By Adriano Fegundes Nearly a year ago, before a headlining gig at Merriweather Post Pavilion, Dave Portner and Brian Weitz of Animal Collective, the hugely successful indie band that first cut its teeth in Baltimore County, described their new material sounding like an alien band sampling material from Earth, such as radio signals beamed...
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by Jefferson Jackson Steele Flock of Dimes, the solo project of Wye Oak’s Jenn Wasner, will be getting a proper physical release courtesy of Friends Records. Side A of the 7-inch features a newly mastered version of the previously released track “Prison Bride.” Side B is a “screwed mix” of “I Can’t Tell You...
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Beach House at the beach Late Tuesday night, when most good bloggers had gone to bed, local dream pop duo Beach House decided to casually drop a new song, titled “Myth,” with a tweet and Facebook post to their respective profiles that read simply, “Hello again.” It ranks as one of the tightest pop...
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Jazz Mind As Ed Schrader’s Music Beat, bassist Devlin Rice and drummer/vocalist Ed Schrader have proven more than capable of channeling the low-end brooding (think “My Mind Is Broken By the Sound But it Gets Me Around”) and high-energy blasts (think “Rats”) of post-punk. With No Age guitarist Randy Randall for “When I’m in...
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Brains For the sweeping drama and layers of quivering sounds in “Brains,” the first single off the forthcoming album Nootropics, Lower Dens released a music video that is rather minimalist. Well, minimalist at least in narrative action. The entire video focuses on a seated Jana Hunter, as seen through a convex screen resembling that...
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Pretty swirly and stuff For his new album, Dreams Say, View, Create, Shadow Leads–out Feb. 21 on Thrill Jockey–Dustin Wong has released a music video and started a contest. First, let’s get to the video, for the song “Diagonally Talking Echo.” The layers of swirling guitars we’ve come to love in Wong’s music are...
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Cover art Well, the economy is still in the shitter, Congress appears to be out of fucks to give, and there’s all of the police-state insanity surrounding the Occupy movement, but, hey, we’ve all got something to be thankful for. Here in Baltimore, we can give thanks for good local music, and we can...
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By Monique Crabb Another Baltimore band is calling it quits. Following the departures of art-rock outfit Ponytail and punk mainstays Double Dagger, psych-rock four-piece Thank You has announced that its co-headlining show this weekend with Oxes will be the band’s last in the United States and Baltimore. The band will then tour Europe and...
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Double Dagger So it is that today, Oct. 21, 2011, marks the last-ever show for Baltimore’s own Double Dagger. City Paper has done an appreciative feature and a do-it-yourself six-panel poster, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t offer some more words from the band. In researching the former, I sat down with lead...
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Oxes bein' rowdy. Back in April, we got word of two 12-inch singles, titled “Crunchy Zest” and “Orange Jewelryist,” released in Europe by math-metalheads Oxes. The band also announced some European tour dates, and then we didn’t hear much of anything. No American release for the 12-inches and no stateside, let alone hometown, shows....
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Going out on a high note The local post-hardcore heroes Double Dagger are calling it quits, according to a statement on the band’s site. “As the band got older and grew and changed, the people in it did too, and our individual lives are pulling us towards other pursuits,” the statement, signed by all...
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"Beach" The plot of the music video for the new Future Islands song, “Balance,” is fairly simple: two love-struck kids thumb rides with little more than a sign that reads “Beach.” But in the same way, say, the Smashing Pumpkins’ video for “1979” was able to capture the doldrums of being a teenager in...
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By Leah Nash Former Pavement lead singer and ‘90s slacker avatar Stephen Malkmus sees a double standard in his inability to name his new album with his band the Jicks L.A. Guns and the pervasive use of sampling. Malkmus had been advised by his record company’s lawyers that L.A. Guns, the glam band, might...
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By Frank Hamilton Future Islands will release their third album, On the Water, on Oct. 10 via Thrill Jockey. The synth-pop trio spent March of this year living and recording in their home state of North Carolina, in Elizabeth City. Naturally, the town is located on the banks of a river and is just...
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By Adriano Fagundes In this week’s cover story, we talked to Animal Collective members Brian Weitz and David Portner—aka Geologist and Avey Tare, respectively—about their recent return to Maryland to write new material following the huge success of their 2009 album Merriweather Post Pavilion. All four members spent January through March working in a...
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Compact Lexie Mountain rummages through her tape collection, pulls out yet another cassette and pops it into the Centennial tape player on the floor. “Her tapes are bonkers,” Mountain says of the woman on the recording. Play. “God, I wish I could stop shaking,” says the woman. Audibly, she shutters, shivers. Then silence for...
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7-inch cover art What made In Evening Air, the second full-length from post-wave trio Future Islands, work so well was a certain sense of unity, a clear declaration of purpose. Sam Herring’s woeful tales of heartbreak, backed by synths and beats from Gerrit Welmers and bass rhythms from William Cashion, were pieced together like...
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by Jay Crossley At the time of this interview, which was arranged and conducted in the span of several hours after it was announced that Will Adams was leaving Lower Dens on April 25, there was a growing local controversy surrounding an ExxonMobil commercial touting oil-sands technology. The reason: the oil company licensed the...
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Jana Hunter, courtesy Gnomonsong 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....
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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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