So, your Chop might just be the only person in America who is of this opinion, but if you ask us there aren’t any serious scandals going on in Washington right now. Sure, there are “scandals” but they really amount to little more than business as usual. We fail to see how...

Despite the title, this post is only halfway about the opening reception of Killer Angels: Faces of American Death Metal. It’s mainly a post about Future Islands, who we’re going to go see at Metro Gallery tomorrow. Naturally, it’s been a while since we’ve seen these...

If you ever wanted to spend a nice, pleasant, relaxing day in Baltimore, tomorrow is it. For one thing, it’s Spring! The weather right now is glorious. It’s cool and warm all at once and everywhere there are trees and leaves and flowers and birds. For someone who’s seen...

If you don’t know Justin Sirois by now, you certainly should. Not least because he’s a friend of the blog and a Baker Artist Award winner. We’ve already told you about his novel Falcons on the Floor and were especially interested in his serial, app centric follow-up So Say...

We’re not sure Why it took us so long to catch on to the whole official election night party thing. It’s a pretty sweet deal. They’re mostly meant as a thank-you to staff and volunteers, but they’re generally open to the public so really any ‘supporter’ can...

We think Obama’s going to win. That’s not really a shocker coming from a decidedly liberal blog in a decidedly liberal city. We think Obama will win in a walk and that’s always been our opinion, since even before the GOP primaries. There was never even a time when we were...

A very well-kept secret of political activism is that a little bit of it can go quite a long way. When you turn on the news you can’t help but hear a lot about big money donors and fancy fundraisers. The images you see are all of paid staffers busily manning campaign offices or dedicated...

It is one of the great injustices in the music world that shitty bar bands who cover top 40 songs are usually some of the best paid bands out there. We don’t mean to say that getting up and playing Margaritaville and Rehab is ultra-lucrative and you can quit your day job doing it, but on...

It was a slow weekend around the Chophouse. We spent most of it drinking boxed wine and watching hard-boiled movies from the 70′s like Midnight Express and Dog Day Afternoon. Hell, it was a slow weekend around Baltimore. Except for Sunday night, there wasn’t much doing. So we...

On Tuesday in this space we publicly proclaimed our love of Fall. But there’s a whole lot more to love about Autumn than just stylish scarves- namely Baltimore Beer Week. Yes Choppers, the fourth annual Baltimore Beer Week begins today with the ceremonial tapping of the first firkin...

If there’s any silver lining at all to our beloved Baltimore Orioles being knocked out of the playoffs, it’s that we now have the evening free to go to the 11th installment of Ignite Baltimore tonight at MICA’s Brown Center. Small consolation, to be sure. While Ignite may not...

As anyone who’s spent about one single hour on any social media site can tell you, there are a lot of fake holidays floating around lately. One can hardly wake up in the morning without being reminded that today is National Steak and a Blowjob Day or National Talk Like A Pirate Day....

Today’s the second Wednesday of the month, which means of course that it’s time once again for Drinking Liberally. Except that there is no Drinking Liberally this week because the VP debate is tomorrow night. Meetings will resume in two weeks though. They start at 7pm and run until...

Novels used to make their first appearances in serial format all the time. Many of the greats of American literature, from Mark Twain and Henry James to Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe, originally published some of their best work in serial form, usually via monthly magazines. Fast forward to...

We were really looking kind of hard for something to say about tonight’s show. Off With Their Heads is coming to the Golden West. We don’t have too much to say about them because we’re not very familiar with them. They’re a punk band on Epitaph so it’s like...

If Christmas can be a month-long holiday every year, they why can’t Halloween, huh? Well, it can if you get into the Halloween spirit. There’s nothing stopping you from going on hayrides and carving up pumpkins and walking around spooky old graveyards all month long if you want to....

We kind of have mixed feelings about Godspeed You Black Emperor here at the Baltimore Chop. They’re a band that’s always had a lot of vision and integrity and has been unique every step of the way, defying comparison to other bands in an age where you are the sum of your...

