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.

​Sightings are Brooklyn's greatest living noise band--period. The avant-bruisers have been making jagged, nauseous, pig-fucked chip-'n'-sizzle for over a solid decade and have only gotten better with age. Their upcoming seventh album, City Of Straw (due April 13 on Brah Records) is easily their most expansive, pumping hollowed-out punk rock dirges as if they were transmissions from scrambled porn channels, all fuzz, static, and pulse-defying hiccups. Produced by Oneida's Kid Millions and Shahin Motia (full disclosure: two of my brahs), Sightings are starting to sound like a full-on rock band. "The guitar sounds those guys got were the best we've had in a studio," says drummer Jon Lockie. But if Sightings are indeed rockers, just think of them as expressionists, using a prismatic array of bowel-battering fuzz and stuttering gurgles instead of "riffs." Opener "Tar And Pine" starts as a precise piece of Mille Plateaux-ready glitch-dub before diving headfirst into oily pits of industrial wreckage, Flipper doom, and suffocating mounds of dirt. Below, an interview, tourdates, and the "Tar and Pine" download:

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