On a recent day in September, music fans everywhere reacted to the news that R.E.M. had decided to break up. However, the same day a much less famous band, but perhaps one that still had a bit more potential for future growth, also announced that it was calling it a day. The breakup of the wonderful, inventive Baltimore quartet Ponytail was not exactly a shock — in fact their split had been preceded by a lack of touring and lots of speculation about the band’s status — but it was still sad to hear. But the band left behind one last album, Do Whatever You Want All The Time, released earlier this year before calling it quits, and it’s a worthy addition to their legacy.

The seven tracks on Do Whatever expand on the already expansive palette of sounds Ponytail displayed on 2007′s Ice Cream Spiritual. Guitarist Dustin Wong’s ear for unique textures has even grown with the experiments of his 2010 solo album Infinite Love, and vocalist Molly Siegel continues to be an inimitable, indefinable presence rather than a typical frontwoman.

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“Flabbermouse” stands out as one of the best tracks on the album, beginning with sweetly melodic guitar licks that could be out of a ’60s surf rock song,. But soon Ponytail are pouring a dozen other sonic elements into the pot, and letting the intensity of the track rise and fall in gentle waves, too subtle and unpredictable for a stereotypical post-rock band’s simple loud/quiet contrasts. The members of Ponytail may have had their reasons for disbanding, but their final album sure sounds like a band still thrilling each other with the joy of creativity.

In a way, the continued existence of The Death Set doesn’t really make a lot of sense after the 2009 death of one of its two founding members, Beau Velasco. Not that remaining frontman Johnny Siera shouldn’t have pushed forward, but the band’s hyperactive fusion of hip hop and dance beats and pop punk sugar rush hooks simply doesn’t seem like a creative vehicle that can handle that kind of sadness hanging over it, and even the Death Set’s name feels awkward and perhaps even in poor taste now.

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Despite all that, their second album Michel Poiccard manages to both retain the Death Set’s unique energy and pay fitting tribute to Velasco’s memory. That takes shape in many ways, from the clip of Velasco’s voice at the beginning of the album, to songs like “It’s Another Day”  and “I Miss You Beau Velasco” marry the band’s speedy, yelping aesthetic to pretty, reverb-heavy guitar tones and memorably melancholy melodies.
Mostly, however, The Death Set is the same funny, chaotic band they’ve always been. “Kittens Inspired By Kittens” is a hilariously strange, short collage of beats and meows, while “Slap Slap Slap Pound Up Down Snap” takes their aesthetic to nearly irritating extremes while remaining as catchy as possible. Instead of taking a tentative step forward after tragedy, or squeaking out one more album before an uncertain future, Michel Poiccard sounds like The Death Set affirming that they are still alive and kicking.

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White Life is something of a departure for Jon Ehrens, the prolific and chameleonic singer-songwriter previously best known for indie bands like the idiosyncratic Art Department and the lo-fi Repelican. For one of the first times in his career, Ehrens is sharing vocal and production duties on White Life’s self-titled debut, which was recorded with Chris and Mickey Freeland at Beat Babies, and features several lead vocal performances by his sister Emily Ehrens. But more significantly, White Life is a big stylistic left turn for Ehrens into the world of synths, drum machines and unabashedly pop vocal performances.

I Want Love
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The eight songs on White Life’s album, out this week on Ehse Records, each offer different variations on the project’s polished aesthetic and retro sensibility. The closer “I Want Love” is the album’s most overtly R&B track, with a bubbly synth bassline and a euphoric vocal by Emily Ehrens that could pass for an early ’80s boogie classic by Deniece Williams.

Follow
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Elsewhere on the album, the ’80s evoked by White Life is more along the lines of brooding synth pop, with Jon Ehrens offering some of the most passionate vocals and nakedly emotional lyrics of his career, which effectively lend a sense of gravity and sincerity to what could otherwise be an exercise in campy, ironic nostalgia. On one of the best tracks in that vein, “Follow,” his staccato verses give way to a chorus. that soars with help from backing harmonies by Jenn Wasner of Wye Oak.

Rjyan “Cex” Kidwell has been consistently revising and switching his modus operandi for recording and releasing music since his career began in the late ’90s. Early Cex releases featured instrumental IDM, before he began rapping, then singing, and later returning to making beats without vocal accompaniment. His first handful of albums tended to run an hour or more, before he began to favor concise 40-minute albums and even shorter EPs. And after beginning his career with high profile national releases on the trendsetting IDM label he co-founded, Tigerbeat6, Kidwell has released much of his music in recent years on deliberately low key vinyl or cassette-only releases, while remaining as prolific as ever. And since some of his best music yet has been on less heralded records like the 2007 Steely Dan sample collage Dannibal or the 2009 experimental club music of Bataille Royale, it’s proven worthwhile to give every new Cex record close attention.