We said in this space recently that Baltimore’s premiere cultural festival, Artscape, was highly overrated. The whole experience is such that some years we skip over it entirely and don’t even show up for a single day. This weekend the coin flips, and the city is gearing up for its...

When we left off blogging it was the Dog days of Summer and in the world of electoral politics Silly Season was in full swing. There was precious little to talk about of any significance. Now we seem to have the opposite problem. We’re heading down the home stretch with the debates right...

First there was just the urban landscape. Here’s an old train station and here’s a little patch of grass and here’s a statue and a few old brownstones around. Then somebody got the idea to fill the landscape up with art. They called it “Artscape.” It was a pretty...

We don’t usually like to write about the same exact things week in and week out here at the Baltimore Chop. We like to mix it up a little, keep it fresh. But as we mentioned yesterday, bloggers is broke these days, so things like free movies are exceptionally good entertainment on our...

Every city has its own fun little games that the locals like to play. Buffalo has ‘Spot the Canadian.’ Boston has ‘Get wicked drunk and yell in the street all night until someone picks a fight.’ LA has Breast Implant Bingo, and in Baltimore we have the grandest game of...

It feels like we’ve been waiting for this since about the first day of April and it’s finally, finally arrived. Flicks From the Hill Kicks off on the side of the American Visionary Art Museum tonight, and we’ll be showing up early and picking out a prime viewing spot. If...

For those who don’t already know, Baltimore’s Urbanite Magazine is currently in the middle of its 2012 Healthy Food Challenge. The Project is an ongoing and multifaceted effort which includes a request for grant proposals, magazine articles, food policy themed events and...

We’ve said before that Baltimore may be suffering Festival Fatigue. This weekend is evidence of that. There’s enough music being played live this weekend in Baltimore to easily last a full Summer if it were stretched out. According to our count, there are nearly 70 acts performing...

Terrible Feelings is a band. They’re from Sweden. This is what we imagine they look like when they play live. They sound like a cross between The Vicious and Siouxsie and the Banshees. They sound like this: There are more songs on their Soundcloud page. They’re playing with...

We haven’t had oh so much to say recently about politics. Now that the Summer is in full swing political news has been mainly dominated by talk of fundraising and who’s raising how much and from whom, with only a little silliness thrown in for good measure. Today we have the...

Although we didn’t blog about it, we went to Punk Rock Karaoke at Liam Flynn’s Ale House the last time that outfit came through town in late March. Take it from the Chop: it was cool as shit. It’s rare that a crowded bar has the atmosphere and bonhomie of a house party full...

You know the Shamrock Inn. At least you should know the Shamrock Inn. It’s a Baltimore landmark of sorts. If you’re a true blue Baltimoron your dad probably knows the Shamrock Inn. You’ve likely driven past the Shamrock Inn a couple hundred times and said ‘Damn it, I...

It’s Pride Festival weekend here in Baltimore. We’re not going to go into detail about the parade, festival, events, afterparties and everything else. You can check out baltimorepride.org if you want to know about that. What we are going to do is partake in one of...

There are two things that will set the 2012 presidential election apart from all other previous elections. The first and more important of these is that in the wake of Citizens United this is absolutely the year of the super pac, and we’re seeing campaigns financed in ways that were...

And now we come to the Blogger’s Paradox. The Blogger’s Paradox holds that the more a band does, sometimes the less there is to write about them. As a music fan, we love it when our favorite bands play all the time. Getting to see a band you love twice a month is great. Who could complain...

It used to be hard to discover new music. Back when underground music was, um, underground- hell, back when you could use the term ‘underground music’ without sounding like someone’s dad it took a lot to discover music that wasn’t on the radio. It usually involved...

It can be difficult to write about events like tonight’s screening of Food Stamped at the Pratt’s Central Library Branch. Typically, we write posts about things we like, explain why we like them, and why you, the internet-reading public should check them out for yourself. The...

