Deleted Scenes: Having rolled into town in the wee hours of the morning, Deleted Scenes was looking a little worse for the wear at yesterday's show. But however disheveled they were, the bar–a grimy sports dive about a mile out of Austin–had them beat. True troopers, they delivered a pretty good set anyway. New songs threw some double-kick drum and Casio DG-20 into the band's spacey indie-rock.

Yellow Fever: Slant 6 and Quix-o-tic frontwoman Christina Billotte had one of the best singing voices of the early '90s–equal parts bored and bluesy. But she's M.I.A. these days, so Austin's Yellow Fever will have to do. The duo–with its eerie melodies and spare instrumentation–is an adequate stand in, though. The crowded tent at the Other Music showcase was probably the wrong place to hear them. Better to catch Yellow Fever in somebody's living room, where they would be spared the competition of a chatty 100 person-strong bathroom line.

More after the jump

Dum Dum Girls: Juxtaposed against the sweaty mid-afternoon masses, L.A.'s Dum Dum Girls–clad in black dresses, dark sunglasses, and heavy lipstick–looked like they had been beamed in from another planet. Or perhaps plucked from Elvira's pencil box. The band's set at the Other Music showcase was drenched in reverb, so much so that apart from the word "baby" it was hard to decipher any of the band's lyrics. But between the clothes, the hair, and the band's gothy girl-pop message came across perfectly clear.

Love of Diagrams: Back for its first U.S. tour since 2007, Melbourne, Australia's Love of Diagrams performed a set drawn largely from its new record Nowhere Forever. I liked it, but they're friends, so take that as you will. The new stuff is heavy and expansive–a grittier take on '90s shoegaze legends like Ride. Buddies or no, I don't think there's any arguing that Love of Diagrams have the best rhythm section in the Southern Hemisphere.

Explode Into Colors: I only caught five-minutes of this set, but what I heard I like. All-girl post-punk heavy on the percussion–a modern answer to ESG with a bit of dancehall reggae flavor.

Ray Davies: I showed up to La Zona Rosa early in order to wait around for the Roky Erickson (see below) with no idea who else was playing. At first I thought somebody was playing Kinks covers, but it turned out to be the real thing. Davies played most of the set accompanied by another guitarist, but at the end a full backing band came on stage to belt out a few of the hits.

Roky Erickson & Okkervil River: Having watched the Roky Erickson documentary, I'm slightly bewildered that anybody could get him on stage at all. Austin folk-rockers Okkervil River succeeded, somehow. I had high hopes that they'd hit the stage with a killer version of "Slip Inside This House." That may have bit a bit of a lofty expectation. Who knows, though, they may have played it–since it was already 2am, I didn't stick around too long. The band did do a pretty good take of "Two Headed Dog" and Erikson still sounds pretty unchained, although he would have sounded more so had been willing to sing directly into the mic.

Also seen: Real Estate, The XX

I'm pretty sure I tried to call Merriweather Post Pavilion "Record of the year" back in January, when I reviewed it, but City Paper managing editor Andrew Beaujon argued that this statement might be a tad premature, given that '09 still had 11 months left to go. But here we are in December and it's still great.

Mi Ami
Watersports
Touch & Go/Quarterstick

From a sort-of-embarrassing-but-earnest blog post that I wrote after attending three Mi Ami's shows last March:

But yeah, they really dropped the A-bomb on me. I had seen them before–when they were still a duo and then last February when they came through DC–and I liked it, but thought it just sounded liked a more stripped down version of Black Eyes. This time though, I don't know, it really clicked. The good shows had the same energy as some of the Evangelical church services that I went to back when I was writing the Service Industry column. The kind of thing where the band doesn't play hymns so much as they act as a foil for the preacher's gradually intensifying emotions and everything just gets crazier and crazier until some old lady passes out in the isle. Except at the DC show, it wasn't an old lady, just some tragic punker kid who had a septum piercing and smelled sort of like salami.

More after the jump:

Love of Diagrams
Nowhere Forever
Unstable Ape/Remote Control

The Melbourne, Australia trio graduates from scrappy post-punk to expansive space-rock that's one part shoegaze uplift and two parts Flying Nun Records-style skronk. The Northern hemisphere slept on Love of Diagrams this year, big time.

Phoenix
Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
Glassnote

French pop band reaches for the stars, benefits from not being American.

Deleted Scenes
Birdseed Shirt
What Delicate Recordings

Sad, uplifting, and bizarre in just about equal measure, Birdseed Shirt is probably the best record anybody in D.C. put out this year. It really deserves that spot in Black Cat's jukebox.

Polvo
In Prism
Merge

Hey, not everything has to be like Star Wars. Sometimes your heroes take ten years off, come back, and really kick ass.

Obits
I Blame You
SubPop

Obits guitarist Sohrab Habibion called me out on Black Plastic Bag (R.I.P.) because I made fun of him for wearing shorts onstage at SXSW. In hindsight, I was being a lazy critic and a bit of a jerk. We got it sorted out, though (I think), but even if Habibion and his bandmates hate my guts, I'll still listen to this record.

Kurt Vile
Childish Prodigy
Matador

Philadelphia songwriter and mega-producer Daniel Lanois are privy to the same secret: If you take the music of the baby-boomers and run it through a ton of effects, it sounds cool again. Hey, don’t laugh, it worked for Bob Dylan on Oh, Mercy. And it works for Kurt Vile, too.

Blues Control
Local Flavor
Siltbreeze

The ultimate soundtrack to the final beer of the evening.

Dam Funk
Toeachizown
Stones Throw

Dam Funk has the chords of eternity at his fingertips. Yeah, that sounds like a cheesy Jim Morrison lyric, but when it comes to synthesizers, the Los Angeles-based modern-funk pioneer really does have the touch. "[I'm trying to get] the best chord that I’ve ever heard in my life. It can hit your heart strings," he told me during a Q&A last May. "Not that Lil Jon effect–those are the devil chords. I’m trying to get the beautiful chords, to get to something inside." His debut, Toeachizown, is crammed with just those chords.

Records that I probably enjoyed just as much, but was too lazy to blurb:
Omar S Fabric 45
Dirty Projectors Bitte Orca
Flaming Lips Embryonic
True Womanhood Magic Child Digital 7"
Fresh & Onlys The Fresh & Onlys
The Clientele Bonfires on the Heath
Circulatory System Signal Morning
The Points Beat In Hell 7"
Real Estate S/T