One of Cex’s more low key recent releases is Evargreaz, a brief four-track album released digitally and on cassette by Automation Records. While many Cex albums feature some kind of conceptual hook or unifying theme, there’s no explicitly stated idea behind Evargreaz to distinguish it from his other instrumental records, other than a consistent mood that sounds like these tracks could have all been knocked out in the same rush of inspiration. In some ways, that’s a weakness, but that also makes it easier to take the music at face value as a pure aural experience, not refracted through the personality or agenda of its creator.

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“November Reign” continues in the tradition of Cex titles that obliquely reference the ’90s rock of Kidwell’s youth like the album Maryland Mansions or the song “Never Mind.” But rather than containing any elements of the Guns ‘N’ Roses epic, “November Reign” is an ethereal midtempo track, with melodic vocals run through such a heavy filter effect that the words, if there are any, are completely inaudible. That allows your ears to instead focus on the song’s rich textures, as a simple hand drum loop foregrounds the bouquet of synths and vocoders that keeps gradually evolving, like a time lapse video of changing seasons. Not every track uses that approach to such enjoyable results, and “Day Of 1000 Radiant Suicides” gets a little too easy listening, but in general Evargreaz is a worthy if nonessential addition to the Cex catalog.

Civilian is Jenn Wasner and Andy Stack’s third full-length album for Merge Records. But it feels more than anything like the continuation of a collaboration between Wye Oak and another duo, brothers Chris and Mickey Freeland of Beat Babies Studio, who began producing the band on last year’s My Neighbor / My Creator EP. The four songs debuted on that EP pointed toward possible new directions for the band, including a wider variety of instrumentation and some of their most lively and upbeat songs to date. Ultimately, however, the ten new songs on Civilian are closer in sound and mood to 2009′s The Knot, another dark and subtle album that gradually unfolds and reveals its charms over several listens.

Holy Holy
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The third track, “Holy Holy,” stands out as one of the most immediately alluring songs on Civilian, an instant Wye Oak classic. The patient throb of Stack’s tom-tom rhythm foregrounds Wasner’s tune, in which the verses are as catchy and memorable as the chorus, and the song slowly builds in intensity with with the soft-to-loud dynamics that have become a hallmark of the band’s songs. Along with “Hot As Day” in the second half the album, “Holy Holy” is an assurance that Wye Oak is still capable of big, bold hooks.

Plains
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For most of Civilian, however, the band is toying with their sound and their songwriting in clever, counterintuitive ways. “Plains” features an elastic tempo that slows down as the volume increases for a heavy, lurching riff, then picks back up as the song heads back into quieter verses. “We Were Wealth” does a complete 180 in tone and texture about halfway through the song. Wasner’s 2-minute solo performance on the closing track, “Doubt,” is a strangely meandering little song that leaves the album on an ambiguous, uneasy note. These songs all reach interesting conclusions that avoid the big distortion pedal explosion that some of Wye Oak’s past songs have conditioned you to expect.

There are many ways in which Wye Oak could fade into the background a just another indie band circa 2011. There are so many other male-female duos who are also couples, so many other records featuring hushed female vocals over reverb-heavy guitars. But Wasner and Stack are not simply a cutesy couple band, or a cozy comfort food indie pop band, or shoegaze nostalgists. And though they arrived with a fully formed sound on their 2007 debut If Children, they’ve steadily grown since then, with Wasner’s voice now possessing a gravitas her early performances only hinted at. The increasingly ingenius arrangements and darkly hued emotional undercurrents on Civilian‘s songs make Wye Oak so much more than what they may appear to be on the surface.

The intriguing title of Microkingdom’s latest album, Three Compositions Of No Jazz, made me wonder if the Baltimore trio were making some kind of statement, serious or tongue-in-cheek, about their genre affiliations or how composed or improvised their music is. As it turns out, the title is a nod to both Anthony Braxton’s Three Compositions Of New Jazz and the ’70s post-punk “no wave” movement, and those reference points in and of themselves make a potent statement about where Microkingdom is coming from.

