May 31, 2011 by Mac McCormick

A three-day weekend means noisy fun for Baltimoreans

This was a huge weekend for Baltimore showgoers, as several large events drew in large crowds. There was the Dope Body record release show at Floristree, two Death Set shows, and Scapescape, sort of the ancestor of Whartscape. Not to mention Maryland Deathfest at Sonar, and the Flying Eyes’ record release. I made it out to the Dope Body release and Scapescape.

Of all of the shows that happened this past weekend, the Dope Body record release show for their new LP Nupping probably gave you the most bang for your buck. Art punk powerhouse Double Dagger made an appearance, as did Ed Schrader’s music beat and Butt Stomach, electronic musician and respected scene elder Dan Deacon’s more rock-oriented side project. Floristree was fairly packed, but the crowd wasn’t so large that it was overwhelming. Butt Stomach opened, Dan Deacon with his table of electronics accompanied by a drummer kicking up a jubilant art rock racket not dissimilar to Thank You. Double Dagger played a triumphant set next, in their first hometown show since opening for Parts and Labor at the Golden West almost exactly a month ago. It was good to see them back, and they seemed refreshed, ripping through a lot of the material from 2009’s More and reviving “ITCFGDIY,” a deeper cut from their 2007 album Ragged Rubble.

Up next was Ed Schrader’s Music Beat, local personality Ed Scrader’s creepily comic (or comically creepy) music project. Schrader and an accompanying bassist, weirdly lit from the bottom as usually, played their incredibly spare, spacey version take on trad-punk to much aplomb. They weren’t the most intensely gripping act of the night, but it was a nice pallet cleanser in between Double Dagger and Dope Body, the latter of whom closed out the evening on a high note. They’re a band to watch; active for a while now, they’ve been honing their style, essentially a blend of noise rock abstraction, metal craftsmanship, punk aggression and classic rock swagger. The album, naturally, is killer.

Dope Body’s set was one of the highlights of Scapescape as well. Taking place at the G-Spot and Ruintown, two venues in the same one-time factory on Falls Road, Scapescape is what we’re getting instead of Whartscape this year. Although the lineup wasn’t as phenomenal (last year’s Whartscape featured not only Double Dagger, Dan Deacon and Dope Body, but also Lightning Bolt, No Age, Health and reunited ‘90s bands Arab On Radar and Universal Order of Armageddon), the overall mood was more relaxed, thanks in no small part to some slightly more cooperative weather and a more ventilated and shaded space. Biggest highlights of the day were local indie rappers Rapdragons giddily fun set, which featured a host of new material along with cuts from Featuring Baltimore, Weekends kicking up an art-garage squall later in the afternoon, the aforementioned Dope Body action (got to see them twice in one weekend!) and Dan Deacon’s solo closing set, which was all electro-chaos fueled anarchy. Not a bad way to spend an early summer Sunday.

May 25, 2011 by Mac McCormick

Drummer for local power-psych monsters the Flying Eyes talks European tour and new

As stepped in late 1960s sounds as The Flying Eyes might be, this is not peaceful, sunshine music. Though psychedelic to the bone, their sound is as aggressive as it is foreboding. Where the band is most popular is in Germany, a country whose national psyche has endured two world wars, a fascist dictator, and a divisive partitioning by NATO and Soviet interests over the past century. When they last played Baltimore at the Golden West, the stage was lit in stark red light, and half of the band was shirtless. They opened with a punishing cover of the Stooges’ legendarily hedonistic anthem “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” and the whole scene was much more akin to Mia Farrow’s dream sequence in Rosemary’s Baby than say, Hair.
When speaking to Flying Eyes drummer and occasional sound manipulator Elias Schutzman, one is more likely to hear words like “sludge” and “doom” as opposed to “peace” or “love.” That’s not to say he comes across in any way as the troublemaking sort; he’s knowledgeable, confident and relaxed. When you’re around him, there’s always a cadre of associates about he’s sure to make pleasant face time with. Sonic Charm sat down with him over Natty Bohs at a recent Hampden trad-punk show recently to talk Europe, Baltimore, psychedelia and sound.

How would you describe the Flying Eyes Style?

I could do the whole generic thing and describe it as heavy, psychedelic blues rock, but as a friend once told me a while ago, we sound kind of like a freight train running off the rails.

I can definitely hear that in your sound. It's psychedelic but it's very dark and heavy.

When I usually tell people we play psychedelic rock, I'm very quick to point out that we're not the Grateful Dead, not all noodly-doodly psychedelic because I feel like a lot of people might associate it with that, who don't really know the connotations of that word.

My line on your type of psychedelia is that the best psychedelic music is made when people are on bad acid trips.

Yeah, I could agree with that some what. I also think . . . I don't think that necessarily depends . . . it's a term relevant only to drugs, it's an overwhelming kind of sensory experience, it overwhelms you on all levels and draws you in. Music that you feel in many different ways.

So you just got back from a tour of Europe. How did that go?

