Rest assured, you are listening to the Baltimore outfit responsible for spasmodic bodily mayhem. Where once Dope Body—a brief moment to snigger at four rope-skinny young dudes naming their band something that vacillates between having a “quite fit” and “strung-out” frame—nailed down a punkish rock mettle, the quartet hammers out something downright accessible this time out. With J Robbins producing, Natural captures the band in widescreen, giving Jacober’s beat keeping a bigger oomph that encourages Utz to run wild—which he does. History is a guitar rock album, though not in a Nuno Bettencourt wank way. Utz is as impish as Eddie Van Halen in putting squirrely, borderline silly guitar sounds into rock songs without sounding ridiculous in the process. He swerves from martial high notes to buzzing punches and twinkling melodies in “Twice the Life.” Bounce-y plinks ping-pong the melodic throughline to “Powder.” Power metal distortion abuts a motoring blare in “High Way.” A watery sustain swims through the lumbering “Lazy Slave.” Where some traditional rock guitarists may need only three chords to write a song, Utz works more like Richard Serra, taking huge slabs of guitar’s raw material and creating monolithic moments spotted with traces of disarmingly delicacy. Throughout, Laumann’s vocals actually rest atop the mix rather than stomp around the background, and Jacober and Jones coalesce into a taut rhythm section. Utz lends “Lazy Slave” its atmospheric personality, but it’s Jacober and Jones who rivet the song to the ground. And the band funnels it all into unexpectedly catchy, pop-sized nuggets.

Roomrunner, meanwhile, has accessible on lock. Ever since its debut EP came out late last year the local quartet has been saddled with the N-word, an albatross that is only partially accurate. With Super Vague, its latest EP from the fine folks at Fan Death, Roomrunner further articulates its noisy purpose. While the songs here betray a wee bit of that Beatles-esque polish that helped Nirvana squeeze punk onto pop charts, Vague has more in common with the noisy mirth of a Jack Endino recording. Denny Bowen, the former the Economist guitarist and Double Dagger drummer turned Roomrunner’s band-leading singer/guitarist, may not yet be 30, but he’s reaching back to the same sort of rock/pop tension that informed the late 1980s American underground, such as Dinosaur Jr.’s tar pits and Mudhoney’s super-fuzzed big muffs: songs you can sing-along to sure are nice but, you know, cats like Thin Lizzy and Blue Oyster Cult really knew how to lay down a groove, man.

And so Vague‘s four cuts fly in just over 10 minutes, from the howling title track to the pleasant ear-pelting of “Petrified.” “Undo” skips along a rhythmic guitar line before it flowers into a power pop chorus, and “No Wait”—an epic four minutes and 16 seconds long—delivers a near perfect dose of jittery noise and disaffected moan. The band’s entire recorded output to date doesn’t even add up to a dozen eggs, but they’re enough to make anyone with an soft spot of rock insolence anxiously await a full-length. Just get on with it already, gents.

Dope Body and Roomrunner play album release shows May 19 at Coward Shoe with Hume and DJ sets from Dan Deacon, Co La, and Spank Rock. 9 p.m., $5.

From davidsmooke.com

On Sunday night the latest experimental music endeavor with firm Baltimore roots makes it local debut. Co-organized and -founded by local composer and musician David Smooke, the League of the Unsound Sound is a loose ensemble dedicated not only to exploring new composed music and improvisation, but to advocating for both of those camps occupying the same new music space. With a core membership of celebrated musicians—percussionist Tim Feeney, who currently teaches at Cornell University’s Department of Music; Peabody bassist Michael Formanek; Alarm Will Sound bassoonist and Ohio University School of Music assistant professor Michael Harley; Courtney Orlando, another fearless Alarm Will Sound member and a Peabody faculty violinist; founding International Contemporary Ensemble violist and Syracuse Symphony Orchestra member Wendy Richman; composer/toy pianist Smooke; and Peabody almuna/faculty member and pianist Shirley Yoo–LotUS kicked off its 2010-’11 debut season in October in Erie, Pa. It has since performed in Fredonia, N.Y., and performs March 19 at Catholic University before the March 20 Baltimore debut at the Windup Space.

The evening’s program includes a sound installation by composer Michael Boyd; an improv set with guests Susan Alcorn (pedal steel guitar), trumpeter Dave Ballou, and local reeds MVP John Dierker; and a repertoire including Sofia Gubaidulina’s Quasi Hoquetus, the local premieres of local composer Ruby Fulton’s “Half the Way Down,” Smooke’s “21 Miles to Coolville,” Catholic University’s Stephen Gorbos’ “Selfish Houses on Blood Strange Roads,” and the world premiere of Augusta Read Thomas’ Toft Serenade.

City Paper met up with Smooke, who earned his masters degree at the Peabody Institute in the mid-1990s and has been a Peabody faculty member for four years, at a Mount Vernon coffee house to talk about LotUS’ formation and debut season and future—”I want to get through this season and see how it goes before firming up what it’ll be for next year,” he says—and ended up having a lively discussion about experimental music inclusiveness, composers as gateway drugs, the history of rock, and finding audiences in the 21st century.

City Paper: So tell me a little bit about how the League of the Unsound Sound got organized and why it got organized and that sort of thing.
David Smooke: It originally began with conversations between Courtney [Orlando] and me. We’ve been together on Peabody faculty going on four years now. And from when I first started there we had some mutual friends and from the very start we’ve been talking about how to increase the presence of new music at Peabody. And we tried various different ways of thinking about that and then gradually came up with this idea of a flexible ensemble that we kind of started together and then it became more something that she wanted to be a part of but not so much organize. And so then the organization fell onto me.

CP: When you say y’all talked about wanting to bring new music to Peabody, was that something that, not Peabody specifically, but institutions in general have been slower to focus on? I know in general it can be difficult to focus on new music whatever the format.
DS: It’s not so much the exposure because Peabody has been fantastically supportive. It’s more in terms of the access, where Peabody is centered around the orchestra and because of that there are certain structural things where the orchestras are the main things that Peabody does and there’s a lot of organization that goes into that and a lot of resources that goes into that. And so when that’s where the organization and resources are going, the question is then how do you fit in the other things that the students want to do but that are taking away from the central mission of the organization, if that makes sense.

CP: When you say the organization of the League of the Unsound Sound fell upon you, did you already have performers and repertoire in mind?
DS: Yes, this group of performers came out of conversations with [Orlando] and me and also then with some other people that I worked with for years and admired for years. And the difficulty with that is, these are all amazing players and incredible people and some of the world’s best performers, but they are kind of scattered all over the Eastern seaboard.

CP: And I can imagine very busy in their own right.
DS: Exactly. For example, with this concert, two of the performers who are playing on Sunday, after we had booked this they got calls saying, “Oh, we’d love to see you come out to Berlin and have a German tour,” and they said, “Sorry, we’re playing the Windup Space on Sunday.” But everyone has been great to work given these structural issues, and when everyone does get together there’s a very nice frisson. And the other thing, with this flexibility, I have this idea of there’s a core ensemble of people who will be playing with us over and over again, but then the idea of it being a league means that we can pull in other people. And so for this concert, Mike Formanek, who is very much part of the core, solicited a few improvisors from Baltimore to come play.

CP: Was new music and improvisation part of the League’s organizing idea?
DS: As a matter of fact, I would actually take a little bit of an issue with the whole idea of new music and improvisation. I feel that’s a real problem with the experimental music community because it’s all experimental music. It’s all together and yet there’s this dividing line between the communities for some unknown reason.

CP: That line being between contemporary composition and improvisation?
DS: Yes. And what I’ve found is that the improvisation community tends to reach out out to the written community a bit more than the written community reaches out the other way. The improvisation community tends to have really open ears and much more supportive audiences. And especially in Baltimore you have these incredible resources and places, like the Windup Space and 2640 Space, and various places around in the community, the Out of Your Head collective and various groups of improvisors who are absolutely open to hearing new music. And so it seems completely natural to invite the two worlds to come together a little bit—especially since Mike Formanek and Courtney Orlando and Tim Feeney are very much in both worlds.

CP: That totally makes sense. Now, I need to preface this with the fact that I have really only started to try to follow contemporary composition over the past decade, so my knowledge base is extremely limited. And because I don’t read music, without hearing new music in person my access to what it might sound like is very tiny. So I’m not sure if this impression is only because I’ve been paying more attention more recently, but I get the impression that there has been more effort in the past 5 to 7 years in people trying to present new music–not just in terms of things like the Windup Space, Mobtown Modern, and the Red Room, but venues like Le Poussin Rogue in New York and new music ensembles forming and touring and that sort of thing.
DS: It’s an incredibly exciting time to be in new music because of that very phenomenon. There are so many young performers who just don’t want to play the classics full time. I mean, everyone loves the classics and we all want to play the classics, but we want to keep the art vital and keep it moving forward. And most people who are entering classical music [now], they grew up listening to Radiohead and Björk and Dirty Projectors—to pick someone who [Orlando] has worked with—and Dan Deacon and Matmos. Groups like that are who are bringing people into the classical world. So, then, to be able to excite those young performers you find it in the experimental realm. That’s my background.

CP: So would you say this activity is performer, artist, and audience driven?
DS: I think it’s a matter of knowing the audience is there because that’s where we come from. For me, starting off, I was a goth. I know, it’s hard to imagine purple bangs and all that stuff.

CP: Whereabouts?
DS: Los Angeles—so it was also that whole postpunk hardcore thing as well, the Minutemen and fIREHOSE as well. Then, when I heard George Crumb and [Anton] Webern and [Edgar] Varèse, it was one of those Frank Zappa things of recognizing, “Oh, these are related.” So I know there’s an audience out there of people who want to hear exciting music with an edge. I know it’s a smaller audience than are going to go to an orchestra concert or to hear Britney Spears, but there’s an audience.

CP: So for you, Varèse and Webern hit a place in the ears that postpunk and goth were at the time?
DS: Yes. I guess Brian Eno was the figure who was straddling both worlds. Because Brian Eno and David Byrne did a collaboration with [theater director] Robert Wilson around the time I was in high school, and Robert Wilson got me into Philip Glass. And then Philip Glass was the—the first drug that gets you hooked?

CP: Gateway.
DS: Yes, Glass was the gateway drug. Although that’s not at all what I do anymore.

