Youngster was recently in the studio with Alex to record their first EP! The record turned out amazing. Youngster pushes out electronic jams, but done so organically with no MIDI syncing between the musicians. There is a keyboardist, sampler, bassist and guitarist. They crank out serious groovetronic dance jams a la The New Deal, Underworld and Daft Punk.

Enjoy two of my favorite cuts:

Hoedown
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Acid Roach
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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.

Baltimore’s Dré Jones recently came in to record the first single for his sophomore album coming out next year. We had a blast layering a ton of vocals. He’s one of the most hardworking r&b/pop singers in the city! Take a peek at Merry Go Round below.

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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.

I had the pleasure of working with Monteclair again this winter working on two singles. The guys are always such a joy to work with. Insanely hardworking. Not to mention, they write incredibly catchy songs that keep you tapping your foot yearning for more. This band is a really hard band to pigeonhole. They pull from an arsenal of different influences ranging from Paul Simon, Portugal The Man, Yeasayer, Fang Island and the Strokes. I love what these guys are doing! Enjoy the two songs below and be sure to buy them on their Bandcamp.

Mamma’s Always Right
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Four Years
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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.

Eureka Birds, the songwriting vehicle of Justin Levy, has been a favorite band of the folks at Mobtown ever since their 2008 self-titled debut album and subsequent visit to the studio for a microshow. And while their follow-up release, the Eureka! EP, runs only about 20 minutes, it feels like a substantial work in and of itself, not just a minor stopgap release. The EP’s 6 songs represent a variety of sounds and a satisfying arc as well as many albums, and producer Tyler Watkins, who also plays bass on the recording, helps guide the songs to a clear, full-bodied sound.

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Eureka! begins auspiciously with “That Mountain Is A Volcano,” an opener that manages to feel both playful and ominous at once, and the next song, “Sarah (Sits And Cries),” continuous the thread of droll, almost ambiguous humor that gives Levy’s songwriting an unusual charm. But the song that really makes the EP feel like a leap forward for Eureka Birds’ symphonic pop sound is “There Was Light,” which for its first minute accompanies Levy’s vocals with only a stark piano and drums arrangement, with a single electric guitar stab the only other sound. Eventually guitar, bass and cello slowly creep in, and the song unfolds beautifully to reveal more and more layers.

Of the last three songs on the EP, the most memorable one, “Sunset On Film,” is the only track featuring just Levy’s voice and piano, and is more of a vignette than a song, running less than 2 minutes long. And while they may not leave as indelible mark as Eureka!‘s first three songs, one imagines that Levy’s gotta be saving something great for the next full-length album if he can make an EP this good.