Yes In My Backyard is a semiweekly column showcasing MP3s from new and emerging local talent.

Tommy Kearns

​Brooklyn muckos Batillus shatter woofers and spirits as part of the New Wave Of Brooklyn Doom, alongside previous YIMBY favorites like Bloody Panda and Hull. But they are the blackest, bleakest, and orneriest of the lot, emoting and gurgling at a snail's pace, more concerned with creating massive walls of impenetrable ambience than giving a weedhead something fun to bang along to. Usually, it's a creepy-crawly churn slowly tumbling at a BPM no one would have the patience to count. Their recent addition to their MySpace page, "Division," slathers on feedback with the thickest brush possible. It's a haunting squeal broken up by bayonet stabs of monster doom which eventually settles into a Boris-like groove--it's safe to say that Greg Peterson's guitar tone may be the one for New York metal musicians to beat in 2010. Beyond his throaty bellows, new vocalist Fade Kainer adds a subtle shade of space noise that's more Forcefield noisepunk shudder than Hawkwind cosmic slurp. Each note is held for a harrowingly long time, allowing the listener to pore over tone and marvel at shape--thankfully these dudes always supply fans with monstrous-but-manageable high-bit-rate MP3s for maximum exploration of their increasingly expansive sound. Download one below.

Yes In My Backyard is a semiweekly column showcasing MP3s from new and emerging local talent.

​Brooklyn bliss brokers Growing have fully grown into their rhythmic stutter-creep on their seventh album, PUMPS!, taking their sound to new cinematic heights. From the band's early days as a meditative quasi-metal drone duo to their early experiments in beat-centric slice-'n'-dice, Growing have only had one objective--to envelop the listener in an abrasive-yet-cozy sound world. PUMPS! (due April 6) is their first album for Vice Records and first with new third member Sadie Laska of IUD. It's the group's brashest and busiest in years, mixing a colorful panoply of sound that is at one dance music, sound collage and graceful noise. Errant skips are tweaked to do the work of drum machines, random things sputter in epileptic disharmony, and inhuman voices hiccup and burp in the ether--an uneasy spiral somewhere between microhouse and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. You can get a real feel for the increasing complexity of Growing's new compositions by hearing the short PUMPS! burst "Camera '84." Once the beat kicks in it's like a whisper of krautrock, the dizzy slurps of Black Dice's Repo, a sexy Italo disco record, and at least one mystery sample, all playing at a harrowing 84 bpm (though it feels more like 168).

Yes In My Backyard is a semiweekly column showcasing MP3s from new and emerging local talent.

Will Calcutt

​Brooklyn trio ARMS (all caps, please) is the tasteful, affable, basement-brewed indie-pop guise of Harlem Shakes guitarist Todd Goldstein. Before breaking up in September of last year, Harlem Shakes was the buzz band du jour, full of TVOTR studio motorik, sunshiney harmonies, jaunty keys, and garage rock churn. But behind the scenes, Goldstein was busy crafting a darker animal. ARMS is decidedly moodier, sulking and soaring in reverb-soaked bursts, like Grizzly Bear covering late-'80s Cure, or Phosphorescent trading Johnny Cash's black for Peter Murphy's Bauhaus black. Their upcoming five song record, called the Arms EP, follows their 2009 debut with a five-song cycle that tells a story about relationships and monsters. "Heat & Hot Water" appears in the middle, Goldstein's muted baritone cawing with intensity, his band perfectly mirroring his glacial changes in energy.

Yes In My Backyard is a semiweekly column showcasing MP3s from new and emerging local talent.

Splendid Corp.

​Las Rubias Del Norte founder Olivier Conan describes his band's sound as a "European approach to Latin music," but really they take more of an "Internet generation approach to Latin music." Their third album Ziguala, out today on Barbès, proudly plucks from countless traditions--Tex Mex, Bollywood, Kurt Weill--all given a gorgeous, nostalgic, cinematic melanchol, and the irresistable lilt of Latin-tinged exotica circa 1953. The soaring dual vocals of Allyssa Lamb and Emily Hurst have the unadorned cool of a Codeine-drenched Yma Sumac; meanwhile, the seven other members of the band pluck and sway--mandolins prickle, Farfisas are poked, claves clack evocatively, string quartets swirl off the ancient records found at estate sales, romances are evoked in the desert wind. Opener "Porque Te Vas" is a cover of the 1976 hit by Spanish-via-California-via-London folk singer Jeanette. Says Conan, "Jeanette, the original singer, was not Spanish and had this almost autistic disconnect with the lyrics. As a result, the song feels both very mournful and very detached, which is most of its appeal. We tried to keep that approach, while still appropriating it."

Yes In My Backyard is a semiweekly column showcasing MP3s from new and emerging local talent.

​New York's Child Abuse is a gloriously confrontational band, mixing the incoherent glugs of death metal, the dissonant meander of 12-tone composition, the atonal squonk of free-jazz, blasts of ucky noise, and a wet gob of old-fashioned punk rock. Second album Cut And Run (due on Lovepump Records, April 13) continues to blur the lines between metal, avant-garde, and simple nihilistic abrasion, blasting out six arty and ugly songs that sound like if Dirty Projectors got eaten by Cannibal Corpse. "Even though we all love Stockhausen and Morbid Angel, our sound and writing process has never been preconceived or self-conscious," says bassist Tim Dahl. "Twentieth century composition and metal has influenced us, but I wouldn't consider us 'serious' composers nor a metal band. Until metalheads consider us a metal band, we are not a metal band." "Bebe" is some searing, mildly funky non-metal metal, working like zombie Stravinsky and zombie Battles clawing each other's eyes out over some galloping 9/8 double kicks.

