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 Dirty Marmaduke Flute Squad are a spectacular force of perversity and tastelessness, even in the context of a Baltimore music scene known around the world for its eccentrics and iconoclasts. Or perhaps I should say they were, since the band announced that it was calling it quits in November, shortly after the release of their second album, Boneslinky! And that’s sad to hear, because the album stands as a document, for better or worse, of all the strange things the band were capable of that nobody else has the balls, or the utter shamelessness, to even think of trying. During their lifespan, The Dirty Marmaduke Flute Squad’s biggest claim to fame was a brief run on the FOX reality show “The Next Great American Band.” And the band, who play primitive butt rock with absurd lyrics while wearing bizarre costumes, inevitably became darlings of the anti-reality show website VoteForTheWorst.com, which the band seemed to embrace even more than actually appearing on the show.

Show Us Your Boobs (Buy Me A Beer)
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The highlight of Boneslinky! is perhaps the closest the Dirty Marmaduke Flute Squad ever came to a mission statement, a song called “Show Us Your Boobs (Buy Me A Beer).” With a strutting riff reminiscent of Ozzy Osbourne’s “Flying High Again,” the song is a tongue-in-cheek autobiography of a hard working band of weekend warriors: “Woke up at 2 to practice this song/ Drank all day long and put on costumes/ We’ll blow through these tunes and go the fuck home!”

Do You Got A Disease
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Although the default sound on Boneslinky! is boneheaded riff rock, the Flute Squad demonstrated a Ween-like ability to incorporate different sounds and genres into their own oddball vision.  “Do You Got A Disease” is a surreal, lightheaded pop song with a catchy synthesizer melody and reverb-heavy vocals, while “Country Robots” is exactly as twangy and twisted as the title implies. Boneslinky! may have ended up the band’s swan song, but the Dirty Marmaduke Flute Squad always seemed proud to remain ugly ducklings.

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.

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.

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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.

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When singer/guitarist Jon Ehrens first recorded an album as the Art Department in 2005, it was just one solo project of many, including Repelican and the Hypnic Jerks. Nearly five years after The Art Anthology, however, the band is a fully operational gigging trio, rounded out by drummer Mike Meno and bassist Jason Howe, who have helped Ehrens both expand and refine the Art Department’s rewardingly unusual sound and uncompromisingly narrow aesthetic boundaries.

On the new album, Paperwork/Birdwork, the debut release on Gen Pop Records, the Art Department sound much the same as they ever did, with fingerpicked guitar riffs and basslines tightly intertwining over driving closed hi-hat drumbeats and strangely tweaked high/low vocal harmonies. Even though the band recorded in professional studios this time and the final product shows it, the overall sound is remarkably faithful to the lo-fi first album, with the exception of none of the insistently rattling tambourine that was ubiquitous on The Art Anthology. Brevity is another one of the Art Department’s signatures; their songs average under two minutes, and they’ve probably never played a live set longer than a half hour. But the new album, even at just 18 minutes long, crams in a dozen tracks and is split into two distinct halves that were each recorded in different places.

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The album’s first half, Paperwork, was recorded in Athens, Georgia last year, and features some more interesting new divergences from the original Art Department sound. Ehrens plays some xylophone, Howe overdubs tuba and trumped, and a trio of guest musicians add clarinet, violin and zither. And yet, once again the overall effect isn’t too different — the clarinet is especially audible on “Not Called The Shots” and “Axe To Grind,” and only the almost symphonic instrumental intro “Let’s Imply Stuff” is a complete departure from the band’s live sound.

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The second side, Birdwork, was recorded earlier this year at Chris Freeland’s Beat Babies studio, and features the core trio at their best. “Small Net” is the closest thing to a pop hook the Art Department have ever managed since the early favorite “Dennis Quaid,” and the closer “Pains Me” retains some of that vaguely spooky, otherworldly vibe that make the band’s unusual sound more fascinating than off-putting. Paperwork/Birdwork was released on vinyl as a 45 RPM 12″, which is somewhat appropriate given that the Art Department have always sounded kind of like a ‘normal’ rock band’s records sped up. So if you don’t love the album, try playing it on 33 and see if you like it better.

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.

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“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.

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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.