Austin’s Woven Bones may be the second coming of Jesus and Mary Chain with their fuzzed-out, echoey garage rock. Sometimes they sound a little Iggy Pop-ish, sometimes a little Suicide-ish. This is not a bad thing. I like this.

SPONSOR

I caught Austin band Watch Out For Rockets playing the other week at the Beauty Bar, a small smoky den on a bustling hipster strip. Although they hit the stage a few hours late, they still cranked out an awesome set of guitar-based power pop, though they left out my favorite track, Urgent Serpent Merchant (below).

Mistress Stephanie & Her Melodic Cat is the naughty brainchild of Stephanie Stephens and Adam Sultan, two musicians and actors and from Austin, Texas. Initially a cabaret act influenced by Weimar Republic Berlin, Mistress Stephanie & Her Melodic Cat soon expanded into what one critic calls ‘Sado-vaudevillian punk’. Their diverse sound combines everything from classical music to classic rock, performed with outrageous style and irreverent humor that touches on half a century’s worth of history. Their debut CD, Take That!, ranges along the German countryside from Marlene Deitrich to Kraftwerk, then crosses the border into Eurotrash dance, punk rock theater, and even Texas swing.

Austin-based Future Clouds and Radar, the eclectic art-pop ensemble headed by Robert Harrison, has recently released its sophomore recording, Peoria. Where their self-titled debut album showed Harrison as the central figure in a large musical cast, Future Clouds and Radar’s latest offering finds the core band focusing their kaleidoscopic vision into a single cinematic narrative about the illusory nature of mortality. Throughout, Harrison stays true to his genre-hopping eclecticism, leading the journey through a maze of fuzz-box vocals and ethereal keys.

Yellow Fever are a great duo from Austin that harkens back to the girl-fronted indie bands of the 90s. At times Breeders-ish, at others referencing garag-y sounds from other eras, their simple and heartfelt songs remind us of why we all thought mismatched Converse and unkempt androgyny was so cool in the first place.

Listen to the Yellow Fever song, Cats and Rats.

SPONSOR

Austin band The Low Lows are one of my most prized finds of the year so far. It’s introspective music — staggered harmonies delivered by a distant, agonised voice that filters through a wall of tranquil guitar distortion and measured drumming. Every instrument carries a powerful emotion, sometimes keeping their distance from one another, floating up and around the airwaves, and other times colliding and crashing back to earth.