Listening Party:
Many of Baltimore’s most accomplished musicians collaborated on an adventurous, challenging, thrilling reinvention of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon.
By Evan Serpick
4/17/2013
Listening Party:
Zs
Score: The Complete Sextet Works 2002-2007
Northern Spy
Improvisation has been the cornerstone of contemporary underground music for a decade now, maybe two, the exploratory/winging-it impulse that launched a kabillion CD-Rs and warehouse-space sets
By Lee Gardner
11/21/2012
Listening Party:
A clever woman with a lot to say.
By Baynard Woods
7/11/2012
Listening Party:
ONCE UPON A TIME, rappers like Baltimore MC Wordsmith—labeled indie, conscious, or backpacker—dotted the mainstream hip-hop landscape like conscientious objectors, avoiding the violence, and self-hate
By Evan Serpick
6/20/2012
Listening Party:
How Do We Explode
By Bret McCabe
6/13/2012
Listening Party:
Three wicked-smart musicians
By Michael Byrne
6/6/2012
Listening Party:
Consider yourself lucky this discography has been reissued
By Michael Byrne
5/30/2012
Listening Party:
Lafayette Gilchrist and the New Volcanoes release a booty-shaking live album
By Baynard Woods
5/23/2012
Listening Party:
It might help to warm up just a bit before listening to this album. Nothing major—whap your knuckles against some cement, just enough to see a little red in there, or maybe have a shot of something terrible and cheap.
By Michael Byrne
5/2/2012
Listening Party:
Kinda funky opening to perfect math-y, metalcore-y assaults like breaking bottles against a brick wall.
By Michael Byrne
4/25/2012
Listening Party:
A classic trio record, straight up.
By Lee Gardner
4/11/2012
Listening Party:
A mix of electroacoustic ambient sound and warbling androgynous vocals
By Michael Byrne
3/14/2012
Listening Party:
Sisters Rachel and Becky make a modest career in singing/messing with traditional folk songs
By Lee Gardner
3/7/2012
Listening Party:
“Senectitude,” a word rare enough that an internet search is as likely to suggest crossword puzzle forums as it is actual definitions, translates roughly to old age. But more than old age as a state of being, over
By Michael Byrne
2/15/2012
Listening Party:
A couple of years ago, Carson Garhart, aka Salamander Wool, advanced the outer marker of how loose and alien folk or folk-like music could be and still resonate.
By Michael Byrne
2/8/2012
Listening Party:
Ambient musician Leyland Kirby sources from music from recorded
sounds dawn, and then cuts up/loops/splices it into ghostly fog
By Michael Byrne
2/1/2012
Listening Party:
Behold the power of a thin electronic whine and some random stuff clattering around in a particularly echo-y room.
By Michael Byrne
1/11/2012
Listening Party:
Screaming primordial emotional frequency.
By Michael Byrne
1/4/2012
Listening Party:
Sit back, close your eyes, and enjoy the puzzle
By Michael Byrne
12/28/2011
Listening Party:
like nothing you’ve ever heard lately. Promise.
By Michael Byrne
12/21/2011
Listening Party:
You hear a lot about things that are goth or gothic, especially gothy
By Michael Byrne
12/7/2011
Listening Party:
Bradford Cox knows what he’s doing, Parallax remains resolutely indie in sonics, introverted in orientation.
By Lee Gardner
11/30/2011
Listening Party:
Various artists
Drive: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
Lakeshore
Lasting not terribly long at the local theaters, the movie Drive, by most reports a slick and smart art-house-meets-Hollywood action winner, has already come and gone from Balti
By Michael Byrne
11/23/2011
Listening Party:
The field of music in which something as potentially corny or cliché as a sample of wolves howling could be dropped unironically is limited to pretty much Ben Frost’s 2009 freak crossover LP
By Michael Byrne
11/2/2011
opening the third eye wide with psych-rock.
By Lee Gardner
10/26/2011
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If a record ever seemed like it was laughing at the sudden arrival of super-mainstream electronic dance music, it might be this.
