Jon Ehrens is a serial band inventor in the Robert Pollard mode. Just as the Guided By Voices frontman frequently comes up with aliases to release music under, sometimes fashioning unique musical identities and even elaborate fictional backstories, Ehrens constantly records under names like the Hypnic Jerks, Factoid of the Dustbowl, and Spittn’ Images, often just for one album or a few songs, before moving onto the next idea. One of his many solo recording projects, The Art Department, even became a live trio that gigs steadily around Baltimore.

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When I interviewed local hardcore trio the New Flesh for the Baltimore City Paper in 2007, the band was in a middle of a transitional period. They had just parted ways with founding guitarist Danny Propert, and had begun playing shows with a new guitarist, Greg Dembeck. At the time, they had ambitions to finish recording their third album of material with Propert, and quickly follow it up with another album with the new lineup. Ultimately, however, those plans didn’t pan out. Instead late last year, the New Flesh released Hall Of Heads, a compilation featuring scraps of both projects along with other recordings, on drummer Rick Weaver’s label, Human Conduct Records.

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Dan Deacon’s 2007 album Spiderman Of The Rings attracted a flurry of national press coverage both for the Baltimore-based musician and Wham City, the  multi-media collective of artists at which Deacon is the center. But so much of that coverage focused on the external facts — the wild live shows, the illegal warehouse venues, the bizarre outfits, the eccentricity of the whole Wham City scene — that something almost got lost in the shuffle: that Dan Deacon is kind of a brilliant guy who made a great record.

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Since forming in the mid-’90s, Baltimore-based quintet Lake Trout has released four studio albums that, for better or worse, tell a woefully incomplete story of the band’s musical evolution. Each release marks a stage in its development, from a party band with moments of jazzy improvisation, to long groove-driven instrumental tangents, and then most recently to brooding alt-rock with a greater emphasis on songwriting. But those recordings are ultimately snapshots of a band that’s always done its most inspired work onstage, where it won a dedicated fanbase that heavily bootlegged its live recordings.

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