Yes In My Backyard is a semiweekly column showcasing MP3s from new and emerging local talent.

​Brooklyn drift-and-strum duo Christy and Emily (a.k.a. Christy Edwards and Emily Manzo) have spent a few years in Brooklyn developing their viscous slurry, which--as of last year's YIMBY staple "Lover's Talk", was a pillow-like fog that split the difference between dreampop reverb and art-folkie intimacy. Third album No Rest (due April 6 on Klangbad) loses a thick layer of their signature fluffgaze, opting for a stripped-down, vulnerable quaver--ultimately their best album yet. Produced by Hans Joachim Irmler of Faust on location in Germany, No Rest was all the warmth of Faust IV with none of the clang, allowing the voices of Edwards and Manzo to remain dry and unadorned atop shimmering seas of organs, malleted cymbals, slowcore guitars, and studio swirls. "Little World" is a gorgeous mix of Mazzy Star moods and '90s college-rocker theatrical plainspeak, using a haze of back-slap guitar and slinky keys for Emily to wail about fear, apprehension, and guilt--all before a thunderstorm of what sounds like kalimbas and gamelan sweep them all away.

Yes In My Backyard is a semiweekly column showcasing MP3s from new and emerging local talent.

Tina Junker

​Twin Stumps are Ridgewood-based pukenoize art-punks, noisy nihilists, abrasive tantrum-throwers that make Pissed Jeans look like pressed jeans. To wit, their melodies are crazy blown-out. Hideously blown-out. Comically blown-out. Sure, occasionally a classic punk gnash peeks through, but most of the times it's a barking, gnashing, anti-chillwave maelstrom--like Wolf Eyes, but with a reliable drummer. After a 12" and a cassette made the rounds, their debut album, Seedbed, is set to finally drop on April 20. First taste, "Missing Persons," is a jarring fuzzfuck, opening with a Flipper-style bass massage that's got the subtlety of an airhorn to the ear, then leaning into a noise-metal groove like Real Thing-era Faith No More played through shredded speakers and a mouth full of duct tape.

Yes In My Backyard is a semiweekly column showcasing MP3s from new and emerging local talent.

Stupid Party play 538 Johnson. Photo by Lauren Vandevier.

​Stupid Party are crusty, grungy masters of the bruising garage-pop that has been rocketing bands like Shellshag, Screaming Females, and Jeff the Brotherhood to the top of the Village Voice last.fm playlists--hell, they're even playing with the latter two tonight at Death By Audio. Why Stupid Party haven't blown up is beyond our comprehension, since they've got everything that's beautiful about ugly fucknoise rock--short songs, dollops of feedback, Jesus Lizard yowl, superfuzz bigmuffery--but with big colorful hooks that belie their disheveled exterior. They're even swell guys who host wild, occasionally stupid parties in their Brooklyn home. "Sludger," from their recently released self-titled debut (Freedom School) is one of their slower lurches, a Kyuss stomp with a Mudhoney yowl. Swallow quick, best served cold.

Yes In My Backyard is a semiweekly column showcasing MP3s from new and emerging local talent.

​New York art-proggos Kayo Dot have broken metal's final taboo. Sure, they've been living on the bleeding edge of avant-metal for three albums, filling their impenetrable stew with freeform jazz, unglued Stravinsky, and King Crimson's most abstract blurble--but they may have broken metal's only commandment on upcoming fourth album Coyote, due April 6 on Hydra Head. "Not really any guitar on this album," says frontman Toby Driver. "A tiny bit, but it doesn't even sound like guitar, so it perhaps doesn't really count. There's that quest to make some brutal rock sans guitar." In turn, Coyote is a 40-minute narrative composition that swirls with cooing violins, whining trumpets, jangling xylophones, and haunting blasts of cosmic debris--easily their most cohesive, heavy-hitting and best album yet. Influenced by early '80s goth and Herbie Hancock's more psychedelic excursions, Coyote is a mini-suite that's at once punishing, sad and gloriously free. The 11-minute "Whisper Ineffable" is the album's second act, an indescribable gust of jazz-fusion, minimalist John Hassell trumpet howl, Zappa-esque blender-benders, and Hawkwind-ready space junk. Says Driver, "I mean, almost everything about this one is different for Kayo Dot, but what makes it familiar to our identity is the escapist quality, the adventurousness, and my compositional idiosyncrasies that I hope, at this point in my life, are recognizably unique to me."

Yes In My Backyard is a semiweekly column showcasing MP3s from new and emerging local talent.

​Brooklyn four-piece the Shondes make bold, brassy lonely-heart rock with the snarl and swoon of classic '90s Northwestern indie--all riot grrl bluster, K Records sentimentality, and a keening, wailing violin that's more Nirvana Unplugged than Raincoats unhinged. Their debut album, My Dear One, due May 4 is one of the first records released by Fanatic Records, the label arm of the long-standing indie promo company. Separating themselves from Sleater-come-latelys, the Shondes have a little bit of steampunky clatter underneath their crunching riffs and a keen ear towards the Jewish music that raised each of its four members. "There are definitely moments in our music where you can tell we've been absorbing Jewish sounds our whole lives--in the spirit of the vocals and the violin especially," says vocalist/bassist Louisa Solomon. "But it's not something we are hyper-conscious of. It just happens because we write from the heart, and those old sounds live pretty deep inside us." "Make It Beautiful" features Elijah Oberman's violin swirling plaintively around the edges of a Jewish scale, while the rest of the band digs deep into a Cranberries-meets-Gossip alt-ruckus.