Noise: Archive for December, 2009

| Image by Saulius Paukstys WMUC‘s DNA Test Fest is back for 2010 with Pissed Jeans, and it’s in Baltimore, not Washington. Our wallets give thanks. Effing “Frank Zappa Day” is a thing that exists. J-Roddy Walston and the Business gets a fancy new record label. Animal Collective’s Deacon...
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When you have a trio of piano, trumpet, and upright bass, the temptation is to make up for the missing drummer with a heavy left hand on the piano, repeating riffs on the trumpet, and a steady stream of eighth notes on the bass. The Eddie Palmieri Trio not only resisted this temptation at...
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Halfway through his two-hour-plus show at the Rams Head Tavern on Sunday, Jerry Douglas departed from the program’s Christmas theme and led his sextet through one of his signature instrumental tunes, “From Ankara to Izmir.” Standing tall in his loose black shirt and red goatee, Douglas slid his silver bar across his dobro, reaching...
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Jumpcuts | Image by City Paper Digi-Cam For bands that combine rock with electronic music, live performance is usually a hurdle; no matter how well produced or immaculately programmed the recordings are, they rarely know how to actually rock out on stage. For better or worse, the opposite is true with the recently formed...
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John Hollenbeck‘s compositions resemble a collection of clocks that are all wound to count off the seconds at different intervals. Each clock pursues its own pattern, tick-tocking in counterpoint to all the clocks around it. At key moments, however, they all chime together. Hollenbeck—a drummer, naturally—is spending this week at Towson University as part...
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Moss Icon Moss Icon is back, according to this. The Juno effect lives on. Children’s songwriter Barry Louis Polisar, of opening credit tune “All I Want is You,” has a double-disc tribute album to him out now. Details. J-Roddy Walston and the Business has a new label, Vagrant, home to the Hold Steady, Eels,...
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Sometimes it seems that jazz is divided into two warring camps: those who value tradition so much that they’re skeptical of any hint of dissonant modernism, and those who are so committed to the avant-garde that they consider pretty renditions of standards a sell-out. Dave Burrell swept away this false dichotomy with a swing...
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Kane Mayfield | Image by City Paper Digi-Cam Always Dope, the weekly Tuesday night event that local clothing store PEDX Baltimore began presenting a few weeks ago, has a few things going for it that are terribly hard to come by at local underground hip-hop shows. Those things include a well-lit venue with ample...
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| Image by Josh Sisk If not a revolution, then at least a movement. The Juggalo “family,” fans of the Insane Clown Posse but much more, has the sort of unity and allegiance that doesn’t exist elsewhere in music. You’d be pressed to call it an aesthetic movement—there is something political and social to...
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If Randy Newman had grown up not as the heir of Hollywood composers but as a scruffy garage rocker and had recorded an album about the United States in 2009, that record might have sounded like Chuck Prophet’s Let Freedom Ring. It would have had the same untrustworthy third-person narrators and bitterly comic commentators;...
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