But that was the burden foisted upon Martha Hull and her husband, Bob Berberich. In late September, their basement record store in Frederick, Maryland, was overcome by floodwaters brought on by a massive storm.

“We’ve been in the building for about two years and we, personally, have not had any flooding issues,” says Hull, who opened Vinyl Acres with Berberich in 2013. “We have heard that there have been some floods in the past — last time about four years ago, but nothing on this scale.”

The storm on Tuesday, Sept. 29, dumped about five inches of rain on downtown Frederick, impacting numerous stores along the city’s popular commercial strip. But Vinyl Acres got hit particularly hard. Most of the record shop’s merchandise was either damaged or destroyed.

“The water on Patrick Street was so deep that our stairwell just filled up, and the force of that six feet of water just pushed the door right in,” says Hull. “The water hit like a tidal wave, knocking over two 300-pound glass display cases in addition to a whole lot of lighter stuff.”

The store owners can’t put a dollar amount on their losses. They say it’s tough to gauge because the value of used vinyl and CDs lands somewhere between their purchase price and whatever sale price they can get. But it was immediately apparent that the flood had dealt a mighty blow.

Then the shop owners’ luck kicked in.

Hull and Berberich have deep roots in the Washington, D.C., music scene. Hull fronted local legends The Slickee Boys for the band’s first two years, later playing with D.Ceats, Steady Jobs and The Dynettes. Berberich played with The Hangmen, Grin and The Rosslyn Mountain Boys, among others, and he still plays music today. The Slickee Boys, in particular, still have a community of committed fans.

After the flood, the Downtown Frederick Partnership started a GoFundMe page to solicit donations for Vinyl Acres. In just a day, the shop had raised nearly $6,000 for its recovery fund, with a big chunk from folks involved in the regional punk and rock scenes.

Music filmmaker Jeff Krulik, Old Indian frontman Cory Springirth, Danny Gatton biopic director Virginia Quesada, Kevin Longendyke from The Ar-Kaics and Dig! Records and Vintage, Punk the Capital co-creator James Schneider, Mobius Records owner Dempsey Hamilton, WHFS documentarian Jay Schlossberg and ex-Fugazi drummer Brendan Canty were among the donors.

Canty says helping Vinyl Acres was a no-brainer. He relishes traveling from D.C. to buy records in the shop’s neighborhood.

“Frederick is a record-buying Mecca,” Canty says.

A little more than two weeks after the campaign launched, Vinyl Acres reopened. It rounded up some local bands and hosted a reopening party Oct. 17.

Hull calls the GoFundMe campaign “something we never would have thought of ourselves, and it has been like a miracle.” So far, the ongoing effort has raised more than $10,000 with donations from 176 people.

Without the outpouring of help, Vinyl Acres might have seen its last sale.

“This, and an astonishing amount of support, manpower, donations of supplies and salvage equipment — plus actual records — are already what has prevented us from closing for good,” Hull says. “We are so grateful and overwhelmed we can’t even pull together a proper expression at this point.”

Vinyl Acres’ GoFundMe campaign is still accepting donations. On Oct. 30, JoJo Restaurant & Tap House plans to host a benefit for both the record store and Whidden Willow, a Frederick boutique damaged in the flood.

Ally Schweitzer contributed to this report. 

A woman dressed in what appears to be a cross between a (literal) cat suit and a Mexican wrestling outfit fending off creatures that look like something out of Jim Henson’s craziest Dark Crystal imaginings? Check. Large-breasted dogs in American flag jumpsuits, being coaxed in a boxing match by Abraham Lincoln in a Spider-Man suit? Yup, they’ve got that. Oh yeah, and there’s a band playing, too.

All of this and more took place at the Flying Dog Brewery in Frederick, Maryland, Saturday night, as the psychedelic rockers from Athens, Georgia, took to the lawn stage for the brewery’s final summer show of 2015, the ensemble’s second time there (they also closed out the 2013 season). Frontman Kevin Barnes led the group — this time a four-piece consisting of Barnes on vocals and guitar, Jojo Glidewell on keyboards, Bob Parins on bass and Clayton Rychlik on drums — through a 17-song set, much of which was drawn from the band’s latest album, Aureate Gloom, and from 2007’s Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?

As is typical for an Of Montreal show, an ensemble of costumed performers — which added a surreal element to the performance — frequently joined the band onstage.

Most of the performance was lit only by images from a projector stationed at the sound booth. This proved to be one of the few flaws of the show; the projections were often dark, making it tough to see what was happening onstage, and they competed with, rather than complimented, the action.

Fellow Athenian indie rockers Mothers and Frederick, Maryland, garage rockers Old Indian opened the show.

All photos by Matt Condon

Old Indian

Mothers

Of Montreal

But there are some Easter eggs here. Such as:

1. Cory Springirth’s guitar is plugged into a toilet-paper dispenser
2. Crazy Office Guy’s computer is not plugged in at all
3. There is a slice of pizza in a binder, and it’s clamped in with binder rings

Hats off to the video’s cinematographers, Eric Boehnlein and Robert Urteaga, for the weirdness.

Old Indian plays Flying Dog Brewery Aug. 22 with Of Montreal and Mothers. Read more about the band in Bandwidth’s Track Work series.

That’s clear on “The Riff,” a standout from the trio’s recent full-length debut, Mumble.

“It’s about skateboarding,” says Cory Springirth, the band’s 26-year-old guitarist and vocalist. “Well, trying to go skate and then having it rain on you.”

If this sounds rather straightforward, that’s because it is. “All the lyrics are pretty literal, but they can apply to anything in life,” Springirth says. “I put thought into my lyrics, of course, but I don’t try to sound, like, artsy or make people think or whatever. We just like being simple about things, which I really like in the band.”

Musically, “The Riff” is pretty simple, too, in line with what listeners can expect from Old Indian. “We do this in a couple of songs,” Springirth says, “where it’s really fast at first, and then it kind of slows down and gets kind of Sabbathy.”

But Springirth is quick to point out that “The Riff” stands on its own, as do all of the other tracks on Mumble. “It’s only an eight-track album,” he says, “but we wanted to have a lot of different types of songs.” Citing examples, he points to the band’s surfer-rock track “Just A Bum” and its Spanish guitar-inspired “Spanish Blues.”

“I don’t like when every song on the album sounds too similar,” Springirth says. “Of course I want you to know what band you’re listening to, but I try to not write anything too similar.”

Perhaps what truly sets apart “The Riff” from the rest of Mumble is its wailing coda. “I tracked two solos at the end, and then put them on top of each other, and that just ended up sounding all right,” Springirth says. “They’re slightly different, but they complement each other.”

With all the pieces put together, “The Riff” manages to sound both familiar and fresh.

“Of course we want to be original,” Springirth says, “but we don’t want to be so far out there that we don’t relate to anyone. We just play music that we like.”

Old Indian plays March 20 at Ottobar in Baltimore, March 26 at Windup Space in Baltimore and April 4 at The Faux School in Frederick.