In this third iteration of The Big Baltimore Playlist, we found five local songs we can’t get enough of, ranging from psychedelic pop and Americana medleys to rockabilly headbangers and soulful R&B. Check back each month for new top songs of the moment, and follow our Spotify playlist as we continue to build a soundtrack for our city. 

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“Kinda Bonkers” by Animal Collective

Sure, this experimental quartet doesn’t live in Charm City anymore, but born and raised in the region—and with a strangely wonderful set at Merriweather a few weeks back—we’ll always consider them our own. This fittingly titled track is a swirling feat: off-kilter and eclectic as ever, culminating in a hypnotic, almost tribal piece of pop music that only our boys could create.

“Paper Trails” by Celebration

This sprightly number off Celebration’s spring album will put you in a good mood any time of year. A duet with frontwoman Katrina Ford and Future Islands’ frontman Sam Herring, it’s a swinging dance between two of Baltimore’s most passionate performers. His low guttural croon bounces along with her buoyant, brilliant pipes, amidst a backdrop of shimmering synth and steady hi-hat drums. At the core, it’s a bright little love song. It makes you want to snap your fingers, find a partner, and dance along. (For more Ford-Herring tour de force, see 2010’s “In The Fall.”)

“Heartbroken Shogun” by Dolphin*

We learned about this little known Baltimore songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist through the airwaves of WTMD. With more than 50 unreleased albums, the prolific artist has dozens upon dozens of tracks, but we’ll argue that this new one—a scratchy, funky beat swimming in vintage soul with a hint of futuristic R&B—is his best yet. Go ahead and get lost in the wavy, laidback groove.

“Never Look Back” by The Herd of Main Street

In order to listen to this song right, you need to get out of the city. That’s right—hit the road, get out of dodge—because this jangling, heart-pounding melody is best listened to with the windows down or outside in the country air. Combining classic country and rock-and-roll with blues and folk roots, this 10-year-old quintet makes a rich medley of Americana music, one that’s reminiscent of the greats who came before them: The Band, The Allman Brothers, Gov’t Mule. Be sure to check out their full album, Heyday, when it drops this weekend.

“Preaching To The Choir” by Snakes*

This two-year-old band sounds anything but young. With a sort of punkish twang, they strum together the sort of lo-fi frenetic rockabilly music that lends better to bolo-tied mosh pits than boot-scooting line dances. (They also have heartbreaking blues songs, with swirls of organ and pedal steel,.) However you embrace them, this five-piece might just be the best spaghetti-western slingers that ever stepped foot into Station North, with regular sets at Metro Gallery, The Windup Space, and The Crown. We’re eagerly awaiting their 2018 EP.

*Not yet available on Spotify. We’ll add it when it comes online.

Five things to eat, drink, see, hear, and do with your Charm City weekend.

 EAT

July 29: Fort McHenry Crab Feast

Fort McHenry, 2400 E. Fort Ave. 4-8 p.m. $45-75.

With summer almost halfway over, be sure to get BBQ fix this weekend with cookout fare, local brews, and Chesapeake Bay crabs at the fourth annual, all-you-can-eat feast. Located on the historic grounds and breathtaking waterfront of Fort McHenry, experience Maryland at its finest with live bluegrass tunes by the Eastport Oyster Boys, kids’ activities, and neighborhood vendors from Locust Point. Proceeds benefit education and youth employment at this hallowed national monument.

 DRINK

July 29: BARCS & Brews

Blue Pit BBQ & Whiskey Bar, 1601 Union Ave. 4-8 p.m. Free. 

We don’t know about you, but our favorite drinking buddy just happens to have four legs. This Saturday, beat the heat (though luckily it’s going to be a cool low-80s compared to last weekends high-90s) with cold brewskis, grilled meats, and happy-hour specials for you and your pooch on the back patio, all while helping homeless cats and dogs. With raffles and giveaways, the evening will support the Baltimore Animal Rescue and Care Shelter (BARCS) in its mission of rescuing thousands of animals each year.  

 SEE

July 29-30 & Aug. 4-6: Fluid Movement

July 29-30: Druid Hill Park, 800 Wyman Park Dr. 5 & 7 p.m. Aug. 4-6: Patterson Park, 148 S. Linwood Ave. Fri. 9 p.m., Sat. 7 & 9 p.m., Sun. 5 & 7 p.m. $10. 