CP: It was just that thing that opened a door into a different world through which you found your own course.
DS: Well, eventually. And that’s the thing about the improvised world—they don’t draw those distinctions. And as a lot of the groups like Alarm Will Sound and So Percussion and Mobtown Modern, also aren’t drawing that distinction. Todd Reynolds came out last week, and it’s really no different from Kraftwerk. So more and more people are saying it’s music and we write music so let’s just do it all—like the 1971 concert. So that’s the idea for this—it’s experimental music, but it’s just music.

CP: So have how you gone about programming the League’s repertoire and that sort of thing?
DS: The nice thing about this has been from the beginning, the moment people heard about who these players were getting together, composers all over world, really, came out of the woodwork and I started getting communications from people. So a lot of it has been a balance of trying to include local people and brand new pieces, because there’s nothing written for this ensemble, so we want to try to build some pieces that we can play as a group. And the ensemble itself really formed around the Sofia Gubaidulina piece, which is a trio for viola, bassoon, and piano.

And then Ruby Fulton—who is local to Baltimore, a former student of mine, and a former teaching assistant for a rock music class I teach at Homewood—was the first composer I contacted. I adore her music and is someone with a very distinctive voice and who just lives and breathes this idea of musical inclusivity. And so those two pieces really started the whole idea, and then it was a matter of figuring out how to fill in things around it. So for this concert we’ll be doing the world premiere of a piece by a Catholic University composer, which was composed for this concert and involves staging elements and improvisational elements, so it pulls together all the ideas of the ensemble. And also a new piece by a composer named Michael Boyd, who used to be based in Baltimore and is now in Pittsburgh, and that’s going to be a sound installation that will involve movement and improvisation and recordings.

But I like this idea of the inclusivity of art because musicians, too often, we separate ourselves from all the other arts. But we are artists working in the 21st century, so we can think about bringing other genres of art, in addition to music, together.

CP: That makes sense. You mentioned that when the League started forming composers started contacting you, and that’s just one of those things that I never considered—the network of people doing that has developed in the same way that virtual and real-world underground networks of people developed in, like, postpunk independent American music.
DS: Well its not that big of an audience. And that’s one of those things that I absolutely adore about the internet, these very small communities can really stand together. I don’t kid myself—I know there’s maybe a few hundred to a little more than a few hundred people worldwide who might possibly dig the music I do. But because of the internet I’m able to reach about 80 percent of them—or at least find them, and they’re able to find me. Whereas before, 10 or 15 years ago, there was this sense of floundering and feeling of reinventing the wheel and feeling that it was impossible to reach the audience.

CP: That’s one of the things that’s, to me, been really fun to watch during this wholesale disintegration of the conventional music marketplace is that, yeah, maybe genres like jazz and improvisation and such were a little behind the MySpace DIYing of indie rock and such, but once those artists did that rapidly amplified the access people had to it. If you’re interested, you can find it much easier now.
DS: I was reading some figure recently that I believe said 1 percent of the recordings sold accounts for 80 percent of all recording sales in the United States. So it’s a very consolidated distribution of wealth, as it happens to be throughout the United States, but when you’re not part of that 1 percent, you are still able to reach an audience.

And that’s the thing I love about Baltimore. It’s the most welcoming city I’ve ever been in for experimental arts. So, obviously, anything where you’re not part of that 1 percent is going to be a labor of love but I also feel that in this community there are people who will understand that and dig it and be there.

CP: So you teach a rock music history class at Homewood?
DS: Yes. About six years ago Peabody began a Peabody at Homewood program, so we now administer a music minor on the Homewood campus and some general interest classes as well. So this class is through that.

CP: One semester?
DS: It’s one semester, it’s called Introduction to Popular Music, with the emphasis being on rock music, and it’s incredibly fun to teach—because it’s about the relationship between this music and society and I’ve learned so much about how music has developed. Before I started teaching this class I don’t think I had any real sense as to how quickly rock music developed. In 1954 you have Elvis going into the recording studio for the first time and in 1967 you have the Beatles doing Sgt. Pepper’s. So it boggles the mind.

And popular music these days is so fragmented, what’s out there, and yet when you look back 20 or 30 years, you can see everything comes from a couple of different strains. So I like the idea of giving students who already like this music a different perspective on it.

CP: Where do you start?
DS: I start in minstrelsy.

CP: Oh that’s smart. Having been out of college for so long I forget how much you can cover in a semester.
DS: What I do is all this background history in two weeks, with the idea being that because minstrelsy was the very first popular music in the United States that achieved worldwide renown. And then I get into folk music and the folk music revival—I think it’s important for them to know that Stephen Foster was writing for people wearing black face. So we kind of follow a couple of different paradigms we see throughout the semester. One is that art starting out as an underground art and gradually reaching the mainstream, and as it reaches the mainstream fragmenting and either becoming corporate or moving to the experimental. And you see that with the minstrelsy, you see that with ragtime, you see that with jazz, you see that with rock. And then also how the underground movement tends to be African-American being co-opted by the white society. So it’s set up in a way that hopefully gets students out of their comfort level a little bit.

CP: How is their music knowledge coming into class? I mean, they’re obviously coming in with some interest, but as a longtime music listener, when talking to younger people I’m often surprised at what they do know but also surprised at what they don’t know.
DS: Yeah. There are certain bands that remain kind of cultural touchstones, like the Beatles. But then their knowledge of the roots are generally just not there anymore. And I think a lot of the younger generation is growing up with an ahistorical perspective where everything took place at the same time. Even with my classical Peabody students sometimes will have difficulty with the idea that Bach and Brahms were hundreds of years apart, that’s there’s a huge space between them. So when things move that quickly [in rock] and many things can happen in five years, it’s kind of impossible to expect them to have a sense of that history.

Our parents’ generation grew up with that first era of rock ‘n’ roll, so my father instilled in me this great appreciation of the music of the ’50s and ’60s. So I know that repertoire. But the students today might have heard of Elvis, but not really much outside. So I often get a lot of complaints that I spend too much time on that early repertoire.

CP: I’m curious because how people consume music now shapes their perspective of it. I grew up listening to my parents’ records before I bought my own, so I know my Motown and Stax and Volt and Tamla. But if I had kids I’m not sure they would even go to my records because that’s not how they listen to music. The CD was born during our lifetimes but in some ways it’s obsolete to some music consumers. So even the personal experience of what you listen to when and how has changed and I have no idea how that shapes somebody’s music timeline—or if that really matters.
DS: Well, just look at sampling. Students know Ray Charles’ “I Got a Woman” but they know it through Kanye West. So a lot of the artists who are doing the sampling, they have incredible historical knowledge, but the people listening to it hear all this music happening right now.

CP: Right now, in my earbuds, from this one playlist. That’s fascinating to think about.
DS: It is fascinating. It’s an entirely different perspective. And there’s a different sense of education where, on the one hand, we don’t have this idea that Western culture is better than other cultures anymore, which is awesome. But on the other hand, with that leveling off, it’s almost as important academically to know all the plots of all The Simpsons episodes as it is to know the different Euripides plays. And of course it would be great to know everything, but how do you educate someone when everything is game?

For example, the Civil Rights era. For students now, it might as well have happened during Brahms’ time. And you try to explain that, no, Obama’s parents would not have been allowed to marry in 30 states [then]—and then draw implications from that. So then, in California, at the same time he was being elected by a landslide, they were also voting to make gay marriage illegal. During that election in California people were voting for somebody whose parents might not have been able to be married not that long ago while voting for another kind of marriage ban. And they just don’t always have a sense that these might be related.

CP: And popular music does provide a good prism through which to see the interconnected threads of the past. With something like the ’60s and Civil Rights, there’s a very potent narrative to be told through R&B, through jazz, about the American cultural fabric that becomes history as told.
DS: And the 1960s are an excellent time to come back to in this sense because in the ’60s, the Beatles really wanted to meet [Karlheinz] Stockhausen. They were very influenced by him. And now you have Matmos and So Percussion working together. You have Alarm Will Sound recording with the Dirty Projectors. And some of my friends in the New York scene were recording with Esperanza Spalding. And I didn’t know who she was until I started seeing pictures on Facebook of my friends backstage at Jay Leno with her. And then she goes and beats out Justin Bieber for a Grammy.

So now, again, there is this sense that it is all just music. Of course, this is the 99 percent that accounts for 20 percent of all the record sales, but at the same time as popular music—or maybe popular is the wrong term—as parts of that 1-percent world become marginalized, it’s almost like we’re able to reach out a hand and say, “It’s OK. We’re here—and you can have artistic freedom.”

The League of Unsound Sound plays the Windup Space March 20. Sound installation opens at 3 p.m. and improv set begins at 5 p.m. Suggested donation $10; students free.

Amy Domingues

Indie-rock fans of a certain generation might recognize the name Amy Domingues. Yes, the longtime Washington, D.C./Northern Virginia cellist was one half of the dreamy chamber pop duo Garland of Hours and the bombastic trio Telegraph Melts with Bob Massey, an erstwhile City Paper contributor, but she’s also been the go-to cellist for regional rock and pop bands. She’s applied her string skills to Dead Meadow’s Howls From the Hills, Ted Leo and the Pharmacists’ The Tyranny of Distance, Jenny Toomey’s Antidote, Fugazi’s The Argument, and many, many more.

And now she’s a graduate student studying Renaissance and Baroque music and the viola da gamba at the Peabody Institute, and Wednesday, March 2, she performs her first recital at Grace and St. Peter’s Church at 7:15 p.m.. Domingues, joined by Jessica Powell and Tina Chancey (viola da gamba) and Qin Ying Tan (harpsichord), plays works for viola da gamba including George Philipp Telemann’s Sonata in D Major TWV 40:1, Johann Sebastian Bach’s Sonata in G Major BWV 1027 for gamba and harpsichord, and Marin Marais’ Tombeau de M. Meliton.

Click here to visit the concert’s Facebook event page.

Image from toddmarcusjazz.com

One great reason to catch the Todd Marcus Jazz Orchestra when it performs Jan. 7 at An die Musik: The bass clarinetist’s original tunes and the top-notch, lively musicians in the orchestra deliver one of the most satisfying big-band sounds in the region. Another great reason: The orchestra’s two sets will be recorded for a future live release.