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As it turns out, Three Compositions, released digitally and on vinyl by Friends Records, features seven compositions over the course of eight tracks by guitarist Marc Miller, percussionist Will Redman and reeds player John Dierker. The lead track “Peppermint Crab” is a short, strangely inviting bouquet of textures, which opens with a gorgeous combination of Miller’s guitar and Redman’s mallet percussion to ending with a hair-raising saxophone squeal from Dierker less than three minutes later.

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Over the course of Three Compositions, the trio prove how deftly they blur the line between composition and improvisation with pieces that at some turns feel carefully assembled and others chaotic, with occasional digital manipulations and edits showing the seams on where Microkingdom continued to compose the songs well after the recording of the instrumental performances. The two-part centerpiece of the album, “Gamut Runner,” puts the album’s longest tracks back to back, and offers perhaps its greatest variety of sounds and moods. After the upbeat, almost funky first half of the song, the slow burn of the 7-minute “Gamut Runner Pt. 2″ is a quiet, subtle highlight of a record full of visceral pleasures.

J Roddy Walston and The Business have been becoming Baltimore rock’s latest success story in the last few months with the release of their self-titled second album on indie powerhouse label Vagrant Records, which was preceded earlier in the summer by the Don’t Break The Needle EP. But that success has been a long time coming, since the band relocated from Tennessee in 2004, won a dedicated following in Baltimore with their frantic live shows, and self-released their great debut full-length, Hail Mega Boys, in 2007. And given how well that album established the band’s sound and captured their energy on record, it’s appropriate that J Roddy Walston and The Business doesn’t mess with a good thing, putting the same straightforward production sheen over the same kinds of boogie woogie piano rockers and guitar licks. Even a re-recording of one of the band’s most popular songs, “Used To Did,” sounds as perfectly at home here as it did on Hail Mega Boys.

There are some signs that Walston and his band are growing and developing their sound, though, if not ‘maturing’ in any way that would diminish their raucous charm. “Full Growing Man” has a choir of background vocals that make the song feel bigger and more anthemic than anything the band’s done before. With that song acting as part of a one-two punch with the propulsive opener “Don’t Break The Needle,” the album is off to a great start, and although not every song is quite so memorable, there really aren’t any duds on J Roddy Walston and The Business.

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Walston’s songwriting persona has always been hard to pin down, a mix of hard-living badass, vulnerable crooner, and playful wordsmith. Those qualities all come together the most perfectly on the album with “I Don’t Wanna Hear It,” which swaggers and swings on the verses, but betrays a certain tenderness when the drums drop out on the choruses. And it’s songs like that that keep Walston and his band from seeming too much like a retro party band caricature, and confirm that there’s meat to these songs to digest, once you get past how fun and irresistible the hooks are.

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We Used To Be
Family is a post-rock quartet based out of Baltimore
which at time echos the likes of Godspeed You Black Emperor and The
Arcade Fire (sans vocals). There is something insanely special
about them. Half the band is classically trained and the other half
learned by the seat of their pants. How the latter half keeps up
with all the odd time signatures is beyond me, but somehow they
nail it every time. Their music has severely dramatic cresendos
that take minutes, at times, to develop. This isn’t a pop record,
so you’ll have to give each of their songs time to settle and build
in to their beautiful swell of noise.

I had always wanted to work with We
Used To Be Family, and after their set at NoVo earlier
this year, Ruby came up to me asking if I’d be interested in
producing their debut record. I was floored. It was a dream come
true. The recording process was seamless. Alex Champagne
engineering always helps that process with his finely tuned ears
and impeccable work with strings. They were well rehearsed and were
simply amazing people to work with. They didn’t even flinch after I
asked them to track the the strings more than a 2 dozen times
complete with harmonies. It was almost like that was how it was
supposed to happen and they knew it.

The interesting thing about this band
is that there is no one person who takes the leads. They all switch
off and share democratically, which makes for an insanely dynamic
listen. Ruby Fulton, effortlessly and always with a smile plays the
violin, trumpet and Wurlitzer. Andrew Histand plays the cello
(sometimes with heavy distortion through an amp and always
shredding the hairs off the bow in to a pile by his feet), Michael
Yoon plays the Twin Peaks guitar, Michael Shank plays the guitar
that at times doesn’t even sound like a guitar and Mr. Brian Litz
plays the drums like it’s the last day on earth.

Here are my two favorite tracks from
this record. Be sure to listen all the way through. These songs
take a while to build – especially with Jerkface Shipley. Check out
that ending. The massive amounts of strings will blow your ears to
the moon.

Rose Isn’t A Better Stickball Player Than Randy
Milligan
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Jerkface Shipley
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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.”