Noise: Archive for May, 2007

No Baltimore hip-hop freestyle event has yet to fill the void left when the monthly Style Warz battles came to an unceremonious end last year thanks to a conflict between the event’s organizers. So Rock Da Mic Wednesdays, a new weekly competition put together by three influential local crews–Team Fifty, Deep Flow, and Raw...
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Attention all you cool, iPod-rocking, MP3-blogging, underground clubs-going, DIY dance party-forming, kinda/sorta unironically pop-friendly, clever T-shirt-devising, electronics circuit-bending, noise-funneling, social-networking young people out there. Don’t want to spoil all your getting-ready-to-be-in-Spin fun, but enjoy the ride while it lasts. You, too, will one day be over 30 and then almost 40–aka the new dead–and...
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(All photos by Frank Hamilton) Our dirty little secret: We did not make it through all 33 bands spread across all three days of this year’s Maryland Deathfest at Sonar. With only slices of pizza and $3 Cokes on site for sustenance, our live report had to be tempered with periodic trips for vegetable-based...
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Last Friday was a chilly, noisy night in East Baltimore, as local knuckleheads set off fireworks in the vicinity of Johns Hopkins Hospital, perhaps excited about the arrival of Preakness weekend. But inside nearby hip-hop hot spot the New Turntable Club, it was as warm and friendly as ever, the kind of atmosphere you...
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Power-pop bands are a nobly geeky bunch dedicated to an anachronistic ideal of melodic rock that is about as likely to take the charts these days as a barbershop quartet. While most of them play out their Beatlemania fantasies in indie-rock clubs, Sloan might be one of the only English-speaking power-pop bands to know...
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On the surface, it doesn’t look like a very good time to be a woman in hip-hop. The few female rappers who used to sell (Missy Elliott, Eve, Lil Kim) have recently flopped or scaled back, and newer artists like Remy Ma and Shawnna aren’t fairing much better. Meanwhile, the men who dominate the...
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To love Elvis Costello is to be vehemently opinionated about exactly how much of his output is absolute crap. For some, he jumped the shark immediately after those unfuckwithable first three albums; others draw the line at virtually every possible interval in his 30-year career. But as wildly uneven and capricious as Costello has...
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It’s well established that clips of kids dancing to Baltimore club are among the many, many reasons that Noise is grateful for the glorious copyright-infringement warehouse that is YouTube. But what about Baltimore hip-hop? Possibly the best local music gem we’ve seen on the site to date–a recording of Backland’s championship run on BET’s...
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Unless you’re also a Texan or ventured down to the South by Southwest music conference in recent years, chances are you prolly haven’t heard of Austin’s heavy-psych, stoner-rocking, garage-schlocking, and fabulously named power trio Tia Carrera. Think Comets on Fire before it pussed out on 2006′s Avatar, or any one of those noise-rocking middle...
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With the first band often going on around 8 p.m, the Ottobar has been starting its weeknight shows a bit earlier these days–a schedule those with 9-to-5′s will heartily endorse, especially on a night like this past Wednesday when the bill featured five bands. The show was the EP-release party for the new–really new,...
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“I’m 39 years old, and this shit just started for me two years ago, goin’ all over the place and DJing,” says Scottie B., one of the founding fathers of Baltimore club music. He still DJs in Baltimore on a weekly basis, but before his recent spate of jet-setting to London and Miami to...
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