Marcus isn’t merely one of the few contemporary jazz composers focusing exclusively on the bass clarinet, he’s also one of the city’s many jazz artists who is an advocate for the music and its culture locally. He’s worked with Jubilee Arts in efforts to bring more jazz to the Pennsylvania Avenue corridor, which was once Baltimore’s main cultural hub.

“The music can be a little weird and unusual, so we want people to come check it out and feel like they’re not having to make a commitment,” Hopkins says by phone about the series. “If you don’t like it, you leave, and you’re out maybe a beer.”

The collective’s fundraising goal is modest ($550) because, according to Hopkins, it’s looking only to cover the costs involved in bringing a guest artist to Baltimore. Every $500 raised over its target will be put toward bringing another guest artist to the city. Out of Your Head is a musical adventure, not a business plan.

Contribute here.

“The Red Room bought a new PA last year and we decided to keep the old one,” Boram said by phone last week. And quad stereo–very basically, four separate speakers being fed four separate sound sources–has “been kind of at the forefront of some things that we’ve been into for the past year, and I’ve been kind of thinking about doing a quad series at the Red Room for a while, maybe once a month, but then August was open and we decided to do it there.”

Since it was introduced and eventually became possible to mass produce in the 1950s, two-channel stereo is how we typically hear recorded music. Corner a sound engineer to walk you through a more sophisticated breakdown of its sonic characteristics, but in simple terms it’s the use of multiple recording inputs that are eventually spread through two sound outputs–basically, left and right speakers–in order to recreate sound environments closer to how we actually hear. Movies–and, since the 1980s, home stereo systems–have used multi-channel sound for decades. It’s why you can go see some big dumb Bruce Willis movie and feel like his wisecracks are said right in front of you while bullets whiz by your head and strike objects seemingly behind you.

That’s one of the disorienting and fun aspects of quad-stereo works. Two-channel stereo, itself, isn’t exactly natural, and pod-people reared on listening to music compressed into low bitrate digital sound files through earbuds aren’t just hearing music artificially reproduced, but often with its dynamic range constricted. (As Jarvis Cocker told The Nation, “People don’t know what bass is anymore.”) Creative musicians/producers, however, have had a great time exploiting two-channel stereo: panning a voice between right and left channels, lending directionality to beats by bouncing back and forth, creating a whooshing sensation by cross-fading, etc., etc. With quad stereo, two more channels–or directions, or dimensions, or planes of existence, or states of being–are added to that aural playground. Multi-channel sound possess a tremendous ability to create a rippling sense of space. And just thinking about how already mischievous Baltimore musicians/composers might toy with that makes the inner sound nerd giggle with excitement.

“Martin Schmidt is really into it,” Boram says of quad sound. “Karl Ekdahl is designing and ready to market a four-way voltage-controlled amp. Leprechaun Catering and Matmos did a quad show earlier this year. Twig [Harper] did a sound installation that used quad at Load of Fun. Some people haven’t done things in quad before but they’re going to devise systems for doing it in quad for the series.”

And the experimental minded Red Room is the ideal laboratory for this sort of work. “We’re supposed to be the space for serious listening,” Boram says. “And we haven’t really done anything exactly like this before.”

Tonight Black Vatican’s Owen Gardner and Teeth Mountain’s/Dan Deacon Ensemble’s Andrew Bernstein collaborate for the series’ inaugural installment. Next week, Aug. 12, the series teams up with local music organization After Now and features Samuel Burt, Jeff Carey, Andrew Cole, C.R. Kasprzyk, and Mark Lackey. The series continues through August. Visit the Red Room’s calendar for full details.

Needle Gun at Ehse on Ice, Part Un

Back in February local out-sounds label Ehse Records organized one of the best things to put on ice since whiskey. The inaugural Ehse on Ice party hit the Dominic “Mimi” DiPietro Skating Rink at Patterson Park Feb. 26 and featured performances by Sky Crab, Secret Secrets, and a mirthfully bonkers set from the always dependable Needle Gun.

The overall vibe, though, was the masterstroke. Imagine your average Red Room-meets-H&H building gallery opening crowd. Now give those people skates and put them on ice. If you’re not smiling at this moment you have no soul.

That vibe may be considerably jacked up for tonight’s Ehse on Ice, Part Deux. This time the ice-skating fun train stops at the Mount Pleasant Ice Arena and features the powerhouse lineup of Snacks, Beastmaster, and Weyes Bluhd, the solo noise-drone moniker or ex-Jackie-O Motherfucker member Natalie Mering.

Ehse on Ice, Part Dexu hits the Mount Pleasant Ice Arena (6101 Hillen Road) July 9, 9:30 p.m.-12:30 a.m..

She merely hasn’t in many moons. The good thing about Nobody’s Daughter, the first Hole (read: Courtney Love solo) album in 12 years, is that it’s not 2004’s depressingly self-aware America’s Sweetheart. The bad? It’s also not a seismic blast that anybody still rooting for Love—yes, we exist—might’ve hoped for, a roaring return to form that would’ve let the singer/guitarist-turned-actress-turned-spectacle chalk one up in the “win” column with her middle finger. The silver lining? Push through all the pop polish, conventional guitar muck, and milquetoast songwriting, and there’s a smidgen of Love’s familiar complexities underneath that makes you hope she can live through this and once again deliver something that burns the metaphorical witch and brings back her head.

For this pair of ears, what has always made Love so unignorable is her unapologetic vulnerability: At her best, Love is profane, angry, defiant, sexual, contrary, abrasive, searching, and absolutely unconcerned with being demure, domesticated, docile—or any other word traditionally associated with feminine. She never lets you forget she’s a woman, but that’s less a biological given that a volatile state of flux. And the music backing her has always complimented that mix of anxiety and wonder.

That beguiling tension is what’s missing from Daughter. Sure, Love tosses off some good bits—”I’m overwrought and so disgraced/ And too ashamed to show my face” (“Pacific Coast Highway”), “I’ve pierced the last hole in my arm/ To gouge out the pieces of you” (“For Once in Your Life”), “I loathe every inch of you/ You’re going down for what you love” (“Loser Dust”)—but they’re packaged in superficial melodies, generic grunge guitars, or feckless mid-tempo acoustic guitars. Co-songwriter Linda Perry certainly has better pop ears than Love, but Perry can’t compliment Love’s jagged sensibilities or ragged voice.

Nothing against those acoustic mid-tempo numbers, though, because they also deliver the album’s two best moments, “Letter to God” and “Never Go Hungry.” The latter is a disarmingly jaunty quasi-folk, with Love in a resiliently confessional Dylan mold. “Letter to God,” though—despite the annoying Wyld Stallyns guitar wankery in the background and cliché setup—may be the best proof here that Love still has courage under her ire. It’s not only her most frank moment—”I never wanted to be some kind of comic relief,” she sings—but also her most unguarded performance. Throughout the album, Love’s delivery is mannered and controlled. She doesn’t have a great voice, but she used to embrace her warts/all rasp. On Daughter she frequently sounds like she’s trying too hard to sing instead of just letting the words come pouring out of her mouth because they have nowhere else to go. Save “Letter to God” where, about three minutes in, Love erupts with a series of entreats that culminates with “I’ve lost all self-esteem/ I’ve buried everything/ and I feel nothing, nothing”—those last two words the searing scream of a cornered animal pushed to fight or flight. If there’s more where this came from, by all means: Fight.

Hole plays the 9:30 Club June 27 with Foxy Shazam.

Behind them, maestra Marin Alsop led the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra through a movement of Erik Satie’s Parade, a percussively eccentric 1919 ballet. Throughout the evening, the BSO backed the acrobatic performers of Cirque de la Symphony, a traveling troupe that performs in music halls, typically accompanied by pops programming. It stopped in Baltimore last year, but this year’s series is the first time it is performing to a classical repertoire, which doesn’t have the breaks between songs that the Cirque’s choreography would normally incorporate.

Fortunately, Alsop chose sections from three ballets to accompany the performers, essentially casting the acrobats, contortionists, a juggler, and aerialists as performers in movement theater. And it made for an exquisitely lovely combination: Watching a man and woman scurrying up a bright red aerial silk a good 20 feet above the BSO stage to a suite from Francis Poulenc’s Les Biches offered captivating visuals to go along with the sprightly music. Later, Cirque performed a lover’s triangle between a pair of men and a woman, including choreography with an aerial hoop, to a suite from Aaron Copland’s Billy the Kid, and the pairing of Copland’s evocation of America’s wide-open spaces and the push and pull of romantic movement made for a beguiling combo. This performance included more flabbergasting displays of corporeal feats. At one point the woman arched into a back bend, and one of the men pressed himself into a handstand—with his hands resting on her hips.

If there was any drawback to this setup is that the Cirque performers are so eye-catching that you don’t pay as much attention to the music. And the only reason that’s a shame is that, on Thursday night at least, Alsop and the BSO sounded nimble, responsive, passionately on point, and its performers looked like they were having a blast. To borrow some blunt praise from rockwriting, the BSO was fucking killing it.

This attitude was best witnessed during the performance of the lone piece that didn’t include Cirque accompaniment. Alsop introduced Bála Bartok’s suite from The Miraculous Mandarin, Op. 19, with a colorful synopsis of its garish tale: A honey-pot woman lures men up to a room where three goons plan to beat and fleece the poor saps, but her first three marks turn out to be penniless. Along comes the Mandarin, who gets coaxed upstairs and falls under the woman’s spell, chasing her about before the goons retaliate, suffocating him, stabbing him, and finally stringing him up by the neck. It’s the story you’d expect to find between the covers of a Gold Medal Book with a fabulously lurid cover.

Bartok’s music is equally frenetic, and the BSO tackled this lurching, anxious, and frenetic suite with taut competence. Parts of it are frantically paced, with the strings’ bows spiking up and down in the air like fixed bayonets during a charge, but the score also opens up into places of disarming graciousness and beauty. It’s music that runs through more emotional mood swings than Idi Amin, and the BSO delivered it with a feverish, controlled competence that stirred the pulse and charged the mind.

The BSO and Cirque de la Symphonie runs through March 14 at the Meyerhoff Symphony Hall.

