The Baltimore duo Beach House’s first two albums were fairly popular on an indie level, and made a good number of year-end lists. But that all seems like a prelude now to the massive reception that the band’s Sub Pop debut, Teen Dream, has enjoyed since its release in January, as one of the most universally acclaimed albums of 2010 so far.

To be sure, Teen Dream is a marked step forward in quality from 2008’s Devotion, which I never particularly loved, but the aesthetic differences are subtle. New producer Chris Coady removes some of the hazy gauze of reverb from their earlier work, and it sounds like he’s moved the musicians closer to the microphones and captured more precise performances. But there’s still a thousand yard stare quality to Beach House’s songs that makes them more enjoyable as background music than active listening. It’s slow, pretty music, but it never hits you upside the head with striking beauty or haunting emotion. Victoria Legrand’s throaty, almost androgynous voice is still one of the band’s most distinctive traits, but aside from her impassioned performance on “Real Love,” she rarely projects a strong persona or emotional state.

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Still, Teen Dream is not without its charms or surprises. “Used To Be,” with its jaunty, lively piano melody, or the pounding climax of “10 Mile Stereo” are things I never would’ve expected to hear on a previous Beach House album. And “Lover of Mine,” with its strong backbeat and shimmering keyboards, is almost the band’s lackadaisical take on synth pop. More often than not, however, touches like the dragging, almost drunken-sounding slide guitar on “Norway” underline how Beach House can find ways to be creative and unique while remaining largely in their comfort zone of pretty background music.

Big In Japan functions as not just a side project or offshoot of the long-running Baltimore quintet Lake Trout, but as effectively a subset of it — all three of Big In Japan’s members also play in Lake Trout, and even the two musicians in the latter who aren’t members of the former have sat in with Big In Japan during live shows. Still, Big In Japan have now been doing their thing, with on-again off-again live residencies full of low key improvised grooves, for over a decade themselves, and have grown into a distinct entity. While Lake Trout focused more and more on song-based studio creations, Big In Japan remained exclusively a live concern, only issuing live recordings as albums.

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Live At 8×10 2009 was released for free by The Biggest Label Ever, the same website that issued Lake Trout’s recent live album. With numerous improvised pieces edited down into a handful of untitled tracks, the structure is identical to Big In Japan’s debut release, 2001’s Goodlove Sessions Vol. 1, but the formal similarities highlight the differences in content. Big In Japan may still be playing at the 8×10, the Federal Hill club that’s been their stomping grounds since the ’90s, but musically they’ve continued to develop and diversify their sound away from the jazzy flute riffs and drum’n'bass rhythms that used to be their signature.

“Untitled 05” is the record’s real gem, with a busy but restrained rim-tapping rhythm foregrounding some evil synth bass and spooky, ethereal vocals. On the flipside, though, “Untitled 06” is vintage Big In Japan, with the bass guitar thumping out relaxed whole notes over a tight, funky beat and a repetitive synth pattern. Still, Live At 8×10 2009 sometimes feels a little too edited down at only 33-minutes, and some tracks, like “Untitled 03,” which starts out with the album’s most raucous noise but quickly peters out, feel like they’ve been cut too short. They do get credit, however, for leaving you wanting more, and “Untitled 07” ends the set on an offbeat note, with what sounds like a harmonica solo, albeit one run through enough delay and distortion effects to make it all sound thoroughly Big In Japan.

As 2009 came to a close, it became clear that More, the third album by Double Dagger, was one of Baltimore’s most acclaimed albums of the year, on both a local and national level. Unfortunately, I’d been attempting since its release in May to identify the album’s appeal, to no avail. The power trio’s Thrill Jockey debut, recorded in a vacant space above the Current Gallery, is as raw and loud as the band’s popular live shows, but for whatever reason, it took a while for me to warm to it.

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Ultimately, it was the More’s second track, “Vivre Sans Temps Mort” that provided my entry point to appreciating the album, with its slow burn groove stretched out over five minutes in contrast to the album’s faster and shorter songs. But of the latter, the frantic groove of “We Are The Ones” is another highlight, bringing to mind Stay Afraid-era Parts & Labor.

Still, I remained frustrated that Double Dagger’s commitment to their punk roots has manifested itself in vocals so perfunctory, and at times inaudible, that I almost wish they were just an instrumental band. Songs with titles like “Surrealist Composition With Your Face” and “Helicopter Lullaby” probably have interesting lyrics, but I can’t make any of them out given how low the vocals are in the mix on More, and “Half-Life” packs the album’s catchiest riff, but the vocals that accompany it completely skirt the melody. Double Dagger are definitely a band to watch, but I’ll be waiting until the next album to see if they make something more up my alley.

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The self-titled debut album by Baltimore quartet We Read Minds is scarcely more than a half hour long, but its very first track announces itself as something more epic and ambitious than you might expect. The 6-minute “Of The Nest” features a winding, unpredictable structure and a number of disorienting shifts in rhythm. But on another level, it’s also consistently midtempo and accessible, effectively establishing the band’s keyboard and guitar-driven sound. The brooding, groove-driven songs of We Read Minds seem to take a number of cues from a band they’ve opened for, Lake Trout, which is refreshing given that the latter is one of Baltimore’s longest running and most popular live bands, but hasn’t ever seemed to have many kindred spirits or followers in the local music scene.

