Music

Five Philly artists you might’ve slept on last year

The Cats are gorgeous and inventive in a Guided By Voices/Breeders way, only young and full of vinegar.

Cyberbully Mom Club

The Cats

On Facebook, this South Philly band has filled in its genre tags thusly: “rock, old guy lo-fi.” Not wrong, but definitely an undersell for an act this exciting. The Cats are gorgeous and inventive in a Guided By Voices/Breeders way, only young and full of vinegar.

Released back in April, Relax on Everyone is a loud, dirty, kinda sludgy/kinda vibrant chunk of poppy punk. The songs are short. The guitars know just the right moment to get all fuzzy and punchy, to make you want to move. Manon Gordan’s vocals may well have been sung through an Arby’s drive-thru — in a good way — but when it comes to punk passion this band delivers.

Dena Marchiony

After 12 years (and counting) at the helm of the Philadelphia Songwriters Project — a nonprofit that sets up workshops and other opportunities for young and journeyman songwriters — Dena Marchiony has finally stepped out of the shadows and dropped a record of her own. Released in December, On the Way to Now is a gentle, uplifting acoustic album, with horns and tightly strummed guitars backing up Marchiony’s soulful croon. As you might expect, several notables from Philly’s formidable singer-songwriter scene (Ross Bellenoit, Dawn Hiatt, Dante Bucci) show up to help out a woman who’s helped out so many of them over the years.

Cyberbully Mom Club

In the golden age of lo-fi bedroom-pop — circa 1999, somewhere in the Pacific Northwest — ladies with ukes and dudes with Casio keyboards used to pour their hearts onto cassettes with no download codes and ship them out for three bucks a pop. There’s basically no way the youthful Cyberbully Mom Club, wayward brainchild of UArts student Shari Heck, could’ve experienced that era directly, but she woulda fit right in alongside secret stars like Super Duo, S and Get the Hell Out of the Way of the Volcano.

Whether she’s going for dark and dissonant or pleasant and catchy, Heck often nails the mood with some memorable lines. “I wanna be the one you drunk-text first when you’re outta beer/ At 3 a.m., at some shitty house party in South Philly,” she moans on “Drunk Text Romance.” Here’s a heartbreaker, from the song “Fight Night Champion”: “All my friends are always doin’ drugs and getting high/ We gave ourselves 10 years to act like kids and fight all night/ And I wish I could have fought with you one last time.”

CMC’s recorded output — and there’s a lot of it; cyberbullymomclub.bandcamp.com lists eight releases, all from 2014 — is mostly intimate and cozy. Usually you’re only hearing a plucked guitar and Heck’s sibilant vocals, gently layered. Lately, however, Heck has enlisted some friends (UArts students all) to turn CMC into a real live band, and they just wrapped up a tour with Pittsburgh emo act Fun Home.

The Bad Doctors

Somehow I lost track of this West Philly new wave/post-punk trio and was pleasantly surprised to find that they’d dropped their first full-length over the summer. Burning City is darkly jubilant, powered by pulsing synths, danceable beats and Matt Korvette’s casual-sneer vocals (way up in the mix).

For starters, check out “In Time of Plague,” a Bad Religion-esque ditty about earthquakes, fire, floods, blood and a chorus insisting “there’s nothing wrong here.” The Bad Doctors are highly recommended for wearers of dark eyeliner and all appreciators of poetically grim dispositions.

Ghost Gum

So far, the only thing we’ve got from this shoegazing four-piece is a four-song, bedroom-recorded demo called Demos 2014. It’s a bit muddy and sometimes those swirling guitars bleed into the many, many cymbal crashes, but the promise is clear.

The noisy maelstrom brings to mind Owls and, of course, Glocca Morra, the longtime Philly punk band a few of these guys used to play in. Fans of Velocity Girl will appreciate the way singer Carolyn Haynes — of the dear departed Catnaps — comes leaping over the noise. We need to hear more from Ghost Gum.