When Austin musician
Kendra Sells shared with a friend her new solo work, they suggested the description club punk. It s an apt encapsulation of
All in Your Head, an exploratory dance of distorted guitars, anarchic structures, and magnetic beats rooted in Sells vocal expertise. Released with Richmond s
Quiet Year Records, the singer calls the seven-track EP a whole rendezvous of whatever I have going on in my head. I ve never been good with placing genres, especially with the EP being kind of all over the place, she says. I had just started learning Ableton. I ve never owned cool pedals or a good amp, so it was really exciting to mess around with so many tones. The whole thing felt very playful. I was just trying things out and enjoying myself.
When a young
Keith Galloway Jr. couldn t sit still in church, his mother suggested he take up a seat next to the pianist. That sage advice eventually led the Ft. Worth native to
UT-Austin s jazz program, where the keyboard maven finishes his sophomore year. His own solo musical outlet,
KindKeith, a dreamy alternative R&B guise, debuted full-length bow
Take What You Need last Friday in collaboration with longtime friend and co-producer
Ian Salazar, who Galloway calls Skinny. With gospel music, you re taught jazz theory from the jump, says 20-year-old Galloway. It felt like a job as a little kid. You have to wake up early, put on a nice suit, and then sit at the organ. So when I met Skinny, it was perfect. I was 15 and wanted to start playing in a band.
Austin Music Awards, held at the
Moody Theater on March 11, turned out to be the final show I attended in 2020. That also proved the last time I dressed up with a tiny purse, saw those friends you only run into at shows, and went out on the patio to talk shit about Austin music. While the 40th annual
Austin Music Poll can t account for such nuances, it addresses the ongoing pandemic head-on.
Detailed last week in The Austin Music Poll Got COVID-19, (Music, Jan. 8), the ballot winnowed down to 20 categories and the
Hall of Fame as spearheaded by the coronavirus-specific new categories including Best Livestreaming Artist, Best 2020-Themed Song, and Musician Who Went Above & Beyond. As evidenced by passionate emails for broadening the Best Online Series category, the Poll and the Austin Music Awards they bestow still mean a lot locally after four long decades. A body of 600 homegrown music professionals helped determine the multiple-choice nominees, now online at vote.austinchr