Album Of The Week: Dungeonesse Dungeonesse

You haven't always been able to hear it in the actual music that comes out of the city, but Baltimore's DIY-heavy indie rock scene has always been a beautifully unsnobby and pop-happy sort of place. I haven't lived there in nearly eight years, and haven't spent nearly enough time there since I moved out, but I cherish memories of Baltimore as a place where you'd argue the merits of Three 6 Mafia deep cuts between bands at, like, an Out Hud show. When the rest of the indie world was still proudly ignorant about rap or pop music, Baltimore indie art-head types would play Ludacris, not Neutral Milk Hotel, at barbecues, and they'd hold down halfassed rap side projects that they'd trot out at house parties, or they'd book Baltimore club DJs with actual radio shows at their warehouse parties. The past few months of Daft Punk-mania has me thinking of a show I saw in the summer of 2001, one where IDM producer and weirdo rapper Cex, his voice worn out from a European tour, told an Ottobar crowd that he couldn't really perform so he was just going to throw on Discovery and have a dance party instead. And it worked, too, up until the moment his CD started skipping and he had to get onstage and do a regular show anyway; that mix of dance-music goofiness and art-school stuntery struck me as one of the most Baltimore things I've ever seen. As an outsider, I've seen that same spirit popping up from time to time: Beach House covering Gucci Mane at Coachella, Wham City's Whartscape fest booking Lil B before any other indie festival acknowledged his existence. And now Jenn Wasner, the powerfully gifted Wye Oak frontwoman, has made her version of a Ciara album. The saga continues.