• Whispers for Wolves, the solo work of electronics/sound worker Melissa Moore,; Wolves’ 2008 Language of the Dards (Yauu and Twilight Sing 1000,000 Songs of Milarepa: Noise Narratives Part 1 was serious plunge into chthonic regions
• J. Graf, the local creative game-changer behind Metalux and who has been involved with some of the finer sounds, sights, and social experiments to hit Baltimore in recent years
• Weyes Bluhd, the nom de music of Philadelphia’s Natalie Mering, former Jackie-O Motherfucker member and current architect of a beguilingly strange mix of beauty and nightmare: her self-released 2007 Strange Chalices of Seeing offered some of the better there’s-something-not-right-in-the-basement-and-it’s-going-to-get-me sounds around, while the “Shattered Mirror” b/w “Liquor Castle” 7-inch offers downright haunting drones for staring at the backs of your eyelids
• Walker Teret, of local hive Walker and Jay, going solo
• Owen Gardner, the local half of duo Black Vatican, whose 2008 Split (With True Primes) seriously captured one pair of ears
• Salamander Wool, the solo project of Carson Garhart, the locally based sound sculptor who may have a release coming out on Ehse Records soon and who also plays in the underrated Sejayno.

Cover $6. Starts 9 p.m..

For four years and two albums Nashville’s Be Your Own Pet tore through garage punk with the sort of brashness that only teenagers can deliver. The quartet delivered everything at the frenetic clip of young people trying to live before they got old or the Jolt cola ran out—whichever came first. The blonde-haired personality at the eye of this tornado was the howling Jemina Pearl, 200 lbs. of don’t-give-a-shit strained into what looked like a 90-lbs. soaking-wet package of flailing energy. She put the verbal attitude behind the band’s sonic fury, defiantly challenging “Look us in the centre of our eyes/ And tell me when I’m going to die” (“Thresher’s Flail”), justifying impudence with “All because all because all because/ Because because because because” (“Bicycle, Bicycle, You Are My Bicycle”), or not really lamenting teenage homicide with the pithy ” If only what you wrote in my yearbook was true/ Then I wouldn’t be stuck in fucking Cell Block 2″ (the immortal “Becky”).

Everybody’s teen years end abruptly, and BYOP called it quits in August 2008. Since, Pearl relocated to Brooklyn and unleashed her solo debut, Break It Up, Oct. 6. Co-written by BYOP drummer John Eatherly (who also supplied the lion’s share of the instruments, with a little help from Awesome Color guitarist Derek Stanton, Thurston Moore, TV on the Radio’s Dave Sitek, and Iggy Pop), Break doesn’t try to rebottle BYOP’s manic insouciance, but don’t fear that young adulthood has tamed Pearl.

The music has matured somewhat, but not adversely. Where sheer energy used to push everything forward behind Pearl, now Eatherly puts actual hooks and melodies behind her still-arresting throat. “Ecstatic Appeal” moves along at brisk new-wave-y gallop, while “Nashville Shores” explodes with a power-pop guitar shimmer and harmonizing on the chorus. And “I Hate People,” Pearl’s duet with a crooning Iggy Pop, is damn near girl-group pop, a love song about bonding over mutual loathing of pretty much everybody: “I was walking around wanting to die/ Thought I wouldn’t make it through the night if I tried/ But I saw you standing there/ In your torn leather jacket and dark brown hair.”

It’s the sort of cheekiness that seeped into Pearl’s lyrics on BYOP’s 2008 sophomore outing Get Awkward, but the now 22-year-old doesn’t stagnate in brattiness. In fact, on Break‘s best songs she’s trying to reconcile adulthood’s caution with youth’s vigor, knowing perfectly well they don’t jibe. “My hands smell like cheeseburgers and cigarettes,” she sings on the pop-rocking “Retorgrade.” “On the tips of my fingers I count my regrets/ I try to accept who I’ve become/ Because I’ve done things I would have never done.”

It’s a conflicted stance best captured on the infectious “Band on the Run,” an anxious rocker that features some of Pearl’s best peals here. Given her irreverent streak, it’s hard not to suspect that she’s poking fun of the Wings 1973 album/song of the same name, Paul McCartney’s biggest hit since leaving the Beatles. McCartney’s song was about liberation; Pearl’s merely starts off that way. Her first verse ends, “breaking free is going to taste real sweet,” before she gleefully sneers into the chorus:

gonna burn every bridge down
on our way outta town
ain’t got time to linger
wave goodbye with a middle finger

That freedom becomes a mere mirage in the sing-songy bridge, where Pearl muses:

Wave to your broken dreams, buried in dirt
buried in dirt
all the roads lead to memories, memories that hurt
memories that hurt
we used to be such good kids
we used to be such good kids
we used to be such good kids
we used to be such good kids

before she goes on to decry the new future, with its rational compromises and “no more friends that we can trust.” The entire album doesn’t hit such wise skepticism, but “Band on the Run” is a tremendous three-minute poke at adulthood’s stark realities, the sound of knowing what’s coming up and not wanting to settle for it at all.

Jeminan Pearl plays the G Spot Nov. 2 at 8:30 p.m. with Islands. $12 advance, $14 door.

Guitars are rock’s phallic object, but volume remains its big dick. Ever since the Who hit 126 dB in the late 1970s, the loudness = greatness paradigm is both a joke and operating cliché, as pushing decibel levels became metal’s concert Everest even though “softer” bands–see: My Blood Valentine, Survival Research Labs, Borbetomagus, etc.–routinely bled ears dry onstage. By the early 1990s it became such a dead horse that Seattle bands effortlessly made deadpan jokes about it: recall the Melvins’ louder than sondgarden T-shirt.

All of which makes Sunn0))), which iceberg-carved its way through Sonar the night before last, such a frigging trip. This drone/doom outfit formed by Stephen O’Malley and Southern Lord label honcho Greg Anderson in 1998 sounds like a joke on the page: named after an amplifier, they play live in monk’s robes before a wall of amps and create feedbacking immovable objects that proceed at the pace of anaconda digestion, completely sans anything resembling rhythmic meter. Oh, there’s a microscopic world of percussive elements that poke through the maelstrom, but they’re textures in the band’s slowly building tidal wave. And everything from the band’s verbal universe (song/album titles include ØØVoid and “Defeating: Earths’ Gravity”) to its visual language (think: desolate abstraction or Brueghel uncanny) reiterates the music’s idea of pushing metal’s dark subtext to an absurd extreme.

None of which explains why the band and its music is so seductive, or how the band so effectively transcended its Earth influences come the early 2000s, when a string of albums–2002′s Flight of the Behemoth, 2003′s White1, 2004′s White2–revealed a band as interested in avant-garde composition’s outré experiments with saturated ringing tones and the sort of esoteric collages of sound and information found in Nurse With Wound or Death in June. By this year’s Monoliths and Dimensions–with its Richard Serra cover art and a small army of collaborators–it became clear Sunn0))) was aiming for the forest that birthed the darkest, deepest metal, outer-head-space exploring free-jazz titans, and the likes of Ligeti, Wagner, and Pärt.

It’s still metal about metal, though, bringing death to false metal through deconstructionist meta. And for this tour’s live presentation of it, Sunn0))) goes full bore into performance art. Expectedly, Sonar’s tight club-room stage is bookcase-stacked with amps. Smoke machines drenched the room in a thick, humid curtain, lending this predominantly male-filled room a feeling of sordid exotica (while a handful of women were in attendance, this show was overwhelmingly attended by guys, and being in a room of men standing rapt before a stage did kinda make you feel like a volunteer in an Annabel Chong project). By the time the house speakers started playing the band’s entrance music, a mix of what sounds like chants and throat singing, you can’t tell if you’ve just walked into an Orthodox mass or hopped on the boat heading upriver in search of Kurtz.

Three robed figures slowly take the stage–O’Malley and Anderson on bass and guitar and Steve “Stebmo” Moore on electronics and trombone–and the first notes emanate from the speakers, though those words don’t come close to approximating the effect. At one moment you’re standing there listening to recorded music through the house speakers and the general hum of crowd chatter, the next minute a penetrating noise commands your senses and it feels like every hair on your body flagellates at attention while loose articles of clothing ripple as if a flag stirred by gale-force winds.

The guitarists strike various guitar-rock poses in extreme slow motion, a preposterous effect heightened by the still-dense fog and the fading-in-and-out red and gold lights, which made the stage feel like a primordial murk form which these robed figures occasionally broke free. And then tour vocalist Attila Csihar, the operatic Hungarian black-metal vocalist who worked with Norway’s infamous Mayhem, crept onto the stage, also in a robe getup. He proceeded to strike ritualistic poses, too, and the show warped into the batshit.

Full confession: I only presumed, but wasn’t certain, that Sunn0))) was performing tracks off Monoliths and Dimensions; only when Csihar hit the stage did I recognize parts of “Agartha.” Sunn0)))’s molten music becomes overbearingly uniform live for me, a pulsating GRRRRRRRRRRR that makes me feel like I’m undergoing an epic hernia exam, and their sets feel more like endurance pieces than sound maps that I recognize. And that’s fine–it’s the same situation as experimental improv. Csihar–and Moore, for that matter–introduced a modest degree of conventional structure to the live experience, even as Csihar’s theatrics pushed the show toward The Dark Crystal. He titled his head back and spread his arms ominously. He shrieked and throat-sang and offered incantations in a deliciously broken English. He left the stage and came back in a metallic costume that looked like a teenage mutant ninja turtle’s suit of armor, complete with a Statue of Liberty-spiky headgear and red laser shooting gloves, and continued his one-man vocal master class in being into some really creepy shit. Perhaps he knows Rosemary’s baby.

It was elaborate visual theater that could easily be mistaken for merely taking Stonehenge to 11, but nothing about the presentation feels, well, merely ironic or insincere. That’s not to imply that Sunn0))) doesn’t take the piss out of extreme metal–best merch: Monoliths tote bags, perfect for trips to the store or farmers market–but the band doesn’t resort to mere cheap jokes. It might resort to all the cheap jokes, but it presents them in the context of total commitment to the band’s idea.

