a regular instrument. See them live at Palisades on February 26th.

–The Deli KC Staff 

Despite radio-ing out from the foggy northern city of Sendai, Repeated Measures‘ tripped out, overcast garage trickles through the Internet, and it feels like he’s still here in Orange County. Guitar harmonics. Negative-range sine waves. Obfuscated sighs. Christopher Norwood’s electronic ephemera dabs UK beats with West Coast psych, coming up distinct from the Los Angeles beat scene with the Grn+Gld collective: Dirty Merlin, Kalva Won, Cicero, Chip Monk, Dripping Gems, and more. After last year’s ambient love letter Transmission, Norwood’s been teasing out his upcoming release Dark Matters over the past two months, and the wait is finally over. You can still listen to the entire album via Norwood’s Bandcamp, including our personal favorite sonic imprint "Rooftop Comedown"—contemplative, detached, poignant. – Ryan Mo

Rivaling Sade in musical sophistication and loungy atmospheres, Tiger + Man is a Brooklyn based electronic duo with a very artsy approach to music. Formed by Austin-raised Tiger Darrow and South African-born Andrew Orkin, the project is about to release a self produced EP featuring artwork by five different visual artists, but for the video of single ‘Wondering’ (streaming below) the duo went for artists from a different discipline: dance. The choice works perfectly, with the dancers’ expressive moves becoming one with Darrow’s sinuous vocals and the band sparse but rhythmically intriguing arrangements.

We have towards ambient music an attitude similar to the one we have towards olive oil – we don’t really want it by itself, but add it to pretty much anything and… BOOM! Girlyboi is a brand new duo of musically gifted models, who play music that, according to our previous metaphor, floods their simple but touching folk songs in a sea of olive oil (and just the right amount of Eastern spices); the results are pretty tasty indeed. They released three singles in quick succession since September 2015, and went for a quick east coast tour. The word about their music spread so quickly that the door to Rough Trade and Baby’s All Right opened pronto: the band released their debut album at the former in December, and is playing the latter tonight, opening for Deli favorites Wilsen, who graced our mag’s cover in our NYC Fall 2013 issue. 

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

Dueling left and right stereo channel guitar bursts introduce RANN’s live-in-studio video recording of “Falling,” the latest single off their debut album “Yellogun.” The polyrhythmic structure is soon filled out with precisely placed synth, sharp drums and driving bass figures that allow for dramatic spaces between those notes.  “How does it feel?” introduces the essential vocal hook, with the songs title embedded in the answer line “right before you start falling.”  When the arena sized chorus ultimately emerges, a catchy rising melody hook punctuates each passage through.  The overall feel is reminiscent of ELO’s psych-pop Beatles influenced hits. Directed, edited, and shot by Ryan Ela of Midnight Treehouse Productions, the video makes use of high quality black and white imagery in showcasing the bands impressive live performance.  The band is about to embark on a winter-through-spring tour including featured performances at SXSW, then on to LA and culminating with an end of tour concert at Le Poisson Rouge on April 10th. The band recently won  the Indie Pop section of our Best of NYC Readers’/Fans’ Poll for Emerging Artists. – Dave Cromwell