I have an interview with The Bow-Legged Gorilla over on Splice Today.

Labels: Bow-Legged Gorilla, Splice Today

Mania Music Group, a Baltimore hip hop label I've spent the last couple years following and writing about a lot, released their first official album, Welcome To The Audience, yesterday, and since they'd given me an advance copy I got to write an extensive preview of the album for Splice Today.

Labels: Mania Music Group, Splice Today

I recently sat down with Bossman for an advance listen of his new album, The Re-Up, which will be out on June 8th, and wrote up an extensive track-by-track preview of the album for Splice Today.

Labels: Bossman, Splice Today

Height With Friends - Swiss Chard, Vol. 1 (SpliceToday.com)

Height With Friends have been on a good run since last year, releasing Baltimore Highlands, the companion remix album, and they have another album in the can for release later this year. In between, they got together with SpliceToday.com to release a free download release, the first in a series called Swiss Chard (incidentally, I tried Swiss chard for the first time last year and it can be really good, my wife cooks it up with garlic and rice). A few years ago, Height used to do a series of EPs called Utility Fog between albums, so I guess that's kind of what this series is going to be like, too. All of Height's albums are short, usually a half hour or less, and as a stopgap EP-type release this is even short, 5 songs in under 9 minutes. So it's not really substantial in and of itself or a good intro to Height, but if you already like his stuff there's some good tracks here to throw in a playlist with his other records. It also features a lot of his kind of abstract, chant-y material, so it's not as overtly hip hop as some of his other releases (although the last track is a Schoolly D cover/homage). Like the other With Friends releases, this features contributions from Mickey Free, AK Slaughter and P.T. Burnem, among others. Height With Friends are performing at the Windup Space this Saturday, and setting off on a national tour in a couple weeks, and Bmore Musically Informed recently posted a preview of a few tracks from their upcoming album, Bed Of Seeds, which will be out on May 1st.

Height With Friends - "Right Road" (mp3)
This is the first and longest track on the record, also my favorite, apparently it only didn't make the cut on a previous record because of length concerns.

Labels: AK Slaughter, Height, Mickey Free, mixtape/album review, mp3, P.T. Burnem, Splice Today

Mario - D.N.A. (J Records)

Mario's last album Go! from a couple years back was a really good record, but it didn't really spin off any big singles like his first two albums, so I was wondering where his career was headed and whether Baltimore still had a R&B star really representing in the mainstream. As I mentioned in a Splice Today piece I wrote recently about musicians in reality shows, I thought dude going on "Dancing With The Stars" was maybe signaling the end of his music career. But then he came back big over the summer with "Break Up," which really I think was annoying as fuck, one of the worst hits of the year, but good for him that it got him back on the charts, and the follow-up single "Thinkin' About You" is really good. This definitely isn't his best album, but it's got some good tracks on it and really I think he's easily one of the best R&B singers in his age bracket out there, still.

Mario - "I Miss My Friend" (mp3)
This is one of my favorite tracks and damn, it was written by Babyface, that's big.

Labels: Mario, mixtape/album review, mp3, Splice Today

Wye Oak - "Dance My Pain Away" (mp3)
Mickey Free - "That I Do" (mp3)
Splice Today, a great site that I've been doing some writing for, recently released its second compilation album for free on the site. Baltimore Does Baltimore, Part 1 is, as you can probably tell from the title, a collection curated by Zach Kaufmann of Baltimore musicians covering songs by other Baltimore musicians, mostly people from the indie rock scene. However, there are two tracks on here that worthy of noting here on Gov't Names, and both involve Wye Oak, who are probably my favorite band in Baltimore of the past couple years. On one track, rapper Mickey Free (of Height With Friends and the Baltimore All-Rap Round Robin) remixes Wye Oak's song "That I Do" and adds a verse to it. But the really exciting thing is that Wye Oak themselves worked up a cover of Rod Lee's stone classic "Dance My Pain Away." On the face of it, a mellow rock band covering a Baltimore club song is the kind of thing that might easily make me cringe; rock artists doing tongue-in-cheek of covers of raunchy rap songs have become a really awful annoying cliche in the past 10 years, and it kinda irritates me that Kaufman references one, Ben Folds's "Bitches Ain't Shit," when describing Wye Oak's track. What they do with "Dance My Pain Away" is a million times better than that, and totally respectful of the original song, which has a lot of melody and pathos to begin with, and I think them just being from Baltimore probably gives them the right understanding of it and club music to pull it off. Plus I'm really just excited because there is probably no person in the world who loves both Wye Oak and "Dance My Pain Away" as much as I do. Baltimore Does Baltimore, Part 1 was mastered by my friends at Mobtown Studios, by the way.

Labels: Baltimore club, Mickey Free, Mobtown Studios, mp3, Rod Lee, Splice Today

I wrote an essay titled Is 2009 The Year Baltimore Club Broke? that is my first piece for SpliceToday.com, kind of a long thinkpiece covering a whole lot of ground, hope it stimulates some discussion about the club scene and where it's going.

Labels: Baltimore club, magazines/newspapers, Splice Today