Ocobaya – Messix
ROM – jerry princess taste
Aaron Tinjum and the Tangents – Roving Instrumental / Interlude #1
Opus Akoben – Babies
Stephen Allen Kochersperger – The Quest
Lisa Ann Wright – Lucinda
Wes Swing – Dilate
Matt Rippitoe – Ladybugs
Drop Electric – Santo Domingo
Asparagus Media – Dubalicious
Jonathan Parker – Sundown
Sol Power All-Stars – Djidjo Vide
Letzkus Lanou – Glory
Troy and Paula Haag – Lies & Cries
Mary Chapin Carpenter – I Am A Town
The Meer – Canopy
A Tale Of – We Rise and We Fall
Griefloss – Charon
Marian McLaughlin – Even Magic Falters
Patuxent Partners – Washington County

Title Tracks – All Tricks (Instrumental)
Beauty Pill – Idiot Heart
Masego – Disconnected (Shorty From VA)
Diggs Duke – Crazy Like A Fox
Yeveto – Remote Unelectrified Villages
Letzkus Lanou – Ted n Lindsay
Dupont Brass – Can We Talk
Opus Akoben – Ronin
Fort Knox Five – Swinging On a Rhyme (Instrumental)
Spirit Plots – Pssst
Stephen Allen Kochersperger – Headhunter Serenade
Deathfix – Hospital
00Genesis – Inside the Brown Paper Bag
Tereu Tereu – Savage Love
Stephen Robey – Charlotte’s Song
The Petticoat Tearoom – Kundalini
ZOMES – Black Magic Band
Teen Mom – Kitchen
Patuxent Partners – Victoria Waltz
GroundScore – Here We Are

Ocobaya – Messix
Matt Chaconas – AEIOU
Smoke Bellow – Conscious Heads
Sun Machines – Mare Island
Drop Electric – Santo Domingo
A Tale Of – 1976
Nitemoves – Grinder
Lo-Fang – Animal Urges
Maxine – Since I Lost You
Damu the Fudgemunk – 1993 Pete, 45 Mix
Mathugh – The Hitcher
Catscan! – Marine Biologist
Patuxent Partners – Victoria Waltz
Art Sorority For Girls – All Year Again (Yoko O.K.)
Buildings – For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky
Opus Akoben – Ronin
SCANNERS – Petty Tragedy
Andrew Grossman – Death to Rockville Pike
Reginald Cyntje – Wind

Oscars — a species of fish native to South America — can be aggressive, says the songwriter and guitarist in D.C. rock band Thaylobleu. Sea creatures wade into an oscar’s territory at their own risk. “It’s pretty straight-ahead,” says Nicholson, 47. “If an oscar’s hungry, it’s gonna bite you.”

Jellyfish, by contrast, are deceptive. “At first blush, [a jellyfish] is kinda soft and squishy,” Nicholson says. “But [if] you rub up against it, it’ll sting you.”

“Oscars & Jellyfish,” the debut album from D.C. rockers Thaylobleu

Nicholson says rippers like Thaylobleu’s “Locked” fall under the “oscar” category. Seemingly gentler songs, like “Amnesiah,” float along like jellyfish, sneakily dangerous. The tracks represent two poles on Thaylobleu’s debut album — called, naturally, Oscars & Jellyfish — out this week.

The record represents a turn in Nicholson’s musical career, which blossomed in the ’90s with D.C. hip-hop group Opus Akoben. The trio did well — it fetched a major-label deal in France and got love in Europe — but Opus split up, dropping its last record in 2002. Nicholson began to reevaluate himself creatively after that. He’d always loved rock music, songwriting and arranging. But he didn’t pursue them seriously until he made a key discovery: some of his hip-hop buddies were listening to rock, too.

“Back in 2010, we all found out that, ‘Hey, I didn’t know you was listening to this, I didn’t know you was into that,'” says Nicholson. He got together with hip-hop heads William “Bill” Vaughn and The Poem-Cees’ Darrell Perry and formed a rock band, rounded out by drummer Joe Hall. (Fifth member DJ Ayce International joined later on.) He called the group Thaylobleu, after Phthalocyanine Blue BN, a deep and calming shade of blue he fell in love with while attending the Corcoran School of Art.

Thaylobleu focuses on songwriting with an emphasis on lyricism — true to Nicholson’s hip-hop background. Storytelling plays a leading role, too. “Locked” tells the true tale of a nasty encounter Nicholson had with police in 2010. Another album highlight, “Too Much” describes Nicholson’s past dalliances with rowdy women. (One lyric: “When she told me that she liked it rough/Didn’t know she meant fisticuffs.”)

“I wouldn’t appreciate where I am now if it hadn’t had been for [the bad matches],” says Nicholson, who’s married these days. “So [‘Too Much’] is about acceptance, about love, and it’s also about the girl who stabbed me in the face with a spoon.” (A true story, he says. After that incident he resolved to never take a date to Ben & Jerry’s.)

The coda on Oscars & Jellyfish, “Welcome to Anacostia” references the gradually gentrifying D.C. neighborhood in which Nicholson grew up and where he still lives and works. “I call Anacostia a village, and I’m watching it get sacked,” he says. The track delivers a message to new arrivals: “Just [be] mindful that if you live next door to a person who’s lived there 30 years and they’ve been sitting on their porch and laughing with their friends for the last 30 years,” he says, “don’t f***ing call the police on them.”

Nicholson, who spends his days working at the Anacostia Arts Center and teaching martial arts, says he doesn’t like to squander his time behind the mic. He considers it a blessing. That’s what hard-driving cut “Rose in the Briars” — definitely an oscar, not a jellyfish — is about.

Some of his neighbors in Anacostia “don’t have the privilege to be able to be on the microphone and speak their truth,” Nicholson says. “So when I say [on “Rose in the Briars”] ‘I’m the village crier, I’ll make your ears ring’… it’s about how I’m in a position where I can say something and I don’t take it lightly. There was a time that I did — when I was gigging and traveling and hip-hopping and groupies and all that stuff. And I said to myself, ‘If I ever get back to this thing again,’ after Opus broke up, ‘I’m gonna try to use it.'”

Thaylobleu plays an album release show June 16 at Velvet Lounge.

The singer/guitarist and leader of D.C. rock band Thaylobleu was helping his then-fiancée