Gary B & The Notions play short, snappy guitar pop songs with funny, idiosyncratic titles and lyrics that almost dare you to underestimate them. But their forthcoming second full-length album, How Do We Explode, out on May 8th, retains the light, amiable mood of the Baltimore band’s previous recordings while cranking up the volume and, more crucially, the nervous energy inherent in frontman Gary Lee Barrett, Jr.’s songs. The result is something a little more compelling, a little sharper, than the seemingly lightweight power pop the Notions built their rep on.

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The appropriately pyrotechnic sound of How Do We Explode comes down to personnel changes since the Notions’ last record, 2009′s New Twist & Shout. Here, Barrett Jr. and founding bassist Kris Heath (also of Aldo Nova) are joined by drummer Rick Bowman (also of The Frauds) and guitarist Bryan Elliott (also of Liars Academy). In the past, the Notions has been a power trio with only Barrett the band’s only guitarist. The addition of Elliott in particular makes the Notions’ sound thicker and more textured than before, making possible songs like the brief, surging pop gem “It Could Be” and the wailing fretwork of “Too Busy For An Ambulance Ride.”

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The fourth track on How Do We Explode, “Lyndsy Fonseca,” is named for the actress seen as Ted’s future daughter on the TV series “How I Met Your Mother.” It’s hard to tell from the lyrics exactly what the song has to do with her, but it’s easy to imagine Barrett, Jr.’s offbeat imagination turning to a beautiful girl who occasionally pops up on television, and the gears in his head turning until they crank out another strange, catchy song.

Among Wolves have been working on their second album, and previewing songs from it in their rousing, raucous live show, for so long that I felt like I loved This Is A Wave Goodbye before ever hearing it. The Baltimore quartet is a rare breed, an old-fashioned rock band with multiple singers and songwriters whose different voices and visions fit together into a unit that’s greater than the sum of its parts. That unit has a tendency to get drunk and play sloppy renditions of their twangy roots rock compositions, but that’s just in keeping with the tradition passed on by the band’s influences, which loom over the album without swallowing it up.

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“Trigger” is the Jason Butcher-fronted rocker that vaults This Is A Wave Goodbye into high gear after the solemn, piano driven “Broken Afternoon” gently opens the album like an extended intro. But even “Trigger” soons open up into a gorgeous, harmony-driven bridge. From there, the band keeps bouncing between different singers, different moods and different tempos, managing to make a relatively short, concise album feel like a journey with an emotional arc. Even the straightforward, synth-driven power pop of “Sailboat” ends up feeling like a welcome curveball in the context of the album’s moody second half.

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Even though the loose cameraderie of the band’s live shows as they trade instruments and take turns at the mic is missed on the album, the focus and clarity afforded by a lengthy gestation period in the studio more than makes up for it. And on the album’s best song, the roaring, careening midtempo barnstormer “3 AM,” a little of the band’s wild chaotic energy starts to seep in, from the ad libbed howl that opens the song onward. Even the slight sloppiness of the song’s guitar solo gives it a little bit of an edge that makes the track come alive. Many bands continue to mine the same fertile intersection of classic rock, indie pop and alt-country as Among Wolves, but few make it sound so vital and their own.

DDm is a rapper from Baltimore whose name is as much a product of his career’s unusual trajectory as his music is. When I first met him about five years ago, he was rapping under the name Midas and tearing opponents apart at local MC battles like Style Warz and making fairly traditional solo mixtapes. A couple years later, he linked up with the label Mania Music Group, becoming part of a wrecking crew of creative, offbeat rappers and producers, and began forging a more unique sound and identity under the name Dappa!!! Dan Midas. And in the last year or two, he’s shortened his handle to DDm and has undergone more changes in both his musical aesthetic and his public persona. Namely, he’s begun to incorporate diverse dance and Baltimore club music influences in his music, and he’s come out of the closet as a gay man, still a rarity in the world of underground hip-hop.

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DDm’s latest project, Winter And The Tinman’s Heart, was released on Valentine’s Day and is billed as an EP. But the 11-track Winter is actually closer to the concise and cohesive ideal of an album than the overlong mixtapes that rappers often call albums these days. “Piece of My Heart” obliquely references DDm’s sexual orientation with a series of newsreel samples about entertainers like Liberace and Freddie Mercury, but for the most part that topic is not explored in the rapper’s lyrics. The EP is, however, relentlessly personal and revealing, particularly on songs like “High School” and “Getting By.”

The second half of Winter is stacked with guest appearances by an assortment of fellow Baltimore rappers. “Click Pow” features Rye Rye, the protege of Baltimore club producer Blaqstarr and pop star M.I.A. who helps bring an upbeat, danceable atmosphere to the table amid some more serious material. And “Take Off” is a collaboration with Los, now signed to Bad Boy Records, that offers a thrilling chance to hear DDm go toe-to-toe with one of his most talented peers in the city not as a battle rap opponent but as an equal (although Los lacks DDm’s ear for hooks, given his chorus on the track that lazily apes Oasis’s “Wonderwall”). “Take Off” is reprised from Los’s 2010 mixtape Shooter, but feels perfectly at home on Winter And The Tinman’s Heart. Overall, the EP functions equally well as either an introduction to DDm or a snapshot of his continuing evolution. But it also feels a bit like a stopgap, something that hints at his range and his talent without fully embodying it, something that he will probably outdo sooner than later.

Between the title, one of the simplest and most universal phrases in the English language, and the cover art, a commonplace portrait of the planet Earth from outer space, Jason Urick’s latest album I Love You seems to be pursuing an aesthetic that’s as neutralized and devoid of detail or personality as possible. The only thing he could’ve done to make the exterior packaging of the album more generic would be to change his last name to Smith. But that’s not to say that I Love You suffers from a lack of ideas or creative expression. If anything, the album is a culmination of a running theme in Urick’s music, which often takes very specific source material, and stretches and manipulates the samples until they become abstract and ostensibly meaningless, sound for sound’s sake.

Although Urick, a longtime fixture of Baltimore underground music, recently located on Portland, Oregon, I Love You was partly recorded at Floristree, the Baltimore performance space he previously ran and lived in. Like the 2010 album Husbands and Urick’s other solo releases on Thrill Jockey Records since the breakup of his band Wzt Hearts, I Love You is a collection of a handful of lengthy tracks, mostly running from six to ten minutes, each with its own particular palette of sounds that slowly unfurl in subtle variations. It’s a headphone album in the classic sense, with the pure aural beauty of its best moments being derived primarily from the way the sounds drift from the left to right channel or vice versa.

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The most ear-catching overtly rhythmic track is “Ageless Isms,” which keeps a consistent groove even as its central loop is buried under more and more layers of echoing noise. “The Crying Song (Album Mix),” an alternate version of a track from the single that preceded I Love You, is at the other end of the spectrum as Urick at his most ethereal, with the kind of trebly, pixellated swirl of sound that might be compared to ’80s new age music but only could’ve been made in the 21st century era of laptop avant garde sound manipulation. In either case, Urick’s very individual aesthetics and ideas can’t help but shine through, as much as he may mask them in seemingly impersonal packaging.

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.