Which is what prevents the highly mannered performance form turning into self-parody: It offers something to occupy the eyes since the sound occupies everything else. Sunn0))) live is above all a visceral immersion, and Monoliths introduces more spaces for shocks to the system. The volume is so invasive that you don’t realize how incarcerated you’ve been until the guitars drop out, leaving only Csihar and Moore, and the sudden splash of negative space feels like being allowed to come up for air after being held underwater. Csihar’s piercing screams–many piercing screams–makes you aware that Anderson and O’Malley stick to their instruments’ low- and mid-ranges, infrequently hitting those annoying upper frequencies that make your ears sphincter clinch. And when the band finally worked to its rumbling finale–after more false codas than Return of the King–it generated the sort of floor-shaking power that compensated for those moments during the show when time felt to stop, and the tide threatened to take you way out.

Four songs. That’s the problem with beguiling songstress Abby Mott’s new EP Go West! Get East!: it’s only four songs. Yes, a mere four tracks that don’t even crack the 20-minute mark in total running time from the supercute vixen with the golden pipes who wrote and recorded her 2007 debut Hearts a’Flutter all by her own bad self. Now she’s backed by her band—drummer Pat Blades, guitarist/backing vocalist/keyboardist/percussionist Jason Hughes, vocalist/backing vocalist Jay Novak—and the results are some totally angelic indie-pop. And at four songs, it leaves you wanting more, more, more, and more.

And that’s the last whining you’ll read here, because on those four songs Mott displays a growing songwriting sophistication and a divine sense of vocal control. She has always sounded pretty—she could read court transcripts and make them sound like buttery dreams—but she’s honed her sense of timing, pacing, and florid moments, making an already distinctive instrument even more alluring. Take “Cars and Jobs and Daytrips,” a countryish—the entire album belies a honky-tonk attitude that Mott and the band tweak into their own folky pop, as the Elephant 6 bands did for so many years or the way Pavement did on “Easily Fooled”—dirge shot through with a levitating bloom of a chorus. A sleepy-time guitar line, drum beat, and organ weep underscores Mott’s stroll through her verses, which quick sketch moments of fleeting time, before she gets to the a stomping two-line chorus that ends “but I can’t put to music my paycheck or the drive.” Mott stretches out that final long “i” into an at first bubbly high note that eventually ends in a resigned sigh, echoing the vocal approach she uses for the first word of each line in the song’s verses, creating vocal frames for he lyrical imagery.

EP closer “Vault” may be Mott’s most stunning vocal performance yet. Essentially a love-gone-wrong ballad—she opens with “you break my heart everyday when I wake up and give it to you,” sung over a such an sad but solid organ and guitar riff that recalls early ’60s Willie Nelson (think “Hello Walls”)—halfway through she leaves the country-ish crooning behind for some damn near gospel moments. It’s a performance that gives the song a classic, nightclub-singers-should-cover-it shine.

Mott can still put together an infectious pop melody, and opener “I Like it I Do” takes a mid-tempo barroom sing-along and transforms it into a rush of symphonic pastoral pop three minutes in, the sort of successful shift in song dynamics that make Decembrists and Arcade Fire fans go weak in the knees. And on “Draw Me a Line,” Mott sings the chorus with the sort of sensual abandon—”Draw me a line shake it and make it unwind”—that would cause fans of Jenny Lewis, the Watson Twins, and Zooey Deschanel to eat their James Perse pants if Mott could get the same sort of exposure.

Abby Mott and Her Band plays a CD-release show in Sonar‘s club room Sept. 19. $10, which includes a copy of Go West! Get East!.

“I AM…YOURS”: these were the last words to leave the mouth of Beyoncé Knowles Tuesday night at the 1st Mariner Arena, and the final message projected onto the gigantic video screen behind the band. It was both a gracious thank you to her fans, whom she left screaming as if they wanted more following a two-hour-and-change concert spectacle, as it was the young woman’s operating mantra for the set. From the moment she appeared center stage in stark silhouette, Knowles spent the evening moving, bumping, grinding, dancing, singing, chatting, smiling, welcoming, and thanking the audience, her three watch-out-for-the-big-girls back-up singers, her 10-piece all-female band, the five female dancers, the four male dancers, the four-woman opening act RichGirl, the tech crew, the lighting crew, and just about every single person who might have had anything to do with helping her make this show the most-est best-est fun thing to do that evening. She wasn’t exaggerating: The show was, in fact, more fun than a bed full of puppies. And girlfriend works onstage to take you there. No joke.

This well-paced and exhaustingly choreographed show kicked off with the horn-powered “Crazy in Love,” which the band opened up a little bit for a short sax solo from the heavy-blowing reedswoman, and moved straight into “Naughty Girl,” sexed up with a rocking arrangement that translated the song’s slinky rhythm into a stalking guitar line. Throughout the show’s opening salvo Knowles wore a sparkly, sequined mini-dress—gold in the front, silver in the back—that featured a bow the size of a small animal on her bum, the sort of accent even skinny women avoid more than carbs and which Knowles, of course, effortlessly pulled off. By the time Knowles and her band—two keyboards, two drummers, one percussionist, one bassist, one guitarist, tenor and alto sax and a trumpeter, all clad in curve hugging varieties of black—hit “Get Me Bodied,” the concert was already an up-tempo bash.

And then the wardrobe changes started. During the “do the Naomi Campbell walk” part of the extended version of “Bodied,” the dancers took over en masse, providing Knowles with a chance to exit and make another grand entrance, this time atop a set of stairs that rose from the stage, clad in a body-hugging white mini-dress and hooded cape. She sidled into a few slower numbers, establishing the concert’s roller-coaster shape: some bangers, some ballads/mid-tempo jams, lather, rinse, repeat. During these early ballads the mix was a tad flat, with even Knowles’ powerful pipes getting swallowed by the reverberating volume inside the arena. It was a sonic flaw that was fine-tuned away by the time Knowles’ onstage wardrobe upgrade—into a Road Warrior-meets-dominatrix black leather mini-skirt and bustier get-up—led into “If I Were a Boy,” complete with nightstick-swinging, handcuff-accessorized backup dancers stomping and strutting behind her. Smack in the middle of the song, Knowles and the band broke into a verse and chorus of Alanis Morrissette’s 1990s you-go-Canadian-white-girl anthem “You Oughta Know” that was, quite frankly, fabulous. And I loathe that song.

Frank Hamilton

But such is Knowles’ charisma: She makes even annoyingly gooey hokum such as Sarah Maclachlan’s “Angel”—yes, she did—work. It helps that she’s got a solid stage sneer and smiles more often than not—and that the show is such a nonstop rush. A good 75 percent of her songs feature multiple dance sequences, and if anybody is missing a beat, it’s difficult to notice. All you see if Knowles singing, dancing, kicking, dancing, dropping her bum to floor and bouncing immediately back up, singing, freaking singing, dancing, strutting, and even getting into a harness to be hoisted above the floor seats and transported to a second stage toward the back of the arena, doing an aerial flip en route—and always in heels high enough to make you dizzy. Your thighs and abs burned just watching her.

Soon Knowles was moving into her back catalog; “Bills, Bills, Bills,” “Say My Name,” “Bootylicious,” “Independent Woman Part 1″ all got a brief run-through, whether by Knowles herself or in some abridged musical interlude, and served as a disarming reminder of just how many pop and R&B hits the 28-year-old singer has been a part of ever since Destiny’s Child came roaring out of Houston in 1998. So, yes, Beyoncé live in concert does involve a little bit of narcissism: Stands for L’Oreal cosmetics, with whom she has an endorsement deal, were found in the 1st Mariner lobby and brief ads for her House of Dereon ready-to-wear fashion line played on the in-house video screens prior to the show. And during her admittedly gorgeous version of the song forever associated with Etta James, Mack Gordon and Harry Warren’s “At Last,” archival footage of the civil rights era played on the screen behind Knowles, into which footage had been cut of Knowles’ turn as James in Cadillac Records, a video sequence that eventually faded from black-and-white footage of Martin Luther King’s 1963 march on Washington to color footage of Barack Obama’s January inauguration and Knowles performance of this same song as the newly elected president danced with his wife. Presumptuous? Yes. Pyrotechnically effective? Absofuckinglutely.

But you can make such bold statements when you’ve become such a cultural presence that Forbes ranks you in the top 10 of its World’s Most Powerful Celebrities, behind only such little-known forces of nature as Angelina Jolie, Oprah Winfrey, and Madonna. And yet, still, Knowles ends her show thanking everybody in the room—and during her final number, “Halo,” actually leaving the stage to shake hands and work the front rows like a visiting dignitary, but never putting herself above the fans. In fact, the evening’s highlights were the set’s most interactive numbers. For a rousing version of “Irreplaceable,” Knowles encouraged the entire arena to sing in her stead, accompanied only by guitar. (Knowles and the full band came in on the second verse.) And an energetic “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)” was preceded by a video montage of the seemingly endless homemade versions of song’s video dance moves that drew as enthusiastic of a response as Knowles and two dancers did recreating the choreography onstage. And it’s little, inclusive details such as that which make such potentially shallow showbiz flourishes as proclaiming “I am yours” feel like anything but an empty gesture.

Early deadlines for this week’s Sizzlin’ Summer issue meant that info e-mailed to us early this week didn’t make the print edition—such as this bill of spoken word and hip-hop. Hard-working spoken-word poet Talaam Acey comes to town, sharing a bill with Indelible’s David James, Carolyn Malachi, Labtekwon, Channel Live’s Hakim Green, and host Carlos Muhammad.

It all takes place at the Nest (note: its web site is remarkably uninformative), 200 W. Pratt St., May 22. Doors open at 9 p.m. Cover $5.

Noise caught local combo the Bellevederes’ first show back on March 7 at the Windup Space, the words “soul revue” getting us out of the house on one of those rare Saturday evenings when the evening’s schedule wasn’t already overrun with art openings and/or non-work obligations. And once this ensemble hit the stage, lord love a duck was leaving the house a good decision. A five-piece band–keyboardist Sean Beier (Oxter, ex-Mofofunka), bassist Ryan Finnerin (Red Vines), drummer E.J. Shaul-Thompson (Caleb Stine and the Brakemen), guitarist Burke Sampson (Caleb Stine and the Brakemen), trumpeter Jake Honoroff, and trombonist Micah Huerta (Modern Girls, general musician/producing busybody)–lays down soulful funk, easy strolling R&B, and classic ’50 and ’60s highball cad jams as if born to it. And then two petite female vocalists, Denny Finnerin and Kelly Grochmal, just flat out belt their fucking balls off. Their online songlist includes many a classic, from Etta James to the Meters, Ray Charles to Aretha Franklin, and at the first show the Bellevederes actually pulled off a Beatles cover that didn’t immediately make you want to bring up lunch. A classy, brassy good time–and they’re back, tonight at the 13th Floor at 10 p.m.