One of the city’s most weirdly wonderful summer events is the Fluid Movement water ballet. This summer, the avant-garde group delves into the 16th-century Renaissance with “Sharkspeare,” where the aquatic ballerinas re-imagine Shakespearean classics such as Hamlet, Macbeth, The Tempest, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Expect loads of glitter and good times as the local troupe fuses Old English prose with Baltimore swimming pools.

 HEAR

July 29: Fleet Foxes with Animal Collective

Merriweather Post Pavilion, 10475 Little Patuxent Pkwy., Columbia. 6-11 p.m. $41-56.

When we heard about Fleet Foxes’ new album—their first in some six solid years—we knew what would be on our Spotify all summer long. The indie Seattle group delivered with a wide, lush, folk-driven feat, and a few songs that are almost too pretty to listen to (“Third of May/Odaigahara”). And then when we found out about their mid-summer concert at Merriweather, we didn’t think things could get better until we heard they were performing with Baltimore’s very own Animal Collective. The experimental indie-pop stars will be performing their latest as well, The Painters, full of Day-Glo trips and the rattling rhythms we’ve come to know and love. 

 DO

July 29: Trifecta Food Truck Festival

Maryland State Fairgrounds, 2200 York Road, Timonium. 11 a.m. Free-$60. 

The area’s best food trucks will all converge on the Maryland State Fairgrounds this Saturday for the second annual Trifecta Food Truck Festival. There’s a stellar lineup of mobile kitchens where guests can enjoy gyros from Greek on the Street, pulled pork sandwiches from The Smoking Swine, slices from Dizzy Cow Pizzeria, tacos from Mexican on the Run, cupcakes from Icedgems Baking, and burgers from Kooper’s Chowhound, and shucks from The Local Oyster. To wash in all down, there will be craft beer from Dogfish Head and Evolution Brewing. But that’s not the only thing on the menu, as the event will feature a pie-eating contest, dunk tanks, moon bounces, a mechanical bull, and music from local acts like the All Mighty Senators and Cris Jacobs.

Animal Collective
Painting With (Domino)

Part of us isn’t sure we can call Animal Collective a Baltimore band anymore, but part of us says we always will. (Merriweather Post Pavilion forever.) Regardless, we plan to claim them now, thanks to the local trio’s awesome new album, their first full-length venture since 2012. It’s also their most accessible (and just plain fun) since we first fell in love with “My Girls” in 2009. Maybe you’ve already heard it on a surprise loop at BWI last fall, but if you didn’t, get on it quick—once again, these indie stars are crafting a funky, fresh, spin art-colorful kind of sound. “FloriDada,” in particular, is pure sunshine.

See our interview with Animal Collective’s Brian Weitz.

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Caleb Stine & The Brakemen
Time I Let It Go (self-released)

For over 10 years, Caleb Stine and his Brakemen (an homage to rail workers of eras past) have been putting out the kind of traveling music fit for any road trip you might find yourself embarking on. After a few solo records from Stine, the quartet recently released its first new album since 2008, with all the Americana stories and backwoods confidence we’ve come to love. With toe-tapping giddy-ups like “Hey There Mister”; slow, sweet anthems like “Spirit”; and the lovely, dust-covered instrumental “You Bet He Was My Friend”, the album’s got us itching for the windows-down weather of spring.

Do you have the same process for creating an album every time around? Each record is so unique and layered.
Sometime we just get together in a practice space and write songs out of jamming. That’s how we did Centipede Hz. But with this album, we weren’t going to be around each other for the song-writing process—we were going to be in our respective cities—so we had to do it more by email for the first phase. Dave and Noah are the songwriters, and usually come up with a basic rhythm. They’ll send out a demo of their instruments, maybe with some rough lyrics or wordless vocal melody. That stuff gets sent around and other people can process it, stick it in GarageBand or Pro Tools, and then add their own parts. We send it back and forth like, ‘Hey, this is what I’m thinking,’ and the next person in line can say, ‘Okay! This is where I’ll play this.’

It’s kind of crazy that with technology these days, you can essentially create an entire album without even physically being together.
We didn’t get through all the songs that way. We got about halfway done and decided we needed to be together. Our friend has a studio in Ashville, NC, and Noah was finishing up a Panda Bear tour there, so Dave and I decided to meet him and spend two weeks in our friend’s basement, hunkering down and working on two songs a day. That’s when we got everything together. Everybody came up with their parts. Everybody was psyched on the songs. And then we went into the studio and actually executed it for real.

