
One of Baltimore’s favorite guitar players just got a signature model that doubles as an art piece.
Everybody has been talking about Baltimore duo Wye Oak’s drastic decision to go guitar-less on their new album Shriek (due April 29 in the U.S.), a move singer Jenn Wasner told Spin was a way “to sidestep the block” that was her “weird baggage associated with the guitar.”
If you have any fears about how that’s going to impact Wye Oak’s sound, put them to rest! The lead single off Shriek, “The Tower,” shows there’s much more to the band’s genius than their iconic guitar textures.
With the Super Bowl two days away, Ravens fever is running high, and its even infected those of us who know almost nothing about how football is actually played. If this Sunday will be the first time you tune into the Super Bowl — or at least the first time you earnestly attempt to follow the game — then you’ll want to listen to Beatbabies’ (Jenn Wasner of Wye Oak, Chris Freeland of Oxes, and Jon Ehrens of White Life) 10-minute “Football Instructional Song.”
Ben O’Brien has never let the fact that he doesn’t play an instrument or write songs keep him out of the music scene. In college, this meant his brother (that’s me) had to devise a band with two lead singers, one of whom could sort of growl along. Post-college, it meant making a slew of music videos that tie into his puppet-and-green-screen-heavy video series Showbeast, which Ben describes as “a kids-TV-show style series of short films that come out irregularly for adults.”