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

 

Deli Readers,

Our Best of Chicago 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!

The Post-Punk trio of Chris Sutter (vocals/guitar), Joe Gac (bass), and Ryan Wizniak (drums) known as Meat Wave formed in 2011. In September of 2015 they released their third album, first on Hollywood’s SideOneDummy Records, Delusion Moon. The band spent most of 2015 touring the UK and North America fine tuning a sound that is both chaotic and pleasingly melodic.

The spirit of this Cumbia Jam band is undeniable, and Dos Santos Anti-Beat Orquesta has a unique sound that our readers and voters both agreed on. 2015 saw the release of their thrilling debut album, Dos Santos.

Campdogzz is the duo of Jess Price (vocals/guitar) and Mike Russell (of Wedding Dress, Suns) (multi-instrumentalist) creating gritty blues-infused rock. The will be expanding the band and touring in 2016. 

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 – ELECTRO-HIP HOP – INDIE POP – NOISE ROCK/AVANT – PSYCH ROCK/POP – PUNK/GARAGE/METAL – ROOTS MUSIC

[JASON, PLEASE UPDATE THE HEADPHONE LINKS IN THIS CHART!] BEST OF 2015 POLL FOR EMERGING Chicago ARTISTS ****** FINAL RESULTS – TOP 15 ******

ARTIST J OS R TOT   1 Meat Wave 6.5   0.017 6.517 2 Dos Santos Anti-Beat Orquesta   3 2 5 3 Campdogzz 3   0.072 3.072 4 Soddy Daisy 3   0.065 3.065 5 Luggage 3   0.012 3.012   Al Scorch 3   0.012 3.012 7 Bleach Party 3   0.009 3.009 8 Circuit Des Yeux 3   0.008 3.008 9 Disappears 3   0.005 3.005 10 Whitney 3   0.004 3.004 11 Archie Powell & the Exprts 3   0.002 3.002 12 Saba 3   0.002 3.002 13 The Congregation 3   0.001 3.001 14 Jude Shuma 2   0.5 2.5   Burnside & Hooker   1 1.5 2.5 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+ Chicago 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 Chicago produced in the year 2015, this list is all you need. Enjoy!

Many Thanks to our Jurors: Michael Gebel (Empty Bottle), Lisa White (Freelance Music Writer), Eric Muhlberger (Sofar Sounds Chicago), Bill Valenta (Theft Liable To Prosecute), Jim Kopeny (Chicagoist), Brendan Losch (Count Me Out), Jason Behrends (The Deli Chicago), Eric Schelkopf (The Total Scene), Adam (Saki Record store), Elle Quintana (Reggie’s Rock Club), Coleman Brice (Cole’s Chicago), Matt Baron (Coach House Sounds), Bill Valenta (TLTP.com)

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

The Deli’s Staff

The Deli LA is proud to premiere this jagged new track from Rex Osterkamp’s dancepunk-for-funsies project REXX. "Motion" cuts about an inch deeper than the bedroom slackers of his previous album I Really Tried to Save the Day, with its visceral lyricism and kick-in-the-teeth dissonance. If Osterkamp’s description of 30 foot dads with Oakley shades doesn’t spin you, the breakneck rhythm will make sure you’re on the ground by song’s end. "Motion" is the first single from REXX’ upcoming yet-to-be-named cassette, slated to release on the fiercely DIY Danger Collective Records in May. – Ryan Mo

 

For the five minutes that I listened "f a n t a s y l o v e" by LUV, nothing else mattered. The tip-of-the-tongue ’80s intro, diffracting into effervescent, luminous meloromanticism left a taste half-metallic, half-citric in my mouth. It was like witnessing the birth of a musical deity, like the ones we’ve come to know through larger publications: Solange, Blood Orange, Sky Ferreira.

The bedroom project is as youthful as its sound, started by the enigmatic johnny since August 2015, with some material that s/he’d "been working on for years." Listing N’Sync, Prince, Britney Spears, and Ready for the World as major influences, johnny mixed ’90s pop, new wave and R&B inspirations with homespun technique, taking on a markedly different sound from the debut single "leave."

"Empress Of, MNDR, Kimbra, ABRA, this wave of female producers all inspired me to start taking my lil bedroom jams more seriously," johnny says.

LUV is currently planning shows in the Los Angeles area with .paperman in April; check back for more info. Until then, listen to the bedroom producer’s newest EP and hope that this is anything but a fantasy.– Ryan Mo

Sleepwalker, Long Beard’s debut album, is aptly named, for listening to each song feels like maneuvering through the hazy edges of your most melancholic dreams – both here and there, warm, and cool, so close and yet so distant.  Perpetually teetering between sleep and awake, the album opens up with an instrumental track that sounds like it’s being played backwards, slowly leading into “Porches,” a song of desire and longing where Leslie Bear pleads “who do you love?/ Who do you love?/ And is it enough?” The album climaxes at "Dream" – before the vocals start disintegrating, becoming almost indiscernible, with the looping electronic textures folding into themselves – as if the silhouette of those gentle songs disappeared into a shadow and then became nothing more than a film blanketing the early hours of dusk.

“Please don’t forget/ You’re something I listen to/ When I’m not sleeping.”

Don’t miss Long Beard performing at Baby’s All Right with Emily Yacina, Yohuna, and Crosslegged on 2.29. – Adriana S Ballester

An artist moving comfortably from glitchy folk, to orchestral arrangements, to spacey rock freak-outs, Ben Talmi stretches his canvas wide, reaching some far-out places with his music along the way. Thankfully, he also has a gift for making these sonic journeys sound incredibly catchy. New track ‘Pure’, from latest release ‘My Art of Almost,’ continues this path towards pop music transcendence, with a song that’s as much fun and colorfully rendered as the eye-popping video accompanying it. Check out the video for new single ‘Pure’ below. – Mike Levine (@goldnuggets)