By Michael Byrne
10/12/2011
Listening Party:
Bill Orcutt
How the Thing Sings
Editions Mego
Depending on how literally you want to take it, the “thing” referenced in the title could be Bill Orcutt’s guitar, a battered acoustic with the A and D strings missing. Or maybe the “thing” is Orcutt h
By Lee Gardner
10/5/2011
Listening Party:
Krallice advances its own black metal influenced heaviness agenda with the kind of spacious (and nondogmatic) touches that can only open more ears and blow more minds.
By Lee Gardner
9/14/2011
Listening Party:
The rabbit hole that is the Loren Connors catalog is an impressive one indeed.
By Michael Byrne
8/31/2011
Listening Party:
Ambient music has long had a friendly relationship with cheese. It’s the difference between Brian Eno’s Music for Airports and his Music for Films, for example.
By Michael Byrne
8/24/2011
Listening Party:
Metal just gets weirder and weirder as it expands, and that can only be a good thing.
By Lee Gardner
8/17/2011
Listening Party:
Frankly, there aren’t many terms that Wolf Notes can fall under.
By Michael Byrne
8/10/2011
Listening Party:
It you’re still standing by the time the machine-gunning ends, you’ll be ready to follow him anywhere.
By Lee Gardner
8/3/2011
Listening Party:
Gillian Welch has a bit of Emmeline Grangerford in her—you know, the somber teenage girl from Huckleberry Finn who hurries off to scribble a morbid ode anytime anyone dies.
By Lee Gardner
7/27/2011
Listening Party:
Tom Greenwood delivers a series of surreal invocations and natural-world references
By Lee Gardner
7/20/2011
Listening Party:
Small Sur
Tones
self-released
Music for getting from point “A” to point “B.” It could be a genre unto itself. It’s more immediate and, in some ways, personal—wandering is a solitary, headspace-y way of being—than electronic/electro-acoustic ambient
By Michael Byrne
7/6/2011
Listening Party:
What makes one drone as soothing and encompassing and soul-tugging as the sound of the womb and another a flat, dull noise?
By Michael Byrne
6/22/2011
Listening Party:
it’s so infectious the machine-like steady beat that Klaus Dinger lays down and guitarist Michael Rother builds epics around.
By Bret McCabe
6/15/2011
Listening Party:
One of the more undersung joys in listening to music is being utterly confounded by something.
By Michael Byrne
6/8/2011
Listening Party:
Boris
Heavy Rocks
Attention Please
Sargent House
When a band releases two albums at the same time, it’s easy to suspect that it doesn’t quite know what it wants to say. Listening to the two new albums from Boris doesn’t dispel that idea, though
By Lee Gardner
6/1/2011
Listening Party:
Future-forward yet heavy guitar leads that at points feel like math-rock. That’s the weird duality of Dope Body.
By Michael Byrne
5/25/2011
Listening Party:
If it was still possible for a folk song to become a standard or traditional Tara Jane O’Neil would be responsible for at least a few.
By Michael Byrne
5/11/2011
Listening Party:
Cass McCombs writes and records great songs. His albums are sometimes more problematic.
By Lee Gardner
5/4/2011
Listening Party:
What a mind-blower. Cue up Lil B the Based God’s “Motivation” and nod your head to the dramatic beat with the ethereal synths.
By Lee Gardner
4/20/2011
Listening Party:
So many paradoxes in such a small package. The third album from Wye Oak strips away some of the extra instrumental touches.
By Lee Gardner
4/13/2011
Listening Party:
The thing about lo-fi pop/rock is that it’s less the low that matters than the fidelity.
By Bret McCabe
4/13/2011
Listening Party:
Felicia Carter and Amy Shook
Nothing to Do
ShookShak Productions
When the contemporary female jazz vocalist norm looks/sounds like posh cosmopolitanism (the Diana Krall, Jane Moneheit, Lorraine Feather model) or stately eminence (Dee Dee Bridgewa
By Bret McCabe
4/6/2011
Listening Party:
The problem is that two great tastes don’t always go great together.
By Bret McCabe
3/30/2011
Listening Party:
“Old Black” is the name of the first of the five long tracks that make up the new album by Earth.
By Lee Gardner
3/16/2011
Listening Party:
How do you assess another disc of diaphanous drones and waxing and waning slabs of sound from the Montreal-based musician in a standard music-review format?
