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.

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Night Falls, the title of the second album by Baltimore quartet Thrushes, seems to mirror the title of their 2007 debut, Sun Come Undone. And in many ways the album feels more like a companion piece to its predecessor than a new chapter for the band, with similar production and faithfulness to the shoegaze guitar sound of the early ‘90s. But the more you listen to the two albums and compare them, the more it becomes clear that the new songs do represent some subtle but notable steps forward in the band’s songwriting and arranging.

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The self-titled second EP by Lands & People establishes the trio as one of Baltimore’s most intriguing young bands. In the space of just 20 minutes, Caleb Moore, Beau Cole and Amanda Willis manage to combine simple ingredents like guitars, synthesizers, percussion and vocals in several distinct ways that suggest different future directions for the band with almost every song. After a couple of sleepy soundscapes open the EP, the standout “Awake” kicks in with a muffled snare and kick drum beat and a low, decaying synth tone foregrounding the chorus’s soaring male/female harmonies. And as the song comes to an end, that synth line comes front and center, its beautifully distorted texture washing over everything.

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One of Baltimore rock’s best kept secrets the last few years has been Thee Lexington Arrows, a garage rock quartet formed in 2004 by members of the Alphabet Bombers and the Shakedowns. Led by the bluesy wildcat yowl of frontwoman Kathleen Wilson, the Arrows may mix some surf guitar and rockabilly twang into their riffs, but their appeal is largely in just how unapologetically no-frills and old-fashioned their idea of punk rock is. And they’ve captured the sound of their killer live shows just about perfectly with their latest album, Cut Me Loose.

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The Baltimore duo Beach House’s first two albums were fairly popular on an indie level, and made a good number of year-end lists. But that all seems like a prelude now to the massive reception that the band’s Sub Pop debut, Teen Dream, has enjoyed since its release in January, as one of the most universally acclaimed albums of 2010 so far.

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Big In Japan functions as not just a side project or offshoot of the long-running Baltimore quintet Lake Trout, but as effectively a subset of it — all three of Big In Japan’s members also play in Lake Trout, and even the two musicians in the latter who aren’t members of the former have sat in with Big In Japan during live shows. Still, Big In Japan have now been doing their thing, with on-again off-again live residencies full of low key improvised grooves, for over a decade themselves, and have grown into a distinct entity. While Lake Trout focused more and more on song-based studio creations, Big In Japan remained exclusively a live concern, only issuing live recordings as albums.

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Live At 8×10 2009 was released for free by The Biggest Label Ever, the same website that issued Lake Trout’s recent live album. With numerous improvised pieces edited down into a handful of untitled tracks, the structure is identical to Big In Japan’s debut release, 2001′s Goodlove Sessions Vol. 1, but the formal similarities highlight the differences in content. Big In Japan may still be playing at the 8×10, the Federal Hill club that’s been their stomping grounds since the ’90s, but musically they’ve continued to develop and diversify their sound away from the jazzy flute riffs and drum’n'bass rhythms that used to be their signature.

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