It was really great. It was the first time we really made money. It was really cool, not that being in the music business is about money because then I would be in the wrong business. It was really great that we played shows almost every day of the week and for the most part people were coming out to see us. There were a few smaller shows that you always have to expect but even at those shows there was like 30 people, maybe the smallest show was like 20 people, and I'm still pretty satisfied with that. So most shows we were getting between 50 and 70 people to come see us, and then a few bigger ones.

How does the scene over there differ from over here?

Well it's a totally different vibe. I think like, when we tour here, I don't meet a lot of people who are fans who know us and came to the show to experience our music, it's more like people went out and happened to see us or just a happening kind of scene that they happen to be a part of, but there I felt like although there's more of a kind of scene for the music we make over here, I really felt like people [in Europe] were genuenly our fans and they really wanted to come out and see us and be appreciative of what we were doing. It was a really nice feeling.

Any European bands that you would recommend?

Oh yeah sure! We played with a great band in Holland, it was our one show in the Netherlands, and we were opening for them. And they were actually pretty well known in the Netherlands, they've sold out a lot of shows on their tour, so this was a 500 person sold out show, and that band's called De Wolf, and they're like between 16 and 18 years old, but they're like a 70's psych rock/prog band. They have this really vintage sound, but at the same time it's fresh sounding, there's a lot of energy. They're just really talented. And we've got friends, this German band Burn Pilot, they've got some big stoner metal influences, anywhere from hardcore punk, to grunge to stoner metal, a little bit of everyhing but it's still a very cohesive sound. Those guys are really cool. We got to play this really cool festival in Berlin called the Burning Earth festival, and we were sharing the bill with Orange Goblin, a well known doomy stoner metal band, and this really cool band that's also on our label called the Samsara Blues Experience.

Music in Baltimore is typically in a hardcore, post-punk or electronic vein, not to mention Baltimore Club and Hip-Hop. As a psychedelic band, how do you feel you fit in with that? Do you feel you fit in with that?

You know, not really. I feel like there's definitely fans of psychedelic music in Baltimore and they come out of the rock and roll, garage rock type scene. It's not specifically psychedelic but I think those people cross over. We've had to really just build our own kind of fan base that doesn't really exist within a scene, but its friends and their friends, spreading the word to their friends. I never thought we were a scene-oriented band. We're more of a band that people just like because they like what we're doing, people coming from all over. And I think that's cool, and I think that in the long run those people will be more loyal fans than if we were just part of a scene that just comes and goes.

Tell us about your new album. Is this your first full length?

Yeah, I consider it the first full length. We released another album in Europe, but that was just a combination of out first two EPs. So in a way, Done So Wrong, our new album, I consider that our first full length statement. It was an interesting process, we recorded the rhythm tracks while we were in Germany last summer, and then we brought it back and did a lot of overdubs and vocals to finish it up and then we mixed it partially in here and partially in Germany. And the artwork, which I'm really happy with, was done by a really talented German artist named Kiryk Drewinski, who's in a really cool German psych/garage rock band called the Magnificent Brotherhood from Berlin.

In addition to playing drums in the Flying Eyes, you also play with Mother Sun Flower, with Tim Shaw and Jon Lipscomb from Whoarfrost. You do some vocal effects manipulation in that band. Do you do anything like that in the Flying Eyes?

I actually started doing that in the Flying Eyes. I guess it's this kind of masturbatory need for me to kind of fuck around with some effects, but I bought a delay pedal and
I ended putting our bassist's vocals through it. I just thought it would be fun. I Velcro it to my bass drum. And it also has a stereo output, so the sound hops back and forth between speakers. If you turn the feedback way up, then you can capture the feedback of the band and just make weird tripped out delay sounds with it. I think it fills out certain areas where there wouldn't be as much noise.

In what ways is Mother Sun Flower different from working with the Flying Eyes?

Oh it's completely different, which I really like. [Mother Sun Flower] is a jam band and we've been jamming together for years, and one day we were just like "Hey how about we write some songs?" It's really spur of the moment and spontaneous, unlike the Flying Eyes, where we spend a long time writing songs and shaping them and arranging them, which I love doing too. But with Mother Sun Flower, partially because we just don't have time, we just sort of throw things out there and most of our songs have just been written in one practice, and when we play them live we just sort of jam out. So that's really fun, to just create music without any hang-ups and not thinking too hard and just doing it.

The Flying Eyes play the Granfalloon on May 27, where they will be releasing Done So Wrong in the United States.

May 15, 2011 by Adi Elbaz

8:05 on a Tuesday night, and I am one of the few, the proud, segueing from a long day of work and grad school to a night out at the Ottobar, Baltimore’s most notorious hipster enclave. A quick bodycount confirms that Tuesday night is, as expected, a shit night for rock and roll; I doubt we could muster up an egalitarian minyan*, let alone a frenzied corner of fandom. Which is a shame, because judging from the comments on their YouTube videos, An Horse has already—rightfully—acquired a passionate one.