By Lee Gardner
3/2/2011
Listening Party:
The Psychic Paramount
II
No Quarter
The first proper studio album by New York trio the Psychic Paramount was called Gamelan Into the Mink Supernatural. Wow. The second one, released recently after a nearly six-year silence, is called II. Hmm. Well,
By Lee Gardner
2/23/2011
Listening Party:
A solid few days of digesting PJ Harvey’s new Let England Shake sent this pair of ears back to her entire catalog.
By Bret McCabe
2/16/2011
Listening Party:
Deaf Center’s Owl Splinters has lulled you into its web.
By Bret McCabe
2/9/2011
Listening Party:
Rejoice: Daniel Higgs is making rock music again.
By Michael Byrne
2/2/2011
Listening Party:
The postpunk generation is redefining burning out and not fading away.
By Bret McCabe
1/26/2011
Listening Party:
Gerald Cleaver/Uncle June
Be It as I See It
Fresh Sound New Talent
One of the prime clichés in the writing-about-jazz fakebook is how a drummer’s record doesn’t sound like a “drummer’s record.” Then again, Gerald Cleaver’s Be It as I See It does
By Lee Gardner
1/12/2011
Listening Party:
Given Mechanical Gardens’ early fall 2010 release, we are admittedly batting cleanup on this.
By Michael Byrne
1/5/2011
Listening Party:
Since so many ’90s indie bands are busy launching reunions these days, can it be Labradford revival time now?
By Lee Gardner
12/22/2010
Listening Party:
Whether or not Nicki Minaj can rap is beside the point.
By Bret McCabe
12/15/2010
Listening Party:
Maserati
Pyramid of the Sun
Temporary Residence Ltd.
There’s a great moment in the not-as-great-as-it-thinks-it-is recent rock doc It Might Get Loud when perma-skullcapped U2 guitarist the Edge stands in front of his several refrigerator-sized cab
By Lee Gardner
12/1/2010
Listening Party:
When it comes to doom, less is more. Seems counterintuitive, but there it is.
By Lee Gardner
11/24/2010
Listening Party:
At some point in the last dying throes before Philly’s Clockcleaner gave up, it recorded Auf Wiedersehen, which comes a full year and a half after the gloomy racket-punk band’s final show.
By Michael Byrne
10/13/2010
Listening Party:
A steak, rare, with something deep-fried on the side. No veggies, thanks. And a shot of Jack Daniels with a beer to chase. A last meal, a final meal. The meal you eat when you don’t have or care about a future. The meal you eat when you’re feeling, or better, living dangerous.
By Michael Byrne
10/6/2010
Listening Party:
Thomas Köner’s first three albums emerged at the dawn of the IDM/ambient boom of the early 1990s, but they were never a good fit for the chill-out room at raves.
By Lee Gardner
9/29/2010
Listening Party:
The Coil Sea is the project of Arbouretum frontman Dave Heumann; Big in Japan’s Matthew Pierce and Michael Lowry; Michael Kuhl; Jimmy Wallace of Asheville, N.C.; and Walker Teret, a Baltimore folk veteran who plays with too many bands to mention.
By Michael Byrne
9/8/2010
Listening Party:
Susan Alcorn
Touch This Moment
Uma Sounds
An organ-like hum begins to fluctuate in timbre and intensity, snowballing into a buzzing morass. Just more than a minute and a half into this anxious squall it fades to near silence, before a gentler sound
By Bret McCabe
9/1/2010
Listening Party:
Randy Barracuda
On the Low
Harmönia
Anybody’s having more fun branding themselves and naming songs/albums than certain European electronic music producers, they’re saving that shit for themselves. Dutch producer Young Marco can marry a tropicalia-esque g
By Bret McCabe
8/25/2010
Listening Party:
Anybody can write a song about a lover, a departed friend, or some political outrage, but it takes an extra special band to pen a song that treats The China Syndrome like a juvenile delinquent flick.
Anybody can write a song about a lover, a departed friend, or some political outrage, but it takes an extra special band to pen a song that treats The China Syndrome like a ju
By Bret McCabe
8/18/2010
Listening Party:
By Michael Byrne)
8/11/2010
