JZ Vintage 47

The first mic I wanted to try out was the Vintage 47. In a similar analogy, just like the Blue Mouse (the original black one with the killer transformer) sounds remarkably similar to the Neumann U47 FET, the JZ Vintage 47 sounds remarkably similar, as well. Insanely accurate and smooth reproductions of bass frequencies and a top sheen that sounds gentle and bright with out being brash and overhyped in the upper highs like many of the more popular chinese-made condensers. This mic shined on vocals, bass guitar, cello and snare drum. The Vintage 47 is an electrostatic pressure gradient fixed carioid pattern mic. Maximum SPL is 134dB so you are more than welcome to try this on kick drum, just like the U47.

The Vintage 67 is supposed to be an echo of the Neumann U67 which is a tube mic. While I enjoyed the detail and precision of this mic, I didn’t find it sounding much like a U67. Possibly because the circuitry is vastly different and the Vintage 67 didn’t have a Telefunken EF86 tube inside.

JZ Black Hole

The staple of JZ mics is their Black Hole series. They say that having the hole in the mic reduces intermodulation distortion and reflections. Either way, they look really interesting and is certainly a good conversation starter as you are mic’ing up a band. The Black Hole BH1 is a great sounding, well-made mic. It has three polar patterns to work with: Omni / Cardioid / Figure – 8. There is also a pad. I used this mic for vocals and it stood up nicely amongst my other mics. It certainly has a usable sound and given the right circumstance this mic can really shine with the right vocalist. It was also used for electric guitars, a mono drum overhead and on a banjo. All gave wonderful open-sounding results.

JZ Bat 201

And next to Vintage 47, my favorite JZ mic was the in the Bat BT201. These mics offer removable and interchangeable capsules (small diaphragm condensers) which are magnetically held in. It’s pretty innovative as screwing in new capsules while isn’t intensely time consuming, does add up – especially when you are trying to capture a moment. Changing a capsule with the Bat series mic took no longer than 4 seconds. The capsules offered are the omni, wide cardioid and -20dB padded down wide cardioid. I loved the omni and the wide cardioid. I used a pair as overheads for an incredible drummer and they shined. Added the perfect top to a drum kit. It certainly complemented the Shure SM81. I liked the extra breath and wideness of the polar pattern. The SM81 definitely sounded more boxed in than the Bat BT201. I also enjoyed using the omni capsule for acoustic guitar. The bizarre thing that happened was the mic still passed signal even with out a capsule. Could the signal have arced? Either way, any mic that can record with out a capsule is something to try out!

I also had the opportunity to try out the rate Bat BT301. Certainly all the JZ mics are unusually designed, but this one was that much more. The 301 was very similar to the 201, but without removable capsules. The 301 offers a fixed cardioid pattern capsule. What’s most interesting about this mic is the 21mm mid-sized capsule making it perfect for acoustic guitar or even violin or viola.

Each mic I tried out from JZ was impeeciably designed and built strong. Juris Zarins, the owner and designer of all the mics really has something to say in a world where everyone and their Mom is designing and manufacturing mics. These mics aren’t cheap and rightfully so. They sound incredible, feel incredible and work incredibly well. My only complaint is that because of their unorthodox shapes the shock mounts that are used are not as easy to use as traditional mounts. But that’s a small aspect that is easily overlooked by the beautiful mic it’s holding up.

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.

[See post to listen to audio]

“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.

[See post to listen to audio]

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.

[See post to listen to audio]

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
[See post to listen to audio]

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
[See post to listen to audio]

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.

[See post to listen to audio]

“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
[See post to listen to audio]

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
[See post to listen to audio]

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.

[See post to listen to audio]

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.

[See post to listen to audio]

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.

[See post to listen to audio]

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.

[See post to listen to audio]

The rock trio Pontiak, comprised of the brothers Van, Jennings and Lain Carney, have quietly become some of an unstoppable force of late, with a surprisingly prolific output via Thrill Jockey Records, which in the past two years along has yielded four full-length albums and one split LP, 2008’s Kale with likeminded Baltimore pals Arbouretum. But while 2009’s Maker and the vinyl-only tour release Sea Voids were knocked out relatively quickly, their latest album, this year’s Living is the band’s first attempt in a while to slowly, patiently assemble an album over the course of a few months.

The downside of a band like Pontiak is that they don’t exude a whole lot of personality or excitement with their guitar sludge or Van Carney’s low key vocals. But on Living they prove willing to hold the listener’s attention with unpredictable structures and stylistic details, even with wildly variable song lengths. “Original Vestal” and “Forms Of The” clock in around two minutes while feeling like pieces unto themselves, and the longer songs rarely follow any discernable formula. As usual, Pontiak make room for at least one epic on Living, but the 6-minute “Pacific” is relatively humble and unassuming, meandering along with an instrumental coda before simply fading out without much in the way of a resolution or crescendo.

[See post to listen to audio]

“And By Night” is the most arresting track on Living, a barnstormer with the band’s pummeling rhythm section foregrounding a smoking guitar lead, the closest thing the band’s ever gotten to heavy metal.

[See post to listen to audio]

Just a couple tracks later, the band is swinging its pendulum in the opposite direction, with the acoustic strums and whirring organ tones of “Beach.” That leads immediately into the hurricane of guitar noise that opens “Lemon Lady” and eventually warps into a slow, sludgy rocker. It’s hard to say whether Living is the best of Pontiak’s recent string of releases, or even if there is any one essential album out of the bunch. But it’s clear that the band is intently building a dense body of work that’s becoming harder to ignore with each new album.

Given that nearly two and a half years passed between the original local release of Baltimore duo Wye Oak’s debut album, If Children, and its Merge Records follow-up, last year’s The Knot, it’d be reasonable not to expect a new record from the band for a while. So it was a delightfully unexpected surprise to hear word of a new Wye Oak record just 8 months after The Knot, even if it’s just an EP. And the 18 minutes of My Neighbor / My Creator are as meaty and substantial as fans should have come to expect from anything the band does, in fact possibly surpassing the band’s last full-length in terms of moment for moment quality.

[See post to listen to audio]

My Neighbor / My Creator marks the first time Wye Oak have worked with outside producers, and that collaboration is the key to why its 5 tracks signify an exciting new direction for the band. The brothers Chris Freeland (best known as a member of the Baltimore band Oxes) and Mickey Freeland (who raps as Bow ‘N Arrow or Mickey Free) recorded the 4 new songs on the EP after a Mickey Free remix of The Knot’s “That I Do” appeared on the SpliceToday.com compilation Baltimore Does Baltimore, Part 1 last October. And while that remix is reprised on My Neighbor and sticks out like a sore thumb with its drum machine beat and guest rap verse, the new songs represent far more subtle and intriguing ways that the Freeland brothers have helped Wye Oak push their sound forward.

The EP tumbles out of the gate with “My Neighbor,” a beautifully shimmering array of Jenn Wasner’s guitar overdubs and vocal harmonies cascading over Andy Stack’s hiccuping 3/4 groove and tom-tom fills. It’s closer to the Wye Oak of If Children than the darker, slower The Knot, and the upbeat tone continues with “Emmylou,” perhaps the band’s fastest song to date. The harmonica on “Emmylou,” as well as the elegiac saxophone solo on “I Hope You Die” that  helps the song bring to mind Springsteen ballads, are just a couple examples of the new colors Wye Oak are painting with on these songs. Wasner and Stack have always displayed musical ambitions larger than just making the most of a 2-person band setup as a marketing angle. And with the help of the Freeland brothers, it looks like their sound is poised to become bigger and more varied than ever before.