What were some of the things inspirations that you guys discussed?
One of the first things was the idea of shorter songs. I had been listening to the first Ramones record. Every song is a very concise statement of energy. We’ve never done a record like that, where it’s a bunch of short songs that are all upbeat and energetic. We’ve always had these more ambient passages on our records—these floaty, amorphous things, like a slow song and a sad song—and we just thought we’ve done that so many times, why don’t we try to make our version of The Ramones record? And for Dave and Noah, the songwriters, that was a challenge. To them, three minutes is usually just one part of a song.

Now that you say that, I can totally hear the urgency of The Ramones in this album.
And we talked about the idea that maybe we’ve exhausted a lot of reverb and crazy processing. For me, I felt like I’m not going to make a bed of noise that a song just rests on top of any more; I’m going to see if I can be more surgical with where I insert myself in the song. Everybody needs to play less, you know? Because, for years, we’ve made a racket, so it’s like, why don’t we work on negative space? That’s something that we’ve always felt we’re not very good at. So we start by setting challenges for ourselves—what have we not done well? And we almost surprise ourselves if we can pull it off.

You’ve definitely created something new that still remains true to Animal Collective.
I think we’re confident now that if we try something new, it’s always going to sound like—we don’t know exactly how to define it—but we know there’s something ‘Animal Collective’ about what we make. A long time ago, we were like, we would never want to get to that point where you have an identifiable ‘sound.’ But now I think that’s silly—it’s actually a good thing. People could say it sounds like another band and that would be more of a bummer.

Almost every Animal Collective review in some way, shape, or form brings up the Beach Boys and Pet Sounds.
We get asked about Pet Sounds all the time. We like that record. We love the Beach Boys. So it’s always been a tricky question to answer, because I don’t want to put down . . .

I mean, yeah, who doesn’t like the Beach Boys?
I think the thing was . . . when the first Pet Sounds reference happened, it was around our fifth album, Sung Tongs, and at the time, we actually were listening to a lot of Beach Boys. We had grown up knowing Pet Sounds and the early surf stuff. But if you’re a record nerd, you eventually start to discover this post-Brian-Wilson-domination era of the Beach Boys, in the early ’70s, where Carl and Dennis did a lot of songwriting, and you have records like Sunflower, 20/20, or Friends. That was actually the era of the Beach Boys that we were listening to a lot. So people would be like, ‘Pet Sounds was a huge inspiration,’ and we were like, ‘Eh, sort of, not really.’

At the end of the day, you guys were still able to forage your own thing out of the shadow of that Beach Boys comparison.
Yeah. No disrespect to Pet Sounds. Pet Sounds was an amazing record. But in terms of our iconic records, the ones that the band kind of holds up and puts on a pedestal and says ‘this had a huge influence on us,’ I don’t think I’d put Pet Sounds as one of them, as much as we love it, or the Beach Boys. I think what’s important for us is, like, The Beatles. The Beatles did a lot of harmonies, too.

Any specific Beatles era?
Everything. It’s pretty easy to go from start to finish. My favorite is probably Revolver. Or Magical Mystery Tour.

Ironically, you actually recorded this album in the Pet Sounds studio, though, right?
We did. And we kind of joked about it. Like, it’s the nail in the coffin. It actually wasn’t our first choice, but the other studios fell through and we were three weeks away from our start date and so excited about recording all the songs that we didn’t want to postpone the record. But in the end, it’s cool to record in a historic space. When we were in the studio, we were like, ‘This is awesome. It sounds amazing in here.’

You’re playing two shows at the 9:30 Club in May. Do you guys still come back or feel tied to Baltimore?
Yes. I do, anyway. My parents live in Baltimore, my wife is from Baltimore, her parents live in Baltimore, my wife’s brother and my brother still live in Baltimore. He’s actually about to open a restaurant in Baltimore. So we go there all the time, you know. Animal Collective’s storage space is up near Josh’s house in Owings Mills. So I feel pretty connected to it. I’ve kind of always gone back for some shows and to see friends and family quite a bit. Dave and Noah are there way less, because they live so far away, so it’s hard for me to speak to their connections to Baltimore. And it’s hard when you’ve been away from a place for a long time: you connect your history with it, and then you come back, it feels a little haunted.