Political news has been pretty slow lately, believe it or not. After King Romney was finally awarded the nomination which was his sacred and inalienable birthright everybody kind of took a nice little breather for a while. Luckily for those of us who enjoy politics-as-bloodsport that all ended...

A couple of years ago we wrote our first post about going to a roller derby bout. We were pretty happy with how it turned out, and it was probably the most popular post of 2010. Problem is, we kind of said everything we know about roller derby right there. It can be kind of tough to write...

Maybe the closest to Zen thought that a lot of us ever get on a regular basis is to ponder the question “Is Punk dead, or is Punk not dead?” It’s a real tree falling in the forest kind of thing. Punks have been asking that question in one form or another for thirty years now,...

Two weeks ago in this space we wrote that the dog days of political Summer have come early this year, and so far it looks like we were right. There haven’t been a whole hell of a lot of interesting or important things happening in the world of national politics lately. Since the last...

Sometimes writing blog posts about bands is easy. Sometimes you know the band well and they’ve been doing some interesting things and there’s a natural angle to take and the post writes itself. Sometimes it’s pretty hard. Occasionally there’s nothing to say about a band...

So today kicks off the 4 day cine-thon that is the Maryland Film Festival. The MD Film Fest is great. It gets better every year, in fact. Or at least that’s what we hear. If we’re telling the God’s-honest truth we’ve never actually been to the Film Festival. Pretty...

If you were to walk up to us and say “Hey Chop, who’s your favorite band?” We would say Kind of Like Spitting. If you were to say “No, I mean like, really your favorite, favorite of all time?” We”d look you square in the eye and say without any hesitation...

We’re pretty much convinced that this whole crummy decade is just the 90′s all over again. At least musically. There are slackers everywhere. WHFS is back on the air. Beavis and Butthead are on Mtv, and just this week we dropped by the Sound Garden and found so much Toad the Wet...

Summer is a notoriously dull time in American political life. Congress makes ready to recess and does even less than usual. The Fourth of July inspires even the hardest partisans to hate each other a little less and the King of England a little more, and even in an election year the President...

Half of us will never know what it’s like to be a woman. Most of us will never know what it means to be punk, either. It’s only a precious few people who live the experience of being a woman in punk, and tonight at the Creative Alliance some of the most prominent of those women...

We don’t really like folk punk. The last time we went to a folk punk show it was maybe the worst show we’ve ever been to and we ended up demanding our money back after 90 minutes of horseshit and a headliner that didn’t show up. That’s what you get with most folk punk-...

Hi David Sedaris. Welcome to Baltimore. We hope it’s nice and sunny today and you can walk around the Inner Harbor and get a crabcake for lunch and maybe even do some antiques shopping and sneak into Jay’s on Read for a drink after the show. Oh and we hope the show goes really...

If you ask Friend Collector, they’ll tell you that they are the best band in Baltimore right now. They’ll say it with a straight face. They truly believe it. They make a good argument too, inasmuch as they’re the kind of band that’s not afraid to call your band a bunch...

When you get older, you get a little wiser. At this very minute there are thousands of kids in their early 20′s texting and tweeting and Facebooking all over the city of Baltimore saying “Dude, what’s going on this weekend? Anything? House party this and dance party that and...

Attention: this post is for all of you internet people who claim to love books so much. It’s for all of you who wrung your hands about the discontinuation of printed encyclopedias and incessantly re-post that John Waters quote about not fucking people who don’t own books....

One of the disadvantages of leaving the country for months at a time is that you miss out on what’s going on here at home. Since we left in November, one of the major things that went on here in Charm City was Roomrunner’s instant ascent to the upper echelon of Baltimore bands....

Whenever some local publication has one of those “Baltimore’s Best Bartender” contests, we always nominate and vote for Jeremy Crawford. A fixture at the Club Charles for years, Jeremy has never been anything but kind, patient and understanding when he’s working at Club...

