By Adriano Fegundes Nearly a year ago, before a headlining gig at Merriweather Post Pavilion, Dave Portner and Brian Weitz of Animal Collective, the hugely successful indie band that first cut its teeth in Baltimore County, described their new material sounding like an alien band sampling material from Earth, such as radio signals beamed...
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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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Dope Boy Last year I interviewed OOH, longtime frontman of the veteran Baltimore hip-hop band Brown F.I.S.H., about the launch of his solo career and his plans at the time to release both an EP, The Big 7, and a mixtape, The King of Pops. What he didn’t mention at the time, though, was...
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Ian Hesford Just over a week ago, Telesma, the Baltimore-based “psychedelic tribal modern world dance music” band, was playing a headlining show at Ram’s Head Live, and gearing up to release its second studio album, Action/in/Inaction, due out later this spring. But band member Ian Hesford, who plays a diverse array of instruments including...
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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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from Facebook Susie Mudd, a fixture in the Baltimore music media for over two decades, passed away on April 4. In 1984, she began covering local music for Maryland Musician, and three years later acquired ownership of the publication, which she renamed Music Monthly. She published the free magazine until 2007, when she was...
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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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Beach House at the beach Late Tuesday night, when most good bloggers had gone to bed, local dream pop duo Beach House decided to casually drop a new song, titled “Myth,” with a tweet and Facebook post to their respective profiles that read simply, “Hello again.” It ranks as one of the tightest pop...
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Jazz Mind As Ed Schrader’s Music Beat, bassist Devlin Rice and drummer/vocalist Ed Schrader have proven more than capable of channeling the low-end brooding (think “My Mind Is Broken By the Sound But it Gets Me Around”) and high-energy blasts (think “Rats”) of post-punk. With No Age guitarist Randy Randall for “When I’m in...
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by Rarah On Monday afternoon, MTV News blew up the rap blogosphere with some news regarding up-and-coming Baltimore rapper Los and legendary hip-hop label Bad Boy Records. “We have a new artist named Los that we signed,” Sean “Diddy” Combs told MTV cameras in an interview taped last week. It was an interesting choice...
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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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The Pilgrim, from Kickstarter I’ve seen some powerfully bullshit Kickstarter pleas over the past year or so from bands you will never hear of, wanting, like, major label-style money to record a debut record and various things several miles past the border of self-obsessed self-indulgence, but there’s also a flip-side to that of the...
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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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An die Musik We were kinda worried that it was going to be worse: The jazz and classical venue‘s phone has been turned off since early in the week, after a Sunday night show cancelled. E-mails to club owner Henry Wong were bouncing back, and e-mails about cancelled and/or moved shows had started rolling...
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By Monique Crabb Another Baltimore band is calling it quits. Following the departures of art-rock outfit Ponytail and punk mainstays Double Dagger, psych-rock four-piece Thank You has announced that its co-headlining show this weekend with Oxes will be the band’s last in the United States and Baltimore. The band will then tour Europe and...
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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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Oxes bein' rowdy. Back in April, we got word of two 12-inch singles, titled “Crunchy Zest” and “Orange Jewelryist,” released in Europe by math-metalheads Oxes. The band also announced some European tour dates, and then we didn’t hear much of anything. No American release for the 12-inches and no stateside, let alone hometown, shows....
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Going out on a high note The local post-hardcore heroes Double Dagger are calling it quits, according to a statement on the band’s site. “As the band got older and grew and changed, the people in it did too, and our individual lives are pulling us towards other pursuits,” the statement, signed by all...
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