News

Every few years or so, a few of Seattle's ghosts rear their ugly heads and the music industry gets its hopes up for another charmed city. In 2001, the downtown rock of The Strokes and the agro-girl grit of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs drew even more flash bulbs to the Big Apple. Not long after, the hundreds of arty indie bands that called the Great White North home—Broken Social Scene, Arcade Fire, Stars, Wolf Parade, Frog Eyes—convinced even MTV to start asking what Montreal and Toronto kept in their water.

Today, heading into 2007's home stretch, it's becoming increasingly clear that all eyes are fixed on the "real" Charm City, Baltimore, Maryland, where a few fledgling labels, a whacko art collective and a regional club movement are eating up blog bandwidth and getting critics everywhere excited.

Of course, there isn't a clear beginning to this Baltimore story (the city has a storied noise scene, and plenty of electronic history), but there certainly are major players. One of the biggest is undoubtedly Monitor Records, home to some of the most wide-eyed and exciting music in Maryland and beyond, where bands like Videohippos merge noised-up Nintendo punk and unseemly ambient jams with the Splenda-sweetened cheer of pop music.

The duo's 2007 release, Unbeast the Leash, is an out-and-out celebration of energy, excess and non-convention. Which is a fair description of most of the city's music. Elsewhere on Monitor, co-ed four-piece Ponytail fly the energy flag proudly, specializing in a slapdash fireworks display of too-fast guitars that argue with tangled drum lines and grunted female vocals. Whenever the mess isn't calling to mind the 8-bit heroism of The Advantage, it's reminiscent of the knotty pop of Deerhoof, peppered by the din of a healthy barnyard.

Meanwhile, DC-via-NYC label Carpark Records has made itself plenty comfortable in the vicinity of Baltimore, championing more than its fair share of Charmed bands. Indeed, everything from the fuzzed out neo-shoegaze of Beach House to the crayola pop of Dan Deacon has been released by the label within the past few months. It's Deacon—a fat, balding man-child in secondhand pre-school clothes—who has emerged as the posterboy of this Baltimore renaissance. His curious appearance (and his complementary music) aim straight for a sense of infantile fun never quite highlighted before in indie rock. To be fair, though, Deacon's renown shouldn't be attributed only to his ultra-caffeinated 2007 smash Spiderman of the Rings, but rather, to the Wham City artist collective he founded some five years ago. Gifting the Baltimore scene with a warehouse for all of its shows, art openings, practice sessions, poetry readings, film screenings and festivals, Wham quickly became the coal engine of the city.

Today, the scene seems to be growing more and more tight-knit, while the biggest names splinter off. Domino Records singer-songwriter Cass McCombs has turned downright nomadic since planting his roots in the city a few years back. And first-wave freak folker Entrance wasted no time moving shop to Chicago after cutting his teeth in Baltimore, while current buzz band and Big Apple transplants Battles got their start in Baltimore with Monitor Records.

Of course, that I-95 channel to NYC is important, as Wham City was only founded after a few SUNY Purchase grads migrated south, searching for a place to make a bit of noise. Some five years later, there's still a natural give and take between Baltimore and Brooklyn, as the production credits of TV on the Radio's Dave Sitek can attest (he just finished recording the 4AD debut of female-led Baltimore avant crew Celebration). And a quick glance through the former area codes of the some of the biggest names in indie rock should serve as proof, too: aside from Battles, current titans of avant-pop Animal Collective and heirs to the throne, Yeasayer, both called Baltimore home before they settled in Brooklyn.

But it's not just indie rock that's experiencing a surge in the city. Rather, Baltimore club music has been growing in popularity for over a decade, with the "original don" DJ Rod Lee popularizing the regional form on a national level with his 2005 mix, Vol. 5: the Official. Of course, only a year later, what had been percolating for so long finally came to a head with the hyper-frenetic body music on gross-out MC Spank Rock's 2006 album, Yoyoyoyoyo. Like the indigenous club music of the city, the album interlaced hip-hop and house, with 130bpm breakbeats, and relentless 8/4 time signatures. Meanwhile, guttermusic booster Aaron LaCrate was giving Lily Allen's "Smile" a B-more makeover, and cementing himself alongside Diplo and company as a premiere DJ, while boutique label WildfireWildfire's remix destroyer OCDJ was busy establishing himself as a candy-crunk extraordinaire with the 8-bit mash-ups that would end up on this year's Hooray.

From noise-punk successes to indie-rock zeitgeist makers, and post-modern rap icons to regional-turned-international phenoms, Baltimore is certainly having a decent year. Sure, maybe the next-next-Seattle talk is a bit premature. But with guys like Deacon and Spank Rock gracing the pages of The New York Times, it might be sensible to start asking what it is they keep in those Harbor crabcakes...

—Robbie Mackey
09.11.07