Well, we’re about 12 hours late with the blog post today. That’s because our Comcast internet shit the bed for no apparent reason, along with the cable TV. So a very special fuck you to Comcast, who now owes us one pro-rated day back on our bill this month. Today is the fourth...

This isn’t a music blog. It’s a personal blog. The point of this blog has never been anything more than to say “Hey, here’s what we’re doing tonight.” Kind of like Facebook, only not insipid and insidious. So here’s what we’re doing tonight:...

So, we guess we gotta go see Those Darlins tomorrow. We haven’t really got much choice in the matter. The show’s not gonna watch itself, as they say. It was a lot easier to stay home the last time they played at the Golden West. It wasn’t even that long ago- March 31 to be...

Today is an important day in the city of Baltimore. Double Dagger will play its penultimate Baltimore show tonight at the Charm City Art Space. If you don’t know or care who Double Dagger is, or if you don’t think tonight is important, then you can go look at some fucking cats or...

As Walter Sobchak once said: “Life does not stop and start at your convenience you miserable piece of shit.” Such is the case tonight when the Deleted Scenes show will start sometime after 10 whether it’s convenient for you or us or the rest of Baltimore or not. And for most...

You probably know by now that this blog is a big fan of local band Poly/Western. We’ve posted about them before and go to see them every chance we get. Luckily, we get another chance tomorrow night at the Sidebar. We’ve always said that they were a great band who were bound to get...

Today is a holiday in the City of Baltimore. It’s not the usual thing for a holiday to be on a Thursday, but… wait; is today Thursday? Who cares! It’s a holiday. A high holy day. A high holy week. And by week, we mean like 2 weeks. Eleven days to be exact. Today marks the...

One of the best things about living in Baltimore, and perhaps the major reason we love it so dearly, is the ability to go from something very highbrow and sophisticated to something decidedly lowbrow with absolutely no transition in between. That’s exactly how our night looks to be...

So we’re going to see Strike Anywhere at the Ottobar tonight. Sounds pretty normal, except that we’re not actually going to see Strike Anywhere. Oh we’ll stand there and watch them. We’ll probably even sing along a little. What we mean to say is that even though...

You gotta go see Shellac tonight. Among the many reasons why you gotta go see Shellac tonight is because you’ve probably never seen them before, and the smart money says you’ll probably never see them again. After all, even though they’ve been around forever, they’re...

As you know, we usually only talk politics every second and fourth Wednesday, in conjunction with the regular meetings of Baltimore Drinking Liberally. Drinking Liberally will happen as scheduled tomorrow (Joe Squared, 7pm), but we’ve got something else cooked up for then, so we’re...

Today is the second Wednesday of the month, and as usual Progressives of all stripes will be gathering on the patio of Joe Squared to swap stories, talk politics, and drink beers at the regular meeting of the Baltimore Chapter of Drinking Liberally. Meetings start at 7 pm and are open to...

There’s a new art gallery opening tonight. From 7-10 pm, Guest Spot will open its doors to the public for the first time with its inaugural show, Temporary Home, which is curated by Carl Gunhouse and features the work of Becky Alprin, City Blossoms, Jason Hughes, John Lehr, and Christine...

We were sad to hear the news a few weeks ago that the Hexagon Space was closing. We’re sad to hear about any venue closing up, even if we don’t go there very often. Fletcher’s, The Supreme Imperial, even Hal Daddy’s; we may have gone there pretty seldom, but any venue...

…And now for something completely different. The Chop is on our way to the Red Emma’s Queer Music Explosion! at the 2640 Space tonight. That might surprise some regular readers of this blog, who are more used to us talking about pretty straightforward punk and post-punk bands....

No lie Baltimore, we’ve been craving a snowball lately. Like bad. Like a real one, that stains your teeth and tongue and comes in a giant styrofoam cup- none of that fake-ass Rita’s junk. We’ve yet to find one either. It’s still only May. Schools have been in and...