In fact, this is my first comment to my friend Jen as the Australian duo takes the stage unassumingly: “They look just like they do on the Internet!” Lead vocalist and guitarist Kate Cooper is slight, with a mop of blond hair pushed carelessly to the side; drummer Damon Cox, wholesome despite his shaggy haircut, could be the Boy Next Door in some bleak Scandinavian film. They don’t bother with formalities, but launch directly into their onomatopoetic “Trains and Tracks,” the first song off their sophomore album Walls. It’s hard to believe that two skinny people can summon so much energy, or that two simple instruments—Damon’s drumset and Kate’s electric guitar—can create a sound that layers and blends so seamlessly with Kate’s strong, elastic vocals.

The lyrics could have come from any poetically-inclined twentysomething’s LiveJournal, but there is something about Kate’s verve, Damon’s understated backing, that turns garden-variety angst into something complex and melodic. Though the turnout is small, it is enthusiastic, and everyone in the room is either nodding along, as though in agreement with Kate’s lyrics (“You want to camp out, and I want to screw around”), or else rocking out completely, the way Kate seems to be. “It’s like Josie and the Pussycats, but gayer,” my friend Jamie whispers to me, and it is true that the majority of the audience appears to be queer. An Horse confine their lyrics to ecumenical topics like love, or being 25, but I wonder whether the lesbians in the crowd relate more to a band whose lyrics echo their own lives.

The band breaks after the second song to thank us—the first of many benedictions—for showing up “unexpectedly;” though neither member mentions this, I have the feeling that they might be, as they say, “big[ger] in Australia.” For a band on tour, distance from home must be measured in much more than miles (or kilometers)—both agree that playing in Australia is far easier because there is always a familiar face in the crowd. Fittingly, they cap off this revelation with “Postcards,” the first song for which the audience cheers with the audible pleasure of recognition. It is at this point that I stop texting myself heavily misspelled notes. I am too busy enjoying the show.

Between songs that blend into one another easily—An Horse has an extremely consistent sound—the band charms us with the multi-pronged story of how they found a bedbug in their hotel room. (In fact, the story evolved from an interstitial stopgap to the focal point of the latter half of the show. “But don’t tell the Internet we have bedbugs,” Kate instructs me afterwards. “We just found them.”) The show—like the songs that comprised it—is short, no more than an hour and a half of catchy, energetic anthems to love, addressed to an unnamed “you.” I leave humming, and hoping to catch An Horse again on any night but Tuesday.

*Jewish prayer quorum, typically requiring ten men, though recently some synagogues have expanded the definition to “ten men or women over thirteen.” Anthropology, man! It’s good for you.

May 12, 2011 by Mac McCormick

Last Thursday Hampden’s Golden West café hosted three local punk bands. In contrast to the high concept art rock spirit that is the impetus for many Baltimore rockers, Crimes, Murder, and headliners Cheap Time all played fairly traditionally.

Crimes played first. The Baltimore pop-punk band played a short but energetic set. Though Crimes played with passion, and displayed a strong songwriting sense, there was little in the way of stylistic flourish. However, a closer listen reveals hints of the slithery melodies of Drive Like Jehu and the occasional flash of instrumental creativity. Listen to Crimes online at http://myspace.com/crimesmd

Murder, made up of members late of Baltimore psych-punk icons Vincent Black Shadow, played their first ever set next. Listening to them, it’s pretty clear that the band is heavily influenced by late 1970s LA punk, the type featured prominently in Penelop Spheeris’ The Decline of Western Civilization. In particular, Murder recalls the work of singer Keith Morris in the first incarnation of Black Flag, the Circle Jerks, and his current group, Off, albeit with a little more affection for heavy metal and noise rock.

Cheap Time closed out the night, playing a brand of punk that sounds heavily influenced by the Buzzcocks and Stiff Little Fingers, but in truth has much more arty ancestory. Maybe they’re more influenced more by the Buzzcocks’ b-sides and album cuts than say, “What Do I Get?” It’s quite subtle; a song with a delay effect in waltz time here, a minimalist kraturock piece disguised as a punk banger there. Snotty, speedy and nervy, they were the best band of the night.

May 10, 2011 by Mac McCormick

Listen to the track on Hoss Records’ homepage: http://www.hossrecords.com/

Baltimore’s own Dope Body plays intense, grinding noise rock. Though approximating the sound of metallic objects screeching and scraping against one another, Dope Body’s music still retains a strong sense of both rhythm and melody. The new version of “Enemy Outta Me,” from their recently released Nupping LP, isn’t exactly the type of song one can hum to themselves, but that’s far from saying the bass guitar squall that serves as the main riff isn’t a hell of a hook. In contrast to the version of the song heard in the Matt Porterfield directed music video released this past summer, this new version sounds fuller and thicker, thanks not only due to higher production values, but the addition of a second bassist to provide some melodic counterpoint. Check out Nupping, out now on Hoss Records.

Dope Body plays Scapescape festival at the G-Spot May 29

Dope Body-"Enemy Outta Me"

featured songs from B-more artists