Noise: Archive for March, 2010

Norah Jones has a genuine gift, but she doesn’t seem to grasp what it is. She has the ability to be the next Linda Ronstadt or Emmylou Harris—a strikingly beautiful woman with a strikingly beautiful voice that can imbue the most familiar songs with a new flush of feeling. Unfortunately, she seems to think...
Read more »

Mullyman and Bossman rock the house, mics In 2004, a couple of local MCs named Bossmand and Mullyman began their parallel rises to prominence as two of Baltimore hip-hop’s brightest mainstream prospects. In 2005, they started throwing lyrical darts at each other in a series of diss tracks, for reasons that most people still...
Read more »

Balti Mare is a group of Eastern European shepherds who were granted supernatural powers of musical talent by a gypsy witch and relocated to the United States a few years ago to share their gifts with the rest of the world. At least, that’s the backstory of the 7-piece band as it was given...
Read more »

Ruben Ramos Interstate 35, which runs from Dallas to San Antonio, slices through the middle of Austin north to south. It’s also the traditional dividing line between West Austin, where most of the white population lives, and East Austin, which is largely black and brown. The South by Southwest Music Conference has rarely ventured...
Read more »

Jon Dee Graham For the four days of the South by Southwest Music Conference, it seems that every barroom patio, restaurant deck, and vacant lot within walking distance of downtown Austin has been commandeered as a live-music stage. Some of these were the sites for the conference’s official showcases, but many more are for...
Read more »

The microchip has changed rock’n'roll forever. It has added a whole new palette of sounds and a whole new level of precision that can be perfectly repeated forever. But there is danger in these new possibilities—danger that the otherworldly sonics might crowd out handmade noises, danger that perfectibility may obscure the imperfections that are...
Read more »

One totally hairless gold man is supporting another hairless gold man entirely with his neck. No joke: Atop a platform placed front and center on the Meyerhoff stage, two male acrobats clad in goldish trunks and tinted with golden body paint, slowly move through a series of poses that this writer couldn’t pull off...
Read more »

| Image by City Paper Digi-Cam Reina Williams is one of the more unique musicians working in Baltimore these days, someone who straddles a few different genres. As a hip-hop producer, she’s made beats for brash young rappers like Lil D, and recently won the producer competition No Guts No Glory at 5 Seasons...
Read more »

The first thing you notice about Unsung Stories from Lilly’s Days as a Solar Astronaut is its distinctive packaging, a cryptic collage overlaying a backdrop the color of faded parchment paper: ragged, Ralph Steadman-esque lettering interspersed with distressed typefaces, washed-out snapshots of an ’80s-era sedan and an unidentifiable action figure, aimless doodles, a gray...
Read more »

As the pop stars of the 1960s enter their 60s, as their hairlines recede and voices roughen, the second-tier stars begin to play smaller and smaller rooms. Thus it was possible on the night of March 2, within the intimate confines of Annapolis’s Rams Head Tavern, to sit less than 20 feet from Ray...
Read more »

ScholarMan may be the hardest working Baltimore rapper you probably haven’t heard of, with a thick discography that appears to grow every few months. His 2009 included a solo full-length and two collaborative EPs and, at the top of 2010, he came right back with a new album, Free Spirit of a Troubled Soul....
Read more »

| Image by Robbie Whelan There are heaps of nice things to say about the Baltimore Choral Arts Society’s Feb. 28 program at Goucher College. The program—Franz Schubert’s Mass in G Major and Morten Lauridsen’s Lux Aeterna—included two highly beautiful pieces of music that made an interesting counterpoint to one another: one a tidy,...
Read more »