The Chop has always has decidedly mixed feelings about farmers’ markets. We’re certainly glad they’re there… no doubt about that. At the same time though, we don’t actually go out to them and buy produce as often as we probably ought to. We like the Waverly...

Well, the forecast for this week has not been good. It may not be Joplin-esque, and we may be a whiny pussy of a blogger for complaining about it, but we’re getting sick of rain. To hell with rain. Seriously. We want to do outdoorsy things, like go to festivals and swing golf clubs and...

You read that headline right, Choppers. The Dating Game is at the Ottobar tonight. Not some obscure touring indie rock band called the Dating Game, but, you know, a homegrown version of the old seventies TV show. Their website is short on specifics, but presumably a handful of moderately...

Is it just us, or have the last two weeks gone by really, really quickly? What’s today? April 27th? The 28th maybe? Fuck! It’s May 11! How is that even possible??? We sort of regret that the last two weeks of life elapsed in what felt like 2 days, but the good news is that if it...

Today is a big red letter day in Charm City. It’s the second day of Flowermart, the third day of the Maryland Film Festival, and Kinetic Sculpture Race day. What does this mean to you? It means if you’re going to any one of these, have fun. If you’re not, you probably...

We’re going back to Pigtown tonight. It’s been more than a year since we’ve gone to Pigtown for anything, and the last time we did it was for the first Pigment opening. It’s funny; we said then that Pigtown should hold more cool events to lure people from the rest of...

If you ask any punk in town, ‘What’s going on at the Ottobar tonight?’ they’d tell you ‘Reagan Youth, Duh.’ That’s not the right answer though. Well, It’s technically the right answer, but it’s not the best show going on in that particular...

It’s strange when you grow up punk. Your musical tastes have to evolve eventually. At least a little bit. Three chords alone can’t sustain anyone forever. Over time, even the kid with the spikiest hair or the dirtiest pants will start looking to explore decidedly non-punk records,...

The Chop is a longtime lover and admirer of the Great Outdoors. Not like hills and forests and all that crap, but we like sidewalks a lot. We’d rather climb a rooftop than a mountain, and rather cool off in an open fire hydrant than some crummy lake. (People pee in lakes! That’s...

After their one-off show at Hopkins a few weeks ago, The Stoop is back in its regular home at Centerstage tonight to present Culture Shock: Stories about confronting the new, strange, and often scary. We’ve written about the Stoop enough times now that we’re having trouble coming...

It’s Super Art Fight night again at the Ottobar. Once again, there’s nothing we can tell you here that hasn’t already been said over on their very thorough and entertaining blog. They’ve got more inside baseball stuff over there than the actual Inside Baseball. Check it...

Remember the first time you saw Ghostbusters? If you’re like us you were about 5 or 6 and you were riveted to the screen right from the opening credits. You could not wait for them to catch a ghost. And the first legitimate ghost hunt they went on in that movie was at the main branch of...

Tonight is the first Tuesday bargain night of the season, so we’re going to be watching tonight’s game as God intended- in the stands with the die hards. Now that the ball club sucks again, we happily predict that the fairweather types and the school aged kids will be staying...

So, basically, every place that has ever had music is having music tonight. There’s no shortage of choices, and there’s too much to talk about in detail, so we’ll just give you our picks and let you decide what kind of show you want to go see. Still not sure where we’ll...

Since its inception five years ago, the Stoop Storytelling Series has become a fixture at Centerstage, and a favorite among consumers of Baltimore culture. Its format of seven diverse storytellers each telling seven minute stories has proven wildly popular, and in its time has covered topics...

Well, lucky Chop. We’ve got another night with too damn many interesting things going on. We already told you yesterday about the Found Footage Festival at the Creative Alliance tonight, and we can scarcely find room to mention that Madison Smartt Bell is also reading from his new novel...

