Jenn Wasner and Jon Ehrens formed the duo Dungeonesse after individually becoming two of the most compelling figures in Baltimore’s underground rock scene – she with the massively successful duo Wye Oak, who record for Merge Records and play big rooms across the country, and he with dozens of lesser known projects ranging from the lo-fi solo excursions of Repelican to the high strung high concept trio The Art Department. But the two began collaborating as both were beginning to explore the world of synthesizers of drum machines, particularly on Ehrens’s wildly catchy pop project, White Life, which Wasner sang backup on.

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 Matmos, the duo of M.C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel, formed in San Francisco in the mid-1990′s, and enjoyed a decade of success, including a string of albums for Matador Records and collaborations with Bjork, before relocating to Baltimore in 2007. But given the way Matmos has integrated themselves into their new hometown’s music scene, it wasn’t too surprising when, during last month’s Super Bowl,  Daniel openly rooted for the Ravens over the 49ers on Twitter.

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The latest Matmos album, The Marriage of True Minds, released on Thrill Jockey, bears some immediate fingerprints of the group’s time in Baltimore. The concept of the album involved telepathy, with the duo conducting sensory deprivation experiments in which they’d attempt to telepathically communicate ideas about the album to volunteer subjects. Many of those subjects were Baltimore musicians like Ed Schrader, who shows up on the track “Very Large Green Triangles,” singing about what he visualized during the experiments. There’s even a bit of audible Baltimore club music in the track’s danceable second half.

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Over nearly a decade of recording and five full length albums Arbouretum have established themselves as stalwarts of the Baltimore music scene, so it may come as a surprise that Coming Out of the Fog is Arbourteum’s first record made with the same lineup as their last.

Started in 2002 by Dave Heumann, Arbouretum have been making enchanting stoner folk-rock with plenty of guitar solos; think Neil Young meets Lungfish. Aside from their first record, Long Live the Well-Doer which sounds more like proto-Arbouretum, Heumann and company have shifted subtly from release to release, making small changes to their druidic rock.

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Transantics, true to its name, is a project formed by a pair of musicians from opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean, who met in college and decided to make music together: Andy Shankman of Baltimore, and Cecilia de Lisle of London. That conceit, of course, imposed limits on the band’s future — with them now both situated in their home countries, there are no future plans for Transantics, only the recordings they’d made circa 2009-10. Shankman, who now leads his own band Jumpcuts and also plays in my band Western Blot, decided to finally unleash the Transantics’ songs as a self-titled album on Bandcamp at the beginning of 2013, rather than let them collect figurative dust on his hard drive. And it was a good idea, because it’s a pretty solid record.

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Labtekwon is a singular figure, both in Baltimore music and in a larger sense. Easily the city’s only rapper whose career spans the whole of the 1990s and the 21st century so far, with dozens of full length albums, the numbers alone set him apart. And then there’s his music itself, a dense lattice of social commentary, humorous shit-talking, high concepts and relatable human experience. With so many albums, often working from the same production palette of unpredictably chopped jazz and funk samples, they can run the risk of all blending together as if all minor variations of the same basic aesthetic. His latest album, HARDCORE: Labtekwon and the Righteous Indignation/Rootzilla vs Masta Akbar, however, is a standout in his catalog, perhaps one of his crowning achievements, while still firmly within his established mode.

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Baltimore Backlog is less an album than a data dump, and that’s not an insult but merely a statement of fact. When Dave Fell, a bassist and keyboardist who’s logged time in local bands like White Life and Adventure, released the collection of solo recordings to BandCamp as a double cassette or digital download earlier this year, he noted:

i have lived in baltimore for 3 and 1/2 years. in that time i have released nothing. so here is a collection of songs i made in the rooms i have occupied, all at various stages of completion. i just want them to live somewhere else other than an itunes playlist causing an itch in the back of my brain.

Fell is perhaps being too humble. Although one can hear Baltimore Backlog as a hastily assembled clearinghouse, with 17 home recorded tracks of wildly varying styles and quality spilling out over the course of nearly an hour, it’s also perhaps one of the best such collections you’ll ever hear from a relative unknown. Fell, who previously led the band Pearly, has a high, reedy voice that suits the slight soul bent of his lo-fi pop, as well as a gift for funky, syncopated basslines. The keyboards and drum loops suffer from the same kind of tin and thinny textures as many records from the Baltimore warehouse scene, but given the ambition of Fell’s songwriting and the demo origins of these records, it’s easy to imagine him someday finding a fuller sound for this music.

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“Bad Scene” and “Shadow Casting” make the best case for Fell as a promising songwriter and vocalist on Baltimore Backlog, with big irresistible hooks bursting out the tracks. For much of the collection, though, even the more seemingly ‘unfinished’ or experimental tracks have their charms. “Death Master File” vamps repetitively but appealingly on a simple groove with multi-layered vocals,  while “Both Hands” builds from wordless a cappella and gradually brings in a minimal drum pattern.

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