ADDENDUM: As of 5:19 pm, Noise received an e-mail from the Bellevederes’ Sean Beier announcing that tonight’s show has been canceled due to a band member’s illness.

Fellow vinyl junkies: last week Dischord Records posted a little bulletin about its ongoing vinyl re-mastering of its back catalog and links to its re-mastering process. For the fan/consumer, all this means is that a great wealth of Dischord vinyl is available again, including Fugazi’s Red Medicine and the indispensable Faith/Void split 12-inch. (Click here and here for all currently available re-mastered titles.)

More good news came in Dischord’s March 10 e-mail newsletter announcing re-masters in the works, which include Rites of Spring’s self-titled 1985 LP and the mighty Marginal Man’s long out-of-print 1984 Identity EP.

Thank you, Joe Gross, for the heads up.

Roughly two minutes and 45 seconds into “Aeon,” Antony Hegarty repeats a verse ending line with such an emphatic purpose that the breath halts just thinking about it. The first time Hegarty, the lead singer and doughty focal point of New York’s dour-mood unit Antony and the Johnsons, digs into “Hold that man I love so much,” his arrestingly warbling baritone theatrically haunts the spectral melody the way it has since the group’s 2000 self-titled debut. Hegarty’s immediate reprisal, though, strips the line of its perfectly timed artfulness, shoving an impish, uncontrollable insistence into a tune previously content to paint the sky with intergalactic yearning.

This moment comes in the middle of the eighth of 10 songs on the new The Crying Light, Antony and the Johnsons’ third album–the first since the band’s 2005 Mercury Prize winning breakout I Am a Bird Now. This time out, though, Hegarty handles almost all of the vocal duties, unaided by Bird‘s supporting cast of musical marquee names with voices almost as singular as his own (Rufus Wainwright, Lou Reed, Boy George, Devdendra Banhart). Light is also more musically slight, with arrangements featuring but a cello softly conversing with a piano or a keening violin setting the tone for a gentle guitar line.

Hegarty extracts the same high drama from this extreme minimalism, and at times pushes the emotional melodrama toward crippling extremes without tipping over into the outright maudlin. Light is a far bleaker album in mood than Bird but also a more accessibly empathetic listen. The band has somehow found a way to transcend Bird‘s emotional time-warp to early 1980s downtown New York and the imminent culture wars even while making music so depressing that listening to the album feels like an instinctive, visceral reminder than we’re all hurtling toward the grave.

That little pirouette of change is a welcome twist to the Johnsons, though, as far too much of Light feels too instantly familiar. Yes, Hegarty’s voice–the otherworldly love child of Maria Callas and Billy Paul–is still Nico cold and Scott Walker entrancing, and nothing else comes close to it in mainstream pop or the online underground. Yes, the Johnsons can still make austere melodies sound as inconsequential yet strong as a spider’s web. And, yes, Hegerty still sings about time’s inexorable passing, metaphorical and actual departures, and the sometimes unbearable loneliness of occupying your own skin.

It’s exactly what the Johnsons delivered on Bird and the four EPs released since, which makes the group’s alchemy feel a bit too measured. In fact, when the group covered the David Lynch/Angelo Badalamenti-penned Julee Cruise tune “Mysteries of Love” from Blue Velvet, its very modest alteration from the original’s ephemeral dreaminess suggested the sources of the band’s very DNA.

And so the familiarly abstruse artiness of Light tracks “Her Eyes Are Underneath the Ground,” “Another World,” “One Dove,” and the ambient ode “Dust and Water,” a levitating-in-limbo mood begging to be put in a Lynchian cinematic world. These are the expected songs from an Antony and the Johnsons album, as consistently bankable as LeBron James is for Cleveland Cavaliers fans. Trouble is, these diamonds aren’t as arresting as they were when first encountered on Bird–or Antony and the Johnsons for that matter. Like a jeweled family heirloom, the gemstone retains its brilliance but familiarity has dulled the luster.

It’s a feeling amplified by Hegarty’s appearance on last year’s Hercules and the Love Affair’s posh disco digs, where the knee-knocking vulnerability of his voice was exponentially amplified by the change of musical setting. Squishy beats and a slinking bass line offered Hegarty a different backdrop to respond to, and he answered with some of his more instantly affecting vocal performances.

Which is why Light‘s best moments are when the Johnsons provide Hegarty with something a little different. “Epilepsy is Dancing” finds the group stitching together an earthy, early Fairport Convention folk behind Hegarty’s jaunty vocal that winds death around desire, singing “As I came to a screaming/ Hold me while I’m dreaming/ For my fingers are curling/ And I cannot breathe,” at a gentle lullaby pace. Composer Nico Muhly’s string arrangements give the gorgeous “Everglade” a symphonic sweep that cushions Hegarty’s exultant delivery of “Fingers kiss the string/ mouth taste the blade/ of everglade.”

The album’s finest moments, though, are also the most atypical. “Kiss My Name” continues Hegarty’s moony romantic knack for casting intimacy into tangible matter–recall Bird‘s thorny “Fistful of Love” and the debut’s “Deeper Than Love”–but places these swooning sentiments inside a perky melody. (Perky in the sense that Tindersticks and the Dirty Three can occasionally be upbeat, not insipid Katie Perry perk.) A violin gently follows Hegarty throughout the tune, like a flitting sparrow helping Cinderella prepare for the big dance.

The stunner here, though, is unquestionably “Aeon,” a song of Spartan power and beauty. It opens with a solitary piano line, sounding like it’s going to progress straight into a familiarly Johnsonsesque dirge. Thirty seconds in, though, and electric guitar takes up the skeletal tune, and Hegarty swings in as if channeling Billie Holliday breathing “God Bless the Child” to life. Aeon is the song narrator’s baby boy, a child that will eventually hold the narrator in his journey into the next life. Yes, “Aeon” is an outright spiritual, complete with gospel-like backing choir vocals and a swaying melody that’s more spirit world than the profane one. The Crying Light captures a group and songwriter fully in command of its strength in musical slightness and emotional heaviness, but what makes Antony and the Johnsons something special are those few instances when it escapes that narrow window and goes chasing after something else.

An afternoon volunteer effort had me arriving a bit after the 3 p.m. start, and the Red Room was already full of people checking out Old Songs, the Tinklers’ Chris Mason and ex-Half Japanese man Mark Jickling’s project where they set ancient Greek poetry–such as Archilochos, Hipponax, Alcman, Alcaeus, Xenophanes, you know, the real classics–to ye olde timey acoustic music. I couldn’t quite squeeze into the performance space, but could hear the band’s dulcet songs from the store’s entryway and, unless my ears are failing me more than usual, it sounded like Liz Downing joined the guys for a few Sappho tunes.

Throughout the afternoon, friends and acquaintances jostled past, stepped out for a quick bite or a smoke, and, in general, drank in the afternoon’s ultra-chill vibe. And the brief intermission opened up a few spaces in the back of the Red Room from which to take in Asa Osborne’s Zomes project. His Zomes debut on Holy Mountain is an intoxicating, subdued drone capable of transporting the brain into a pleasant limbo of reverberating introspection, and live the Lungfish guitarist is joined by two other (what appeared to be) keyboard players to recreate his graceful, looping harmonies. And as befits a man who never needed three chords when he knew hypnotic repetitions of two could make the earth tremble, Zomes live explores galaxies in the simple collisions of cyclical note patterns. It isn’t nearly as artfully polished as it is on record, but the music’s rawness in person–hearing background amplifier buzz when all three players are at rest, catching the crackle of organs punch through speakers, Osborne physically cycling through his recorded rhythms on cassette tape–makes it both more elemental and spellbinding.

Local poet Chris Toll read a few pieces after Zomes’ gorgeous set–including a daft poem that he dubbed Emily Dickinson’s first (though numbered last) work, the result of her finding a time machine after befriending Edgar Allan Poe–followed immediately by Father Christmaseastermass himself, Daniel Higgs. He sat at the front of the room, tied a belled rhythm shaker to his right foot, unrolled a good foot of narrow white paper, picked up a single-stringed instrument, and announced that he was to play a new song for the first time–for the first time for anybody outside himself, that is. He started off singing “between myself,” occasionally tapping out a jingling rhythm with his foot and strumming a reedy melody, and continued in this vein–as in, singing “between the seer and the seen,” and other such aphoristic lyrics that made philosophical havoc out of linguistic sense–for a few absolutely arresting and haunting minutes.

Unamplified and unaccompanied by anything other than the sounds he made himself, Higgs’ set became a cross between a campfire session, a fireside chat, and an out-of-body experience, and it’s invigorating to consider how rich and varied Higgs’ solo work has evolved in recent years. It feels like he only started performing solo in 2003 and 2004, and then primarily working his Jew’s harp improvisations and melodies. Since, a solo Higgs performance could include any number of stringed instruments and voice, resulting in a growing number of uncategorizable albums and a few live collaborations.

Puppy duty required me to leave about 30 minutes into his set. At least I was able to purchase a Christmasseastermass gift for myself before heading out.

True Vine majordomo Jason Willett sent out an e-mail last night clueing Noise into this wonderful fact: Matmos’ M.C. Schmidt and longtime friend of Matmos J Lesser perform at the Hampden record treasury tonight, Dec. 11, at 5 p.m., or as Willett put it:

martin “matmos” schmidt & jay “jay lesser” lesser will be performing an {in store} at the true vine. you are welcome to pay attention or to ignore them.

Word to the wise: Don’t ignore them.

A recent, pre-Nov. 4 holiday in London confirmed a few suspicions I had from daily online reading of The Guardian: 1) That UK citizens were as agitated about the outcome of our presidential election as we were, and 2) that The Wire has earned a loyal a British fan base during its recent UK airing. And thanks to Paste magazine, I now know a different Londoner is showing some Wire love through her working relationship with homegrown talent Blaqstarr. The local producer has somewhat interpreted the HBO crime drama’s theme song, “Way Down in the Hole,” for M.I.A.’s single “S.U.S. (Save Ur Soul).”

