L.A.

Joe Firstman avoids bugging neighbors in new LP process, tours through February

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Up until early 2009, singer/songwriter Joe Firstman played bandleader for NBC’s Last Call With Carson Daly before the program’s restructuring. Since then, the soulful Firstman has been putting together El Porto, his latest LP and fifth overall release documenting life between the El Porto coast and Venice Beach. Luckily, his neighbors never called the cops: "For three months, my neighbors were tortured with the slow, often painful incarnations of the music blasting out of the windows of my house/studio," Firstman said. "And they never complained, even when we recorded a full horn section in my living room." When it’s worth hearing, it’d be a crime to call the cops.

Joe Firstman plays the Hotel Cafe on Jan. 21 | 21+ — El Porto releases Jan. 26

L.A.

Everest finishes up sophomore LP, fills new material void with video for “Reloader”

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Everest | "Reloader"
Dir. by Anthony Crawford

After touring alongside Neil Young last year, Americana outfit Everest hid out in a northern California chicken farm to record their yet-to-be-titled sophomore album. Now completed, the guys are laying low until release with a coinciding tour and reflecting on the process: “Although we were in a beautiful space, the work became more challenging and it was really one of the toughest experiences for the band thus far," said lead vocalist Russell Pollard. In the meantime, check out their video for "Reloader" which includes footage from their infamous journey with the legendary singer/songwriter.

L.A.

Despite retina-destroying announcements, FMLY kicks off ’10 with small Cali tour

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Happy New Year! After a few days off to plan our Best Artists of 2009 polling extravaganza and other holiday shenanigans, The Deli LA is back!  We would have participated in the indie music blogosphere’s annual tradition of creating arbitrary and self-congratulatory best-of/worst-of lists, but we were too busy putting that power into your hands. Details on that to follow later today. 

To ring in the new year, our friends at FMLY and Lots O’ Crap Magazine are traveling a small California tour with a slew of the avant-garde in the mix. The 6-city tour kicks off Tuesday night at The Smell and hosts Former Ghosts, Railcars, Professor Calculus, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jules Verne, and Mother Mackenzie. Tuesday | The Smell | All Ages | $5

Other dates on the bill below (we are not responsible for the epilepsy that this epic flier may induce):

Philadelphia

Best of Philly Open Contest Results

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Happy 2010 Philly folks! Where does the time go? We really needed that end of the year break. Well, it wasn’t that much of a break because we’ve been working hard behind the scenes getting things ready for our Best of Philly Poll. We just finished collecting the nominations from our knowledgeable and attractive panel of jurors. If you’d like to learn more about our voting process, please check out the rules here. While we are organizing the list of nominees, we wanted to announce the winners of our Open Contest. For those unaware, this Open Contest is the part of our Best of Philly Poll that nominates artists through an open submission system – while the majority of our finalists are freely selected by a jury of local bloggers, promoters and scenemakers.

 
We’d like to thank all the artists who participated in our Open Contest. This was not an easy decision to make for The Deli writers, which is a testament to our amazing music scene. We are happy to announce that Grandchildren, Orbit to Leslie, Levee Drivers, Prowler and The Circadian Rhythms have been selected to join our jurors’ list of nominees, and special congratulations to Grandchildren who were the overall winners of our Open Contest! (Photo by Tiffany Yoon)
 
 
Nominated for the Next Phase:
1. Grandchildren – 9.1
2. Orbit to Leslie – 8.5
3. Levee Drivers – 8.2
4. Prowler – 8.1
5. The Circadian Rhythms – 8.1
 
Keep an eye on our poll over to the right, as it will soon be populated with all the bands nominated for our bigger Best of Philly Poll.
 
– The Deli Staff

 

 

NYC

Best of NYC 2009 Open Contest Results – Intro

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Happy 2010 musical Newyorkers!

Here at The Deli we start the new year with the much anticipated results of our Open Contest linked to our Year End Best of NYC 2009 Poll for emerging artists.

For the unaware, this Open Contest is the part of our Year End Poll which nominates artists through an open submission system – while the majority of the finalists are freely selected by a jury of NYC bloggers, promoters and scenemakers.

First of all I would like to say that it was truly difficult to choose the winners for this contest, and I can genuinely assure you that if we had an endless amount of time to devote to this we would have probably selected 50 to 100 bands instead of 15 or so. This is a testament to how amazing and strong the NYC music scene is right now.

The incredibly high number of submissions forced us to think about a system that would allow our jurors to listen to all the artists’ music properly and to allow all musical genres to be present at the end of the process. To serve this purpose we decided to break down this mass of submissions, and split the entries according to the following genres (which we’ll tackle in detail in the next few blog entries):

1. Alt Rock + Metal
2. Indie Rock + Electro Rock
3. Avant Indie + Noise Rock + Psych Rock
4. ndie Pop + Electronic + Other Genres
5. Rootsy Genres + Songwriters

It must be said that in this case the artists themselves assigned their music to each category during the submission process.

As of course all our NYC writers’ objectivity is flawed by their familiarity with some of the bands involved, to keep the voting as objective as possible we decided to put our out of town editors in charge of the judging. We assigned 3 of them to judge each category – their names are listed next to the results. And to keep things fair, we rewarded a similar amount of artists from each category, rather than going for the highest scores overall.

I personally removed myself from this voting process and it was tough to see some of my favorite local artists not make it to the final phase of our Year End Poll. Nonetheless, I still think that our in house jurors did a great job and that this list of emerging MYC artists is nothing short than phenomenal.

Keep an eye on our poll on the right, as it will soon be populated with all the bands nominated for our bigger Year End Poll.

Paolo De Gregorio
www.thedelimagazine.com

NYC

Open Contest Result: INDIE POP + ELECTRONIC + WORLD.: Catarina Dos Santos + The Paper Raincoat

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[Catarina Dos Santos]

Categories: INDIE POP + ELECTRONIC + OTHER

Region: NYC + NJ + Long Island

Jurors: Deli Portland, New England and Philadelphia Editors

NOMINATED FOR NEXT PHASE
1. Catarina Dos Santos – 8.333
1. The Paper Raincoat – 8.333
3. Savoir Adore – 8.166
4. Miracles of Modern Science – 7.666

RUNNERS UP
Pow Wow!, Brit & the Cavalry, A Big Yes and a small no, Twin Sister

NYC

Open Contest Result: ROOTSY + FOLK + SONGWRITERS: April Smith + Motel Motel

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[April Smith and the Great Picture Show]

Categories: Rootsy – Folk – Songwriters
Region: NYC + NJ + Long Island
Jurors: Deli SF,LA and Philadelphia Editors

NOMINATED FOR NEXT PHASE
1. April Smith – 8.5
1. Motel Motel – 8.5
3. Jones Street Station – 7.833
3. Julie Peel – 7.833
4. Midnight Masses – 7.5


[Motel Motel]


RUNNERS UP
Hymns, No Eye Contact, Quiet Loudly, Kagero, Numbers and Letters