“Rely On The Moon” feels very much like the album’s centerpiece, perhaps in part because the spare 90-second track that precedes it, “Bastian,” serves as a mood-setting intro for the driving, piano-heavy song. But after “Rely” thunders in, it also offers some of the album’s most impressive musical ideas, including the intricate percussion on the song’s bridge, and functions as an excellent showcase for frontman Justin Gilman’s appealing voice, which brings to mind both synth pop singer Kenna and Jellyfish’s Andy Sturmer.

For all of their ideas and occasional flashes of strong songwriting, however, the band still gets somewhat stuck in the post-Radiohead doldrums with a consistently gloomy mood and a lack of fast tempos to break up the monotony. The album’s final track, “The Difference,” shows how much more We Read Minds still need to grow to catch up to its ambitions, with awkwardly employed drum machine textures and rhythmic shifts that nearly stop the song in its tracks. That “The Difference” and the album’s other weakest song, “The Colour,” are both reprised from an earlier EP, however, suggest that We Read Minds are a young band that’s still finding its footing and improving with every new song.

After “Time Doesn’t Lie,” the towering 9-minute epic that Arbouretum featured on Kale, last year’s split LP with Pontiak, I had high hopes that the Baltimore quartet would more ambitiously lengthy songs on their next full-length. On that front, their third album Song Of The Pearl is a disappointment, in that only one song, “Infinite Corridors,” stretches out past the 6-minute mark with a false ending and a climactic coda. But beyond my own arbitrary expectations, Arbouretum has made a solid and varied album, where the shorter more concise songs are more of a strength than a weakness, and the band’s stellar guitar work is on display as always.

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“Thin Dominion” is one of Song Of The Pearl’s most immediate standouts by virtue of also being its hardest rocking track, with a heavy groove and rumbling toms. But elsewhere on the album, frontman Dave Heumann expands on the band’s austere aesthetic with warmer, earthier tones and more inviting songwriting, and “Down By The Fall Line” and the title track show a mellower side of Arbouretum. And “Midnight Cry” points toward a whole new direction for the band, with a faster tempo than their usual comfort zone, and a soaring lead guitar line reminiscent of Curt Kirkwood of the Meat Puppets. Still, this album does make me yearn for bolder, longer jams that knock me out as much as “Time Doesn’t Lie.”

In the past, Baltimore-based singer/songwriter Jason Dove’s music never quite clicked with me, despite encouraging signs like his classic power pop influences, and the sense of humor in display in his entertaining Jason Dove Diaries YouTube series. But the click has definitely at least started to happen with Illegal Activities, his third solo album and first with a new backing band, Vacation Face. That sense of humor is still more restrained on Dove’s records, though; even when some laughter rises up in the mix on the song “Each And Every One Of Us,” it’s directly following the droll lyric “information doesn’t make advertisers any money.”

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Recorded by local rock mainstays J Robbins (formerly of Jawbox) and Chris Freeland (formerly of Oxes) and released by The Beechfields, the sound of Illegal Activities is dominated more by keyboards than Dove’s previous releases thanks to Vacation Face’s Mike Ward on piano and organ, but the sound isn’t actually any softer. Christopher Demeo, of Dove’s previous backing band the Magic Whip, plays drums on one song on Illegal Activities, and the right amount of Keith Moon-style bombast that he brings to the piano-driven rocker “If You Think We Don’t Care” helps make it one of the album’s best tracks, as well as its shortest at only 2 minutes 22 seconds. That song, along with the peppy “Song For Neil,” the ballad “Hallelujah,” and the twangy closer “Be Free,” make up the strong quartet of songs that end Illegal Activities on a high note, to the point that you almost wish Dove had instead frontloaded the best stuff to grab your attention earlier in the album.

Jason Urick is the kind of ubiquitous figure in Baltimore underground music that you’re bound to have tripped over at one point or another if you’ve spent any time in the scene, whether he was organizing the Once.Twice Festival, running the DIY venue Floristree, working at the record store the Sound Garden, or playing in the noise band Wzt Hearts. But it’s only now, a year after that group’s breakup, that Urick has issued his first solo album on Thrill Jockey.

The laptop experimentation of Urick’s solo debut Husbands, recorded at Floristree, is in many ways a logical progression from his previous band, and like Wzt Hearts’ Heat Chief, it’s comprised of four long tracks. But without percussion or an improvisation-driven band dynamic, the overall sound is far more sedate, almost ambient. In fact, the theme of the album, if any, seems to be taking one or two brief sounds and stretching and manipulating them into countless variations over a lengthy span of time. The opener “Strides” warps and distorts a harmonica played by Emma Walters into an ethereal soundscape, while “Let There Be Love” renders a Bee Gees sample unrecognizable with similar results.