Over the long weekend, local house diva Ultra Naté e-mailed out a link to the Karl Giant-directed new video of her current single, “Twisted,” and it’s a scorcher. (See video, below.) It’s a single from Ms. Ultra’s most recent release, Alchemy: G.S.T. Reloaded, a two-disc hit parade of her No. 1 club hits remixed by the likes of Kenny Dope, DJ Pope, and more that came out just last month, and the video is her third collaboration with photographer and director Mr. Giant. (Thank you, Ethan Says, for the history lesson.) Ms. Ultra is performing in Italy this week, but returns home next weekend, Sept. 13, for her Deep Sugar party at Padadox before heading over to Moscow and Kiev.

And, for the record: the 40-year-old Ultra Naté looks positively lethal in hot-pink wig and matching bustier. Move over, Lil’ Kim.

OK, perhaps you’re all music festival-ed out after last weekend’s Whartscape, but maybe you’d still like to check out some ear-ringing noise–and preferably for free. It’s a bit of a hike for those people who also choose to love their planet and hate on oil by not owning an automobile, but “DNA is the DNA”–a program on WMUC (88.1 FM), the University of Maryland’s student-run radio station–has organized a nice two-day lineup of noise, metal, and other unclassifiable musical extremes into its FREE DNA Test Fest down in College Park. Twenty acts in all–including Baltimore’s own Ian Nagoski spinning 78s, Philadelphia hardcore heavyweight YDI, the total abandon of Cleveland’s Homostupids, and the absolutely shitfuck nutty FNU Ronnies, which can sound like the Brainbombs if they got a hold of a bipolar beat sequencer. Good times.

Friday, July 25: Tall Firs, Satanized, Kurt Vile, FNU Ronnies, Ian Nagoski, No Fucker, Vegetative State, Kid Romance, Eightyfive, True Womanhood, Nicholas Szczepanik, and the Lampshades.

Saturday, July 26: YDI, Homostupids, Violet, Locrian, Copier, and Nocnitsa.

Both nights start at 6 p.m. at the WMUC studios: 3130 S. Campus Dining Hall, College Park. Tables will also be set up with people from MT6 Records, Zeromoon, DNA in the DNA Records, and more.

Thank you, Austin American-Statesman pop critic, all-around righteous human being, and friend of noise Joe Gross, for the heads-up.

The totally trebly sound system didn’t faze Abe Vigoda one bit. The Los Angeles quartet spits out a jittery, sprinting guitar rock that wouldn’t know what to do with a steady, regular beat even if it could be heard through the monitors. And for most of its brisk set, Abe Vigoda cranked out the sort of chugging restless noise cranked out by bands such as Gaunt and Truman’s Water in the early 1990s, bands that made a glorious racket out of guitars that always sounded like they were running away from each other and still managed to swell into a surging crest. Abe Vigoda adds a daft sense of melody to that ramshackle mess, injecting a patina of pop hooks into its shambolic grooves. Plus, any band in which both singing guitarists rock matching hairstyles is a fun time–especially when they’re both sporting a face-hiding skate-punk flip that once made the Bar-B-Q Killers’ Laura Carter such an impudent stage force. (The Baltimore taper captured the show in case you missed it.)

New York’s High Places scratched an itch we didn’t even know we had: Cocteau Twins vocals draped over a Boards of Canada watery groove. This duo of Rob Barber (electronics, electronic percussion) and Mary Pearson (voice) sharply turned the vibe in the room into one suited for cool, shimmering beats. Set up on the side stage in front of the room’s southern windows, Barber and Pearson draped their gear in a weedy tangle of aqua-blue Christmas lights, and when the house lights went out, the duo looked like a pair of undulating underwater creatures. Barber would fire up the skeleton of a programmed beat, typically something slight and borderline woozy, and over it layer a filigree of electronic smashes before hammering out a bottleneck jolt of watery percussions. They both bopped in place behind their setup like pistons powering a hovercraft, and slowly they began to venture into a levitating realm where bedroom pop and DIY dance beats coil around each other and try to hatch some new breed of DNA. Sometimes this Frankensteining took root, sometimes it didn’t, but the band never stopped trying to breathe sincere life into its creation. No idea what Pearson was singing, but if the lyrics at all emotionally complement the music’s coral-reef mood, then bravo.

Los Angeles’ No Age, like its tourmate Abe Vogda, was nurtured at an idealistic art community incubated at an L.A. club called the Smell, a fact seemingly inseparable from discussing No Age in any of the myriad of absurdly fawning reviews of its 2007 singles collection Weirdo Rippers and its 2008 Sub Pop debut, Nouns. It’s reported as the sort of young hive of DIY activity–see also: Wham City, with whom it has been compared/talked about as coming from a similar positive impulse–an attitude you suspect No Age smelted into its lyrics for Nouns‘s “Teen Creeps”: “Wash away what we create/ My sins like funny calls you make/ Teen creeps I’ve seen you on my street/ Teen creeps get what they want and me / I won’t end up like them at all.”

On Weirdo Rippers No Age comes across as delightfully impetuous no-fi punks; for Nouns, guitarist Randy Randall and drummer/vocalist/electronics man Dean Spunt ambitiously aim for droning punk soundscape of hooky guitar riffs bleeding into ambient ooze. And onstage, No Age sounded like just another underground rock duo that is good at not playing the blues.

Stripped of Nouns‘ abrasively comforting production and plunked down on a stage with no low end coming out of the speakers, Randall and Spunt sounded like two guys banging through some basic rock chords and stomp, spitting out a fine mess, mind you, but a well-trod, familiar mess all the same. Don’t get me wrong–I love bands good at playing badly, especially when they serve it up with something resembling an organizing idea. Tonight, though, No Age sounded way too tame and even one-dimensional. Even with all the sweat and energy coursing through the room–the expected bodies and hair flailing–and being able to pick out songs from the set list (“Every Artist Needs a Strategy,” “Boy Void,” “Teen Creeps”), No Age’s set steamrolled itself into one loud smear of high-end energy. It was a nice way to go just a little bit more deaf, but an ear-ringing witnessed many, many, many times before.

Knowing the four members of Be Your Own Pet all hover around 21 years old is one thing. Seeing these noisemaking naifs–vocalist Jemina Pearl, drummer John Eatherly, guitarist Jonas Stein, and bassist Nathan Vasquez–onstage makes you think they got kicked out of an upstanding New England boarding school and decided to become the townie punk band. Clad in jeans and a navy polo shirt, Stein looks like he heard a DNA album while going from calculus class to economics and wanted to see just how much racket he could choke out of those six strings himself. Vasquez is a tall, stolid wallflower, a bassist happy to thump away in time with everybody else. Eatherly appears to take his cues from X drummer D.J. Bonebrake: say little, hit things as fast as arms and legs allow. And Pearl–who might break 100 pounds soaking wet, while wrapped in a down comforter, and holding a St. Bernard–comes across as winning the frontperson spot because her pipes unleash the best scream. And everybody else is afraid to fuck with her.

Altogether, though, the band plays its collective tiny ass off. If the 2006 self-titled debut and early concert clips posted online suggested a band that made music after staying up all night listening to the Germs and X-Ray Spex fueled by a steady diet of Ding Dongs and Jolt, Be Your Own Pet now has control over its spazzcore jolts, nuance in its one-minute rockers, and something like an overwhelming sense of purpose: rock out, have fun. Everything else–fans, records, press–is merely clutter surrounding the onstage buzz.

And what clutter there was on this eve. As part of a Nylon magazine-packaged “Summer Music Tour”–alongside She Wants Revenge and two other afterthoughts–Be Your Own Pet was that one thing not like the others inside a curiously empty Rams Head Live. Not exactly empty, just sparely attended, such that it felt like hardly anybody was there. It was a Tuesday school night, and the rain didn’t make venturing outside that inviting, but surely somebody else knows that BYOP is the punky bee’s knees right now.

Appropriately enough–in accidental honor to BYOP’s newest album, Get Awkward–the prevailing mood in the cavernous space was awkward. A semicorporate environment was installed, thanks to lifeless Nylon TV spots from the South by Southwest music conference played on the house monitors, as one after another of nameless young guys in tight jeans and stubble and young women in day-glo accessories paraded by on screen. I’m the sad late-thirtysomething guy who still reads Spin and Rolling Stone and watches MTV, and I had no idea who these people were. Worse, the between-sets house music was, well, stuff I didn’t like the first time around. It was like Steely Dan was DJ’ing at Hot Topic.

Luckily, BYOP smashed through the guys not dancing girls vibe with its wonderfully brisk 30-minute set. Clad in tea kettle-shiny silver tights, black-and-white-checkered Vans, short shorts, and a T-shirt featuring “party” printed on it about 500 times, Pearl stalked the stage like she knew the sooner the band went on with it, the sooner they could blow this joint. Firing through a large swath of songs off the new album (“Black Hole,” Bummer Time,” a fantastic “The Kelly Affair,” and the sublimely ingenious “Becky”) and a smattering off the debut (“Bicycle, Bicycle, You Are My Bicycle,” “Wildcat!”), the group powered through its set with a devilish glee. Guitarist Stein and drummer Eatherly took turns sculpting the band’s kinetic music, three-note guitar leads snowballing into jabbing chords pushed along at a sprinter’s pace. Every once in a while, Stein jumped into the air and kicked his legs out, timed to nothing in particular, which was almost as adorably don’t-give-a-shit as bassist Vasquez’s equally hilarious leaps, directly up into the air and directly back down–the bassist as a comedy team’s straight man.

Pearl, her pageboy crop shook into halo helmet by the second song, continues to have the best snarl in rock, a throaty, corporeal roar with such a husky belt to it that you can’t quite figure out how it comes out of the young woman onstage. (My girlfriend, who has neither heard nor seen BYOP, nevertheless suggests that such force comes from her rage at having to be around dumb boys all the time.) It’s the perfect vehicle for threatening a former BFF, telling all the other bitches to leave, and synopsizing Beyond the Valley of the Dolls inside of three minutes.

