Yes In My Backyard is a semiweekly column showcasing MP3s from new and emerging local talent. This is a compilation of 2010's best local music, lovingly curated by YIMBY columnist Christopher R. Weingarten. See last year's tape here.

R.I.P. Chris Weingarten's old blue trucker hat. Photo by Rebecca Smeyne.

Have you heard the one about how the recession is over? Uh, don't tell it to New York City's musical community. While our center-of-the-universe assembly line of hype puttered on unabated, 2010's biggest up-and-comer success stories were actually beamed from the outer limits of the five boroughs--Titus Andronicus (Glen Rock, NJ), Screaming Females (New Brunswick, NJ), Phantogram (Saratoga Springs, NY), Real Estate (Ridgewood, NJ)--places where money can go to tour vans instead of landlords, where musicians aren't paying $400 a month for the luxury of sharing a practice space with three other bands. The remaining New York City indie-crossovers all benefited from frugal one-man home-recording set-ups (Oneohtrix Point Never, Matthew Dear), stripped down line-ups (the Drums, Sleigh Bells, Matt & Kim) or simply embracing the idea that sounding mushy is smarter than buying new gear (Small Black).

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

Seldon Hunt

Julie Christmas is best known as wailing, barking, bloodletting dervish fronting Brooklyn's most emotionally complex metal band, Made Out Of Babies--a performer capable of unpredictable hysterics and naked vulnerability, a bulletproof mix of the anarchic and the romantic. But Christmas finally allows her sensitive side to fully shine on her first solo album, The Bad Wife (due November 9 on Rising Pulse). The album that matches Christmas's familiar sludge-bludgeon with a diverse array of triumphant indie rock, Waitsian boardwalk ballads, and Hope Sandoval sunset blear--all while the consummate metal vocalist crosses a gut-wrenching rainbow between vintage PJ Harvey skin-rubbing, Jarboe doom-atmospherics, and heaven-bound Björk soar. "It's easy to be pissed because I've had a lot of practice," says Christmas. "I wanted to try something harder. There is some very personal stuff on The Bad Wife that I wanted to tell people about." Her cover of Jacque Brel's classic "If You Go Away" feels just as confessional as any of her originals, reaching deep into her diverse vocal palette to catch creeptacular goth-whisper, Rid Of Me-styled claustrophia, and pure unhinged wail, giving the song new layers of exhaustion, terror and neuroses.

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