Hard to pick just a handful out of the wild array of Austin bands out there tonight playing for the cuddly price of No Money Whatsoever, but here's what's making our feet tap today: Mohawk has a terrific lineup both inside and out, including Brazos, TV Torso, Great Nostalgic (that trio outside - worth braving the chill), Ume, Many Birthdays, and more. Strange Attractors play Red 7, the enigmatic Zookeeper graces the Parish along with Suzanna Choffel and the consistently underestimated Wiretree, Emo's features what will be one of the last sets by Haunting Oboe Music (pictured above and soon calling it quits) + one of our recent Open Contest winners, The Eastern Sea. And you will soon be able to vote in our mega-mega Year End Poll. That's quite a Thursday...there is also some sort of sporting contest happening tonight, which, whatever the result, works as a nice lead-in to an evening of free music. Get on out there. 

Hey fellow Austinians,

We apologize for being a little slow lately with all things related to our Best of Nashville 2009 poll for emerging indie artists. Our NYC Readers' Poll (which we recommend you to check out here) has brought an unexpected amount of traffic to our site, which has caused our server to crash several times yesterday, making us waste a lot of time. Because of this we decided to postpone slightly the beginning of some of the other cities' readers' polls, Austin included.

Anyhoo... we just finished collecting the nominations from our knowledgeable and attractive panel of jurors and we are now ready to hit you all with an impressive list of awesome local, emerging and 100% independent artists. If you’d like to learn more about our voting process, please check out the rules here. 

While we are organizing the list of nominees for the readers' poll, we wanted to announce the winners of our Open Contest. For those unaware, this Contest is the part of our Best of Austin Poll that nominates artists through an open submission system - while the majority of our finalists are freely selected by a jury of local bloggers, promoters and scenemakers. We’d like to thank all the artists who participated in our Open Contest, the ones who submitted directly, and the ones who qualified throughout 2009 by winning our monthly polls. 

Choosing the winners was not an easy decision to make for The Deli writers, which is a testament to our amazing music scene. We are happy to announce that the following artists qualified for the next phase of the poll:

Monahans: 9

Authors: 8

Drew Smith: 7.5

The Eastern Sea: 7.5

Special congratulations to Monahans (in the picture) who were the overall winners of our Open Contest!

The Austin Best of 2009 Readers' Poll will start soon, keep an eye out for it on the right column under all those logos!

The Deli's Staff

The very very Austin phenomenon that is Free Week is in full swing, and the cornucopia of live music to be heard at Agent Zero prices includes - and we're just talking about Wednesday night here - Scorpion Child at the Mohawk, Midgetmen & The Gary at Red 7, Mobley at Club Deville, Wine & Revolution and Hollywood Gossip at The Parish, Strange Attractors and New Roman TImes at Beauty Bar, and Brothers & Sisters, The Laughing, and Oh No Oh My at Emo's.

That list is by no means comprehensive. Those are just samples - there's a handful of up & comers at every Free Week venue. If you spent 2009 thinking about seeing more live music in 2010, spend 2010 seeing more live music, and thinking about spending more time on your couch. Just to mix things up.

Deli Readers,

The Year End Polls are bringing in a lot of traffic and our server provider doesn't like that - they suspended our account for a few hours because of eccessive load on their server's CPU. We tweaked the site's settings on our end and hopefully we won't have this problem again.

Sorry for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience!

Paolo
www.thedelimagazine.com