And there’s the onstage charisma–the wide eyes that appear to roll into the back of her head when she’s shaking her entire torso around as if she’s trying to escape a straitjacket, the back-and-forth head wagging with such force that you wouldn’t be surprised if her head came flying off midverse (and kept right on screaming), the shock-treatment dance that combines a circa-1964 go-go dancer’s legs shimmy, arms flailing as if enduring a seizure-induced trauma, and hair standing at attention as if she touched a Tesla coil. In between songs, she every so often paced across the stage and lobbed a gob of spit next to the drum riser. Somewhere, a teenage skater boy is waiting to hear about a Jemina Pearl Mishima-like personal army so he can enlist, and it was very, very heartening to see two young women in the sparse Rams Head crowd singing along to each and every word as if it were manifesto. The world is a much better place anytime more than one young woman is screaming “Me and her, we’ll kick your ass/ we’ll wait with knives after class.”

And to top it all off, right in the middle of its set, Be Your Own Pet covered Arizona’s early-1980s obnoxious, puerile punk/new wave outfit Killer Pussy, and the inner-record nerd that still lives strong inside us smiled like he just received an early birthday present.

A special thanks goes out to Rams Head Live’s clockwork timing. Told on the phone that Be Your Own Pet would go on around 9:30 p.m., it was possible to park nearby at 9:20, get to the club at 9:25 as some band was finishing its awful set, stand around the club long enough to pay $4 for a soft drink, and then thoroughly enjoy the adrenaline-pumping set by the live-wire BYOP, and then leave without ever laying eyes or ears on She Wants Revenge. Much obliged.

| Image by THE CITY PAPER DIGI-CAM%u2122

| Image by THE CITY PAPER DIGI-CAM%u2122

In personal experience, anything that ends with people enthusiastically following the shirtless white man into the street as another climbs atop a car typically leads to rioting and looting and/or mob violence. So it was a great relief watching the pulsating crowd of people cramped into the Talking Head pour onto Davis Street to witness Tel Aviv trio Monotonix continue its pyrotechnic set with nary a windshield kicked in or woman inappropriately pawed.

Frontman Ami Shalev–part Cat Scratch Fever-era Ted Nugent, part chimpanzee–basically brachiated out the door. Drummer Haggai Fershtman transported his entire kit outside. And guitarist Yonatan Gat, whose evil love riffs put the pervy leer behind the band’s fuzzy bump and grind, stepped out with his apparently mile-long chord, climbed atop the van parked right in front of the door, and wailed away as a streetlight cast a total eclipse penumbra around his spectacular mop of hair.

Such showmanship was the cherry on top of an evening ripe with noisy good times. Local opener Hollywood turned out to be the latest incarnation of a bunch of local young punk vets including Flowers in the Attic‘s Kenny Harvey on throat and Kevin Bernstein on bass. The two to three guitar-powered outfit played a throbbing eye-poke of noise rock that left no doubts that the Amphetamine Reptile and Noiseville catalogs are still being listened to as much as they were in 1993. The event was the CD-release show for Hollywood’s Hits! An Alltime Low, a 12-track anti-social gem of bad attitudes (“Girl?”) and cheap shots (“Toucher”), and although the band was already on by the time we got there, we’re pretty sure we caught most of its set, as suggested by this between bands conversation:

Kenny Harvey: Did you see us?

CP: I think I only caught the last 15 minutes of the show.

KH: That was the entire show.

Dark Meat, a purportedly 23-member outfit from Athens, Ga., shoehorned a small army onto the Talking Head’s intimate stage. All love to a small-club touring band that 1) shows up in a charter bus-sized touring machine that barely makes it between the parked cars along the Davis Street tight squeeze and 2) packs a horn section that includes flute and trombone. But these kids looked like commune hippies straight up–and a bass player that looked like the love child of Kurt Cobain and Wolverine–and judging by the cover alone suggested this book was gonna be something along the lines of Godspeed You Drive-By Truckers once they got all 5,000 (or whatever) microphones sound-checked and ready to roll.

Goddamned was that assumption ever wrong. Dark Meat takes equal parts marching band and Southern rock, combines them with a heaping dose of constant energy, and mixes until everybody’s having just as much wing-nut fun as it is. Somebody alternates beating a hand drum and sending confetti through the crowd with a leaf blower. Another guy occasionally plays a pocket trumpet, occasionally sends colored streamers shooting to the back of the room. Who knows what that one guy was doing to that poor inflatable flamingo the band tossed into the crowd? And while this circus is going on in the club, the band flies through brass and guitars-injected indie-rock war whoops. You get the feeling that Dark Meat brings its own house party to wherever its merry tour bus takes it, and when it closed its set with an monolithic cover of the Stooges’ “Fun House,” anybody not smiling doesn’t know what fun is.

And then Monotonix, whose set felt to fly by in a wash of fire–Fershtman’s drum sticks, Shalev’s pants’ legs, beer cans, mustaches, wailing hair, and every surface in the club coated in at least one person’s sweat. Guitarist Gat is a perpetual-motion machine of sleazy ’70s rock riffs, and Fershtman remains able to lay down a chest-thumping beat despite any distraction–such as Shalev hauling his bass drum around the room or upending a can and bottle-filled trashcan over his head. The set stuck to the ass-moving rock of its recently released six-song EP on Drag City. And, hell, when this band has enough songs to fill out a full-length, there very may be dope, guns, and fucking in the streets.

A March 4 Sun piece titled “Baltimore: A Muse for Many” offered what felt like a keyword search-generated list of songs with “Baltimore” in the title. What, if anything, these songs have anything to do with the city is beyond our ken. You know what we’re talking about here: Music–a song, a beat, a refrain, a certain riff, a band–can recall a place without having to spell it out in the title.

Instead of posting a flummoxed comment to the article, we decided to ask some of the people who have made, followed, and cultivated Baltimore music over the years what song, piece of music, or band makes them think of Baltimore–and invite you to do the same. We’ll start:

Bret McCabe (blow-hard, CP arts editor): Baltimore in sound is a jukebox of the silly, outlandish, and just plain outrageous bands to these ears. A first blush with Lambs Eat Ivy (pictured) at the 14 Karat Cabaret shortly after moving here informed me that local music was going to be much, much different than what I knew in Texas. The Matt Clark 5′s barroom surf ‘n’ roll will forever be associated with Sowebo fun-time for me. Dan Deacon’s “Wham City” instantly recalls local warehouse recent past. Certain songs–Beserk’s “Giant Robots,” Cloaca’s “Train to Hell,” Candy Machine’s “Autorepublic,” pretty much anything by Buttsteak–immediately bring to mind early-1990s Baltimore. And Miss Tony’s “Pull Ya Guns Out,” the first exposure I ever had to Baltimore club music–played for me by somebody who was obviously much smarter than I, as it instantly informed me that I wrote off house music in the 1980s way too early.

DJ Excel: The movement of Frank Ski comes to mind. His classic use of the “Doo Doo Brown” drum loop was a staple for over a decade. His hit with the catch phrase “Ya Rolling Doo Doo” makes me think of B-more, the B-more I loved and miss so very much. Another artist and song that comes to mind is Miss Tony and her song “What’s Up What’s Up.” The reason these stand out and are classics here at home is simple. They did them. They were not scared to be artistic. They did not duplicate, they innovated. That’s the path that I as an artist stick to. Bmore Original Records is built on being “Original.” Here in B-more, they tend to get involved after other markets show it love, which is why no major label invests here period! In order to breakthrough the market, the movement must be there during the break–not three quarters later. The ironic thing is as soon as B-more got noticed worldwide for our music, they switched to sound like the Dirty South–B-more’s identity went out the window!!! Why would they come to B-more to do Dirty South when they can just go there and get the breakthrough movement with the people RIGHT THERE.

Cullen Stalin (DJ, Taxlo co-impresario) “Feel Me” by Rod Lee. Not as well known outside of the city as “Dance My Pain Away”–or Debonair Samir’s “Samir’s Theme”–but this song is the quintessential Baltimore club track in my mind. I feel like, you hear this song and it makes you want to know what the fuck is going on in Baltimore that produces music like this.

Ian Nagoski (True Vine Records co-owner, experimental musician) When I moved to town in 2000, it was DJ Class’ ubiquitous horn riff, heard every weekend on 92Q, seemingly for years, that defined the roughness and beauty of Baltimore. But then, when Blaqstarr released “Tote It” about three years ago, with its hard-as-hell rifle-shot rhythm track and casual-cool vocals, for me, Baltimore had its voice. Every out-of-towner I played it for was as instantly alarmed at the ferocity of it as they were floored by the Bo Diddley-level singular genius of it. For 18 months, I heard it spilling from cars and convenience store boom boxes almost daily and felt that I was actually living through a good time in music.

Brian Deran (Ottobar co-owner, Leg Up Management owner) Jesus Lizard–the first show I ever saw in Baltimore, at Max’s on Broadway. Graham Parson’s version of “Baltimore.” This Heat–Repeat, since Peter Quinn, Lyle Kissack, and Craig Bowen turned me on to it. Dr. Subrimaniam’s and Moondog’s music since introduced to them by Daniel Higgs and Asa Osbourne. “Isolation” by John Lennon.

Jason Urick (WZT Hearts) I would say the song that still resonates with me the most about Baltimore is the first one I really remember hearing with the city in the title. In my freshman year of college I somehow stumbled upon the work of Scott Walker, through an in-store play copy of his best of that was in the rotation at a Borders I worked at in Gaithersburg. I began to buy up whatever Scott Walker albums I could find, leading to some ill-advised purchases of ’80s country records of his . . . but along the way I bought an import of Scott. I immediately fell in love with “Lady Came From Baltimore,” which I later found out was a Tim Hardin song, an artist I have since come to love as well. Growing up outside of D.C., I never really put much mind into Baltimore at all–except for O’s games and whatnot–and I thought it weird that a British, by way of Cleveland, singer would even think of the city. Years later, after becoming disenchanted with Chicago where I had moved in the late ’90s, I randomly decided to move to Baltimore into a house an old high school friend of mine had. I still knew next to nothing about the city, but I remember loading up a mix CD for my bus trip out here that started with this song.

Lizz King (songstress) “Peanut Butter Jelly”!