Boston’s favorite electro-pop duo Miss Geo recently unveiled their newest EP, Shapes, and unsurprisingly, it’s definitely worth your time--trust me. Even if you don’t trust me, listen to it--it’ll be the best twenty minutes you spend all month. It may only be four tracks long, but Shapes crams enough synths, pop hooks and dance-worthy drum beats to keep you dancing for the next month.

 "Dancing After Dark" was the standout track in this collection. The infectious synth and smooth, almost sultry vocals grab your attention and lead you through to the end of the song--kind of like when you’re out at a club and you catch someone giving you “the eyes” from the other side of the room, drawing you closer for some inexplicable reason.

For more info about Miss Geo, check out their website.

-Dan McMahon (@dmcmhn)
 

Well y’all, the bell rung on the epic bout that was our last Artist of the Month poll about a week ago, and heavyweight hip-hoppers LNS Crew found themselves the last men standing in the ring to take the title. Many congrats to LNS on their win!

For this next bout, we’ve got a hip-hopless roster for the first time in a while, with a singer-songwriter-producer, two psych bands and some damn fine Austin punk slugging it out between the virtual ropes for the completely imaginary but nonetheless glorious Deli Austin Weekly Champion Belt.

We’ll do a deeper post on each of these guys over the course of the contest, but for now, here’s a little on our current contenders and why they particularly caught our ear this month:

Abram Shook

Sound: Indie singer-songwriter with quite high production value

Qualifications: Lovely little single “Understood” and its equally pleasurable music video were just released as a preview to Shook’s sophomore album and are making noise around town, earning Shook KUTX’s Artist of the Month. Perhaps more importantly, recent photos of Shook reveal that he is almost definitely Austin’s premier wizard in training, what with that peppery hair/beard combo.

The Halfways

Sound: Psych pop straight out of the era that birthed it, but with a dab of the new post-Fleet Foxes psych sound

Qualifications: A string of recent shows coupled to new output from the band, who has been doing hard work in the studio. Track “I Don’t Mind” bodes quite well for the rest of the new stuff coming from this group, which has certainly become a pillar of the ATX psych scene in the last couple of years.

THREE BONES

Sound: Psych blues with soul to spare and a riveting lead singer/lead guitarist duo in Victoria de Benedicty and Dalt Jacob

Qualifications: Only one of the oddest, strongest, 60s-est music video ever to come out of the local psych scene, plus the promise of more music and some big-time shows (including one with fellow nominees The Halfways at Scoot Inn not long ago). The vid for triumphant, soul-packed track “Hold On to Ya” is exactly what you want out of retro psych, in that its influences are obvious (that projection is pure 60s), but it’s very self-aware and thoroughly fun. These dudes also just won the John Lennon Songwriting Contest for a Valentine’s Day love song for other new track “Love is the Only Way,” which is some pretty major shit.

Xetas

Sound: Punch-em-up, no stops, unfuckwitable contemporary punk

Qualifications: This is a band everyone in Austin should know, even though they themselves probably don’t give a shit if you do or don’t. This is as close as Austin gets to a supergroup, with each member an undoubted veteran of the Austin music thing, but even though we’d nominate these guys just about anytime for the quality shit they’ve consistently been producing in their relatively short time together, they particularly make the cut for this month’s poll on the utter, pounding strength of their new single “The Point,” released as a lead up to soon-to-come LP “The Redeemer.” They also just wrapped one big-ass, quick-ass tour all over the nation, which is more’n enough to get them the nod in our poll this month.

Holy Sons, brainchild of psychedelic songwriter Emil Amos, doesn't play music that will brighten your day. Emil uses this project as an outlet for dealing with his own ghosts, and his dark, thoughtful, haunted songs don't do anything to conceal that: the process obviously represents a rather effective form of self medication, considering he's released eleven records since 2000 (two of them in 2014). Emil recently moved to NYC (from Portland), recruited musicians to re-form his band, and has been playing several gigs in and around Brooklyn. You can catch him at the upcoming Brain Cave Festival on April 25 at Baby's All Right.

DAVIDS latest video release “Right On” is a strong current of electronic pop. We are never going into the woods again!!! “Right On”  video is something spooky, but we can’t stop dancing! Heavy synth beats thrash you back and forth to a raw invigorating vocal. Did we mention...we can’t stop dancing! DAVIDS like to be off screen so they got front men, Apocryphal Avulsion, to give it their all with that scary sexy lady in the back. Stay tuned on FB for DAVIDS latest EP.

As another run of The Deli Austin's Artist of the Month poll wraps up, we're lookin' at the only artist in the competition that we haven't yet featured on The Deli- the versatile producer Dr Bobby Banner MPC. For those who aren't electronic music producers (which, in Austin, is fewer people than you'd think), the MPC in Dr Bobby's name refers to the Akai Music Production Center, a series of powerful and powerfully badass beat-making machines. Presumably, Dr Bobby Banner MPC makes the slick, dynamic hip-hop tracks he's known for on such machines, and if you go from the artist's social media pages, Dr Bobby might just actually be an MPC. Or at least, that might be his character, but who knows? In the days of hologram Japanese superstars and with music production tech where it's at these days, the idea of a beat machine that makes its own music isn't all that far fetched.

Regardless of who, or what, is making Dr Bobby Banner's music, the recent output from this man/machine has been downright stellar. Particularly, Dr Bobby's new album Musicology, released at the end of March, is a chance to hear one of Austin's brightest beatmakers paired up with an absolute army of quality rappers. Lots of times we see purely instrumental albums come out of the beatmaking scene in Austin, so (as much as we dig those instrumental joints) it's a welcome change-up to get a 12 tracker packed full of both beat and rhyme. That nod toward the traditional hip-hop song structure is about the only place this album is predictable though, as Musicology has Banner et al. letting their creativity and personal spins on hip-hop running free. For an example of the acrobatic musical forces at work here, take track "David Ruffin" below, whose herky-jerky sample-based beat serves as a playground for spitters Scuare and No1Important to let their words jump up and around and play all over. The rest of the album is equally good, and all available what for your listening pleasure over here. If this shit gets ya noddin' like it does us, give the rest a listen, and vote to the right to make Dr Bobby Banner MPC our first human/machine hybrid Artist of the Month.