What could Mr. T’s mother, toilet training for cats, herpes, and puppet aerobics all possibly have in common? Only the fact that someone thought they were not worth watching, and so they all ended up in some thrift shop or garage sale or flea market or video-outlet bargain bin, where Joe...

So, we wrote a whole big blog post last year about how we were going to put on our Sunday best and go to Pimlico and piss away a few bucks and fake-it rich. As it happened, we got called up last minute to help a friend move. We swore we’d get up to Old Hilltop the next week, and then one...

The general idea here at the Baltimore Chop is that we blog about the things we do when we go out at night. We pick a thing to do, and then basically tell why it’s worth doing. Some nights we have to go looking for something to do. Some night’s we’re lucky enough to have two...

The Chop is not a lawyer. We’re not a banker, a military officer, or a city councilman either. Somehow though, we ended up as one of these people for whom everything has political overtones. We make no bones about being a labor-loving, Secularist, pro-choice, pro-gay, anti-war Lefty....

Back in January we had some pretty nice things to say about local trio Poly/Western. Now that it’s almost April, we’re gonna go ahead and double down on those statements. At that time, we’d been vaguely aware of this band, but hadn’t had the chance to see them live yet....

When Barack Obama was elected by a wide margin, and subsequently handed a Nobel Peace Prize, it was all based on one simple idea: that he’s not George Bush. Candidate Obama, for all his lofty speeches was elected on an unspoken compact with the electorate. He promised us, without saying...

There’s no Sunday Night Football tonight. There’s no Sunday baseball game of the week either. Hell, there’s not even any new episodes of Mad Men, Boardwalk Empire, the Walking Dead, or any of the other premium TV fare the networks have started to crowd up Sunday Nights...

So there’s a good show going on tonight. It’s Rocky Votolato and Matt Pond at the Black Cat. But it’s Tuesday, which means you’ve got to ask yourself the same question you always have to ask when there are good shows in DC during the week, namely: Do I really feel like...

There’s no doubt about it, Baltimore- America is officially in decline. The Republicans are stealing and pillaging as fast as they can. Nobody has a job to go to, and it doesn’t matter because gas is $4 a gallon and the kids are more interested in cocaine and shitty dance music...

It’s SPRING, Baltimore. You may be thinking that it’s not Spring, that it is in fact monsoon season, but we assure you that Spring has most positively sprung. Do you know what that means? Eh? Eh? Do you? It means that you need t-shirts. But not just any t-shirts will do. You...

The good news? It’s movie night. The bad news? There is no bad news. We all get to go to the movies for free. What could be bad about that? The City Paper loves and appreciates its readers so much that they’ve decided to partner with the Charles Theater to treat us all to a free...

We’ve talked before on this blog about the Baltimore phenomenon we’ve taken to calling Awesome Saturday. The movers and shakers and event planners in this town who plan things in advance all seem to zero in on the last Saturday of the month to book the really cool stuff, and at...

We haven’t made it out to a Super Art Fight yet. We’re overdue. Way overdue. It’s been our understanding that it gets bigger, better, and badass-er with each installment, so with the approach of their 9th battle, it’s safe to say that it’s going to be the best one...

We’ve never been very big into the Queers. There was a point in time, early high school, when we should have been a huge Queers fan. It was all there on paper: they’ve got songs about drinking, girls, farts, pranks, the suburbs, hating school, etc, etc. When we were a 15 year old...

Man, were we glad when December was over, because honestly all that Christmas mumbo jumbo is kind of boring. The thing about it is that when people schedule things well in advance, they all tend to do the same thing… look at the calendar and say “Oh well let’s pencil in...

Why is it that sometimes the best bands are also the laziest? We don’t mean to call anyone lazy, especially since we pretty much take the cake for sloth in this town, but we can’t help but notice that sometimes those with the most talent do relatively little with it. Consider the...