Beach House On Sunday night, the fine folks at National Public Radio uploaded a free stream of Beach House’s Bloom, the local duo’s fourth album and its first since the breakthrough success of 2010’s Teen Dream. A first listen reveals an album that feels like a natural extension of Teen Dream, with tightly layered...
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Vivek Muralidhar The Maryland music community has lost some well-known figures in April, including Child’s Play frontman Brian Jack and Music Monthly publisher Susie Mudd. One passing that flew under the radar, however, was Vivek Muralidhar, who recorded songs under the band name Valium Eel, and died earlier this month. I first heard Valium...
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Watch the Throne Last year was probably the quietest year in Bossman’s career since before 2004, when he became one of the best-known rappers in Baltimore. He may have been laying low after a busy, tumultuous 2010, which included the release of his second album The Re-Up and a brief, pointless beef with Wale....
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Making Moves One of the increasingly rare local rap singles to make it into daily mix-show spins on 92Q in the past few months is “Trashbags,” an anthemic banger by DBoi Da Dome featuring Starrz. It isn’t a great song, but functional and fun to shout along with, and radio-friendly in the sense that...
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by Jefferson Jackson Steele Flock of Dimes, the solo project of Wye Oak’s Jenn Wasner, will be getting a proper physical release courtesy of Friends Records. Side A of the 7-inch features a newly mastered version of the previously released track “Prison Bride.” Side B is a “screwed mix” of “I Can’t Tell You...
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Blaqstarr Blaqstarr dropped a new track yesterday (via his label Interscope) and there’s nothing Baltimore club about it. Which isn’t a big surprise; dude’s been onto something more for a while, even when you could properly call him a club producer. This is like a new strain of anti-R&B—lo-fi backgroundy production, a kind of...
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Jazz Mind As Ed Schrader’s Music Beat, bassist Devlin Rice and drummer/vocalist Ed Schrader have proven more than capable of channeling the low-end brooding (think “My Mind Is Broken By the Sound But it Gets Me Around”) and high-energy blasts (think “Rats”) of post-punk. With No Age guitarist Randy Randall for “When I’m in...
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Brains For the sweeping drama and layers of quivering sounds in “Brains,” the first single off the forthcoming album Nootropics, Lower Dens released a music video that is rather minimalist. Well, minimalist at least in narrative action. The entire video focuses on a seated Jana Hunter, as seen through a convex screen resembling that...
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Repelican Last year, I wrote a City Paper feature on the band White Life as well as a lengthy companion piece here on Noise about frontman Jon Ehrens’ countless other bands, many of which have never properly released a record. But Ehse Records, the same illustrious Baltimore label that released White Life’s debut album,...
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Cookamonga Last summer when I sat down with Baltimore rapper Caddy Da Don for his City Paper cover story, he was riding high off the breakthrough single “Grindin’ On Me,” and he’s been plenty busy since then, releasing the Powder Meth Blow mixtape and doing lots of shows, videos, and interviews. His camp also...
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Pretty swirly and stuff For his new album, Dreams Say, View, Create, Shadow Leads–out Feb. 21 on Thrill Jockey–Dustin Wong has released a music video and started a contest. First, let’s get to the video, for the song “Diagonally Talking Echo.” The layers of swirling guitars we’ve come to love in Wong’s music are...
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Asleep at the wheel During 50 Cent’s beef with Jadakiss, Jada memorably remarked that he did “real songs with Big, no made up shits,” referring to the fact that he had once collaborated with the living Notorious B.I.G., whereas 50 had only appeared on a song that posthumously sampled Biggie’s vocals. That lyric ran...
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The Crown Ain't Safe Earlier this week, I logged onto the popular mixtape hub DatPiff.com to listen to some of hip-hop’s latest underground releases, and was pleasantly surprised to see that the banner at the top of the site counting down the day’s big new release was from Baltimore’s own Los. The eagerly anticipated...
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Cover art Well, the economy is still in the shitter, Congress appears to be out of fucks to give, and there’s all of the police-state insanity surrounding the Occupy movement, but, hey, we’ve all got something to be thankful for. Here in Baltimore, we can give thanks for good local music, and we can...
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Black Ring Earlier in the year, up-and-coming Baltimore rapper Rome Cee coiled as many dope rhymes as he could into the one-minute “Rap Messiah Freestyle” that served as both an announcement of his signing to Under Sound Music and a warning shot for his latest album, The Extra Mile. Not one to rest on...
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The Beautiful Mind It’s commonplace for unsigned rappers to keep throwing out free releases on the mixtape circuit for months or years while hyping up their eventual (and, they hope, major label) proper debut album. Baltimore’s Skarr Akbar is no exception, but he’s taken the practice to an unusual extreme, touting the forthcoming album...
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Cover art Alto Verde is the latest band fronted by longtime Baltimore rock fixture Andy Bopp, whose history includes Love Nut’s brief major label tenure in the ’90s as well as the long-running solo project Myracle Brah. Anchored by bassist Kris Heath, also of local powerpoppers Gary B. and the Notions, and drummer Nicholas...
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By Josh Sisk This Thursday marks the third anniversary of the death of Baltimore club DJ and local radio icon Khia “Club Queen K-Swift” Edgerton, a tragic loss to the city’s music scene that hasn’t gotten any less heartbreaking or difficult to accept in the time since then. Countless tribute songs popped up in...
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7-inch cover art What made In Evening Air, the second full-length from post-wave trio Future Islands, work so well was a certain sense of unity, a clear declaration of purpose. Sam Herring’s woeful tales of heartbreak, backed by synths and beats from Gerrit Welmers and bass rhythms from William Cashion, were pieced together like...
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King of Pops As the Brown F.I.S.H. frontman promised when I interviewed him for City Paper in April, OOH dropped his first solo mixtape at the end of May, on the occasion of his 35th birthday. The King of Pops: The James Evans Mixtape even opens with a callback to that article, with the...
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