Noise: Archive for April, 2011

Baltimore filmmaker Hilton Carter directed the music video for DJ Quik’s “Luv of My Life,” the first single from the Los Angeles legend’s new album Book of David. The video has all the things you’d expect from a Quik video (weed, strippers, elastic sports headbands) but the video’s narrative rather goofily kicks-off when Quik...
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When I interviewed Baltimore-born R&B prodigy CJ Hilton last year, J Records was just beginning to gear up promotions for the singer’s debut album. Since then, the label has been slowly raising his profile with a smattering of songs, including features from well known rappers like Tyga and Fat Joe. But by far the...
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In a flurry of tweets and Facebook status updates on Monday, Lower Dens announced that Will Adams would be leaving the band due to exhaustion. It was the second major lineup change since the start of the year, the first being the departure of drummer Abe Sanders in early January. As part of a...
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One step forward, one step back is the story of DJ Class these days. This time around, he’s remixing and rapping over hits from ultimate shitbag Chris Brown. First, there’s “Look At Me Now” featuring an actually pretty impressive double-time verse from Class himself, as well as Jermaine Dupri and Da Brat. Also check...
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The Black Sunn and 810 are two young Baltimore rappers that have been making increasingly great music and building a small amount of blog buzz over the past couple years, often guesting on each other’s solo records. And now they’re finally collaborating on a full length album as a duo, United Division Project. Its...
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E Major’s
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I’ve seen Charlie Chaplin’s 1924 silent film The Gold Rush more than a dozen times, and I never get tired of it, for it is one of the half-dozen greatest motion pictures ever made. And yet, except for the first time I saw it in a college classroom, it never affected me as deeply...
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“I’m not cool; I’m not badass. It’s an intimidating thing to try and do,” says Jenn Wasner, prefacing Wye Oak’s cover of Danzig’s “Mother,” done recently for the Onion A/V Club’s Undercover cover song series (making them the only band invited back a second time). It winds up fitting the Wye Oak aesthetic perfectly,...
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DJ Pierre just released ThEEEE MiXtApEEEE (not to be confused with Blaqstarr’s brand new The Mixtape) and unlike the multiple-artist, old classics-meet-new club hits mixed CDs he’s known for, this one’s 30 minutes of original productions. This release comes at an important point for the young producer, just a few months after his remix...
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It’s actually going to happen. On July 9, the members of Animal Collective will take the stage at Merriweather Post Pavilion, the very same venue whose name they appropriated for their 2009 electro-art-pop masterpiece. With guitarist Deakin back in the mix, and given the band’s propensity to focus on new material–material that they have...
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After many placed him within the chip-tune movement, Baltimore-based electronic musician Benny Boeldt has drastically changed the sound of his project Adventure. His new album, Lesser Known, is filled with bubbly synth-pop that sounds like the music kids listened to in the ‘80s when they turned off the Nintendo and switched on MTV. Additionally,...
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Cinematic ambitions and movie homages are nothing new for hip-hop videos. And Skarr Akbar’s “Jackpot” isn’t even the first rap vid to take its inspiration from Heath Ledger’s performance as the Joker in The Dark Knight. But while the Baltimore rapper’s 6-minute “mini-movie” for the single off of last year’s The Pursuit of Happyness...
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It’s been five years since the math-metal band of merry pranksters known as Oxes dropped some new riffage for us to savor. In the years following guitarist Nat Fowler’s departure for Italy, which he later left for Berlin, guitarist Marc Miller would go on to ply his trade in the “no-jazz” group Microkingdom, and...
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King Tutt just released this tribute to disco diva Loleatta Holloway, who passed away on Monday. “Burning Up,” samples Holloway’s 1980 hit “Love Sensation” (familiar to every and anybody via Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch’s “Good Vibrations”), dropping pieces of her vocals into the kind of electro-house production Tutt’s been mining ever since...
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Jonathan Ehrens wears many hats, whether fronting the eccentric Baltimore trio the Art Department or making lo-fi solo recordings as Repelican. But his latest and perhaps most exciting project to date, a skewed take on synth-pop with vocals by his sister Emily Ehrens, is the debut album by White Life, due out May 5th...
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