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In fact, the last of the four tracks on Husbands, “The Eternal Return,” is the only one that comes anywhere near producing the ear-grinding noise of Wzt Hearts, or much of anything that couldn’t be mistaken for a somewhat offbeat meditation soundtrack. The garbled voices, percussive click clacks and roaring distorted tones don’t sound anything like what the sounds must have been when they were first captured by Urick’s microphone, but he twists them into something intriguing and new. And at only 6 minutes, “Eternal” is actually the most concise and accessible track on the album while at the same time its most abrasive.

For years, Karmella’s Game have been one of the most infectiously fun live bands in Baltimore, with a bombastic treble overload of squealing synth lines and polished female vocal harmonies. However, like many power pop bands, they’ve struggled to translate the energy of their concerts to studio recordings without losing the heft of their rhythm section and the crunch of their more guitar-driven material. Their 2003 debut EP, What He Doesn’t Know Won’t Hurt Him, was promising but still tentative and lightweight, while their first full-length, 2006’s The Art Of Distraction, was a confident step in the right direction, with heavier rock and almost proggy song structures.

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Their second studio album, the new You’ll Be Sorry, is by no means a sophomore slump. That much is guaranteed by the second track “Tour Boyfriends,” with an insistent tempo and extended instrumental breakdowns that place it among the best Karmella’s Game songs. But it is a bit of a disappointment that the band hasn’t noticeably advanced their sound or their command of the studio in the past three years. The brushed drums and clean piano of “Twisted Stitches” and the midtempo new wave ballad “Needles And Notions” expand the band’s emotional range, lest their thick catalog of peppy pop-punk anthems make them seem too one-dimensional. Still, they’re not rocking harder or writing more ambitiously than on The Art Of Distraction, where the songs were generally more memorable. You might not be sorry if you skip this album and check out its predecessor, but you will be sorry if you never give their live show a chance.

Needle Gun, a noise band formed in Baltimore by four teenagers in 2006, feels like a bit of an anomoly. Historically, the noise scene in Baltimore seems to be defined largely by solo improvisors, or home recording projects. But Needle Gun, in addition to being much younger than the average noise act, are a live band with a firm lineup who play rock venues, and their music isn’t purely improvised. Still, they are clearly connected to, and embraced by, the estabished Baltimore noise scene, as evidenced by their ties to Ehse Records, who released their recent album Afternoon Computer Umbrage, and Twig Harper of Nautical Almanac, who produced the disc.

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Running only 28 minutes, Afternoon Computer Umbrage is a compact display of the many sounds Needle Gun is capable of, and is actually longer than most of the band’s notoriously brief live sets. Scraping guitars, squealing feedback, lo-fi drums, electronics and occasional screamed vocals occasionally rise up together, but more often than not drift along as disjointed suites of sound. The opening “AU” and the closing “End AU” serve as bookends and two of the longest tracks, with the latter offering a feast for the ears as strange textures seem to wander around before colliding and building to a shambling, cymbal-bashing groove. There’s no big noise rock catharsis in Needle Gun’s music, nor is there much in the way of particularly bizarre sonic experimentation, but the loose playfulness with which they push around sounds is oddly invigorating.

The first time I saw the duo of Jenn Wasner and Andy Stack, at a small, half-empty club in Baltimore shortly before the release of their debut album, If Children, will always stick out in my mind as a cherished memory. And it’s not just because their band, then called Monarch and now known as Wye Oak, have since gone on to national acclaim and a deal with Merge Records. More than any me-first bragging rights, I remember that night as the first time I heard several songs that I’ve since fallen in love with an obsessed over, as If Children subsequently revealed its emotional depth and musical ingenuity more with each listen.

So Wye Oak’s second album, The Knot, comes along with some high expectations, at least on my end. And while it’s impossible to compare the newer songs with ones that have had time to sink in and gain more personal meaning, there are some immediate musical differences. Wasner takes a firm lead role as the band’s frontwoman now, while Stack, who sang several songs on If Children, only has one audible vocal performance on The Knot’s brief opening track, “Milk And Honey.” But Stack has also added to his instrumental arsenal, playing melodica on “Talking About Money” and “That I Do” in addition to the drums and keyboards that he simultaneously juggles onstage. And though one of Wye Oak’s biggest selling points is their ability to recreate lush studio recordings with just two members onstage, they don’t limit themselves on The Knot to only what can be pulled off in concert; the violin and backmasked guitar on “Siamese” won’t likely figure into live renditions, but are crucial components the song’s dense arrangement.

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Wasner’s slide guitar also becomes an increasingly significant and welcome presence on The Knot, particularly on the standout “Take It In,” where it drips gorgeous textures over the song’s bridge. But more than the broadened instrumental palette, the emotional tenor of the band’s songs has begun to shift; where If Children felt quietly sad and mournful, The Knot has a deeper sense of dread at its core. The album’s centerpiece, the 7-minute dirge “Mary Is Mary,” was written after a dead body was found behind the band’s house. And even though not every song is quite so morbid, there’s a dark, foreboding undercurrent to “That I Do” and “For Prayer” that wasn’t present anywhere on the band’s debut. If that ultimately makes The Knot a more difficult album to come back to again and again than its predecessor, it also confirms how much more depth they have left to plumb on future albums.