God bless the Cake Shop for having carved a performance space in Manhattan for all the DIY, Lo-Fi, garage and punk bands! The venerable LES venue just booked Brooklyn garage-pop quartet Trashbear for a four date November Monday residency that started this week and will continue until November 24. The band plays charming and well crafted, but nonetheless scruffy, pop songs, definitely the kind of chilled but fun music needed to improve the average New Yorker’s late fall Monday nights!

Brooklyn’s own Mesiko will be celebrating the release of their debut album "Solar Door" at Bowery Electric this coming Sunday (11.09). As you can hear from the preview single and opening track "Hamptons" (streaming below) the trio isn’t easily pigeonholeable under one genre, but it owes more to American traditional music than this song may make you think. Throughout the album, Mesiko’s effort to expand roots music’s sonic palette in a psychedelic direction is obvious, and this song – dominated by a dark funk bass line leading to unexpected openings – is no exception.

Born Cages serve their boombastic, anthemic electronic rock-pop with a side of indie attitude. The NYC band is getting a fair amount of attention, and you can certainly blame that on their music’s extreme catchciness. Listening to "Rolling Down the Hill" (the video, streaming below, just premiered on Yahoo Music), generates sudden thoughts of arenas packed with delirious fans, strobe lights and even… fireworks! – it almost sounds as if this song was avtually recorded in a packed arena! Only time will tell if Born Cages will get to play the most capacious of music venues , for now you can catch them at NYC’s Rockwood Music Hall’s Stage 2 on December 2.

From JPs report of Day 4 of the CMJ Music Marathon 2014: "After almost four days of running, and watching live music standing, I actually got to sit down to watch Johnnie Lee Jordan & the Boys‘ set, which was a crazy new concept for me (and almost felt like cheating). I surprisingly had a little time before they went on, so I shut my eyes and nodded off for a quick minute. I awoke to the first distorted licks to a cool, heavy Southern blues style of rock you would never have expected to come out of LI. Having grown up there, I know the vast majority of the Long Island music scene consists of metal bands, emo bands, and alternative weirdo bands. Not this. It started a little slow and heavy, almost desperate. Then it was like a flick switched, and I wasn’t drowsy anymore. What ensued was a most excellent modern variation of old school rockabilly and blues rock that made me question which state, and perhaps which decade I lived in. It was during their third song—a very slowed down, handsome sounding beat — that I thought to myself, “why aren’t there more bands doing this?” Honest love songs rocked gently, and sometimes not so gently, to their ladies of dedication, whoever they may be.

Gowanus, Brooklyn’s local punk rockers EndAnd (a band we booked for on of our CMJ shows two years ago) have been embracing the NYHC punk sound since 2011 while giving it a softer, more melodic edge – somewhat reminiscent of Nightbirds. The trio’s sound is defined by Daniel Fern’s incredibly thick and raw distorted guitar and  by his powerful pipes. They’ve just released a 6-track EP entitled "Fun Times with Shitty People" that was recorded in just 7 hours to really give it that live, underproduced, fuzzy punk-rock feel – but boy, it’s so tight and explosive you wouldn’t think so. The EP’s intro song ‘Art #1‘ is an unrelenting, tense sonic attack with interesting math moments and a chorus that’s borderline grunge, while second track "Choked On Beer" (streaming) follows a more standard (and fun) punk rock script.  The band currently doesn’t have any tour dates scheduled, but after coming off a recent performance at Skate Brooklyn Skate Shop on 10.4, some are likely to emerge so stay tuned! -Michael Haskoor (@Tweetskoor)

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

I repeatedly struggle to find exactly the right words to describe Blow Up Hollywood, a New York-based rock band with over twelve years of music making under their belt. Emerging in 2002 with a self-titled debut release, they’ve since proven to be unrestricted by genre, their listeners, and the pressures of the music industry. While they admit to finding the business a bit corrupt (as their name suggests), they continue to create in spite of it, equipped with a special kind of persistence that has helped them build a loyal fan base over the years. The band offers Steve Messina’s raw, uninhibited vocals atop sophisticated instrumentals, with each album taking shape entirely independent of the others. – Read Jillian Dooley’s interview with Blow Up Hollywood.

Long Island bad boys Nude Beach don’t care (among many other things) that the clock has ticked about a gazillion times since 1977, and obstinately keep putting out records inspired by the music of those golden years, although bypassing entirely what was happening in NYC at the time – not sure whether to call that refreshing or outrageous! You won’t hear Television, Lou Reed, Blondie or The Talking Heads in their songs, but you will find at once The Clash, Buzzcocks, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty and even Elvis Costello. From the two singles available for streaming, the band seems to have matured musically – athough we are pretty sure they’ll deny that: "mature" is a dirty word in punk/DIY circles they dwell in. Maybe that’s why they asked kids to help them create this video for single "For You." See them live tomorrow (11/05) at Mercury for the release party of their third album entitled "LP 77."

Cantina‘s debut EP was The Deli NYC’s Record of the Month in September 2014 so we were very excited to see the band live at CMJ – that’s why we booked them for our Indie Pop CMJ Stage. We weren’t disappointed. Talented chanteuse Renata Zeiguer gracefully and confidently led her band through her beautifully dreamy set of songs. Check out one of her best, "Do You See," streaming below.

From JP’s report of Day 2 of the CMJ Music Marathon 2014. " By the time Celestial Shore played, I was drunk again. Goddamnit. But my ears were reinvigorated with fuzz. Finally. It was about time. I was nervous I’d drown in all this clean delay and organized keys. A clean channel came through the set, but their haze and grit made it so that I couldn’t attentively hear anything else. Guitar parts were sporadic, yet cohesive—a chaos that made sense, almost like a grunge-pop. Soft vocals offset the sludge tones, breathing life into the room. It was fun to watch, if only to see their drummer have himself a time on that crash cymbal. It seemed like every time he hit it, a smile would grow on his face. Some of the songs may very well have been written solely around an insane drum solo, but who cared? There was a slow jam thrown in there (maybe the streaming "Die For Us"?), which had a sudden, jolting tempo change. The last song was bluesy and cool, fading out real nice with the singer/guitarist noisily riffing his guitar frets on his mic stand, which was neat. Yeah, neat. " – Celestial Shore plays Shea Stadium on 11.12 with Leapling and Cave Cricket.

We stumbled upon this video by NYC folk duo Anna/Kate and we just couldn’t help but stare and listen. A beautiful song matched by a simple video that celebrates love and the infinite evocative power of a summer day spent in Coney Island.

Brooklyn-based Altopalo‘s latest singles, "Picchu Machu" and "Chagrinning", offer the kind of genre-mashing experimentations that feel oddly familiar, even if they’re incredibly hard to explain. (Let’s try anyway.) "Picchu Machu" (streaming) is dizzyingly down-tempo, its house beats pogo-ing into breakdowns that border on ambience. It totally works. Elsewhere, "Chargrinning" undulates synesthetically, the focus shifting from whispered vocals to sparse and airy piano interludes, culminating in a raucous instrumental section of clashed drums and 8-bit guitar acrobatics. Most impressive is that they do this as a live act too: we witnessed this at our own Deli CMJ Electro Stage at Pianos on October 25, and were floored by the guys instrumental skill. See them live on November 5 at Friends and Lovers with Ruby My Dear and The Pluto Moons.