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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Rjyan Kidwell has been releasing records and performing as Cex in and around Baltimore for roughly a decade now. And while there was a period, running from 2002’s Tall, Dark and Handcuffed through 2006’s Actual Fucking, that he operated primarily as a vocalist, creating music that was a vehicle for his singing or rapping, the majority of his work before and since then has been instrumental, driven by programmed beats. As closely associated with the IDM scene as he’s always been, though, there’s long been a thread of appreciation for less “intelligent” dance music running through Cex’s catalog. And his latest release, Bataille Royale, is his most overt attempt at incorporating the sounds of some of those other genres, particular Baltimore club music, into his own murky, proggy aesthetic.

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Impossible Hair’s members have been kicking around the Baltimore indie rock scene for well over a decade, in outfits of local legend and modest national renown like Buttsteak, The Oranges Band, Roads To Space Travel and the Lee Harvey Keitel Band. So in a sense it’s easy to regard them as just another project from a few journeymen that will probably move onto something else in a couple years.  And while their breezy, 35-minute debut, What Is The Secret Of Impossible Hair, doesn’t necessarily disprove that notion, it packs an impressive punch that consolidates the strengths of their previous bands into a fun, compact package.

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Jon Ehrens is a serial band inventor in the Robert Pollard mode. Just as the Guided By Voices frontman frequently comes up with aliases to release music under, sometimes fashioning unique musical identities and even elaborate fictional backstories, Ehrens constantly records under names like the Hypnic Jerks, Factoid of the Dustbowl, and Spittn’ Images, often just for one album or a few songs, before moving onto the next idea. One of his many solo recording projects, The Art Department, even became a live trio that gigs steadily around Baltimore.

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When I interviewed local hardcore trio the New Flesh for the Baltimore City Paper in 2007, the band was in a middle of a transitional period. They had just parted ways with founding guitarist Danny Propert, and had begun playing shows with a new guitarist, Greg Dembeck. At the time, they had ambitions to finish recording their third album of material with Propert, and quickly follow it up with another album with the new lineup. Ultimately, however, those plans didn’t pan out. Instead late last year, the New Flesh released Hall Of Heads, a compilation featuring scraps of both projects along with other recordings, on drummer Rick Weaver’s label, Human Conduct Records.

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Dan Deacon’s 2007 album Spiderman Of The Rings attracted a flurry of national press coverage both for the Baltimore-based musician and Wham City, the  multi-media collective of artists at which Deacon is the center. But so much of that coverage focused on the external facts — the wild live shows, the illegal warehouse venues, the bizarre outfits, the eccentricity of the whole Wham City scene — that something almost got lost in the shuffle: that Dan Deacon is kind of a brilliant guy who made a great record.

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