Bare Claws for a 4 piecer from Newmarket, cathcy pop rock to the max! "Beautiful" from their self titled record has a nice mix of guitar an keys in the verse and the chorus is a beautiful mess of all instruments involved. Try to isolate each instrument in your head...how does it all make sense? It just does. Pretty cool. I wonder if they planned that? Anyways its pretty fun to listen to. I look forward to listening to more of Bare Claws. I also dig their Chicago Cubs style logo. These fellas will be doing their thing on Saturday 5/2 @ The Smiling Buddha for Canadian Music Week. Find out their set time and add it to your itinerary before you laminate it. -Kris “Big City” Gies

Get some girlongirl action tonight @ the Cavern Bar. Keep your mind outta the gutter...Katie, Lauren and Paul will get you moving with some sweet sounds. This talented alternative trio will rock you steady with pretty vocals and harmonies that shift back and forth between guitars and drums. Take a listen to their live cover of Phil Spector's "I Love How You Love Me", it will get you pumped for tonight's show! Stay tuned on FB for info on their upcoming album. 

 “Josephine”, the single from Honeysuckle’s forthcoming debut album, Arrows, is everything that is right with folk and country music. The intro immediately drew me in; there’s something about banjos and mandolins that makes me exceedingly happy, but banjos and mandolins played together--beautiful.

Along with the instrumentation, the lead vocals on this song are powerful, yet smooth, sweet and sorrowful. The band’s generous use of harmonies and backing vocals makes “Josephine” a song worthy of several plays on their Bandcamp.

Honeysuckle will be having their release show for Arrows tomorrow night, April 29, at Out of the Blue Too Art Gallery in Central Sq., Cambridge. For more info about the show, click here.

-Dan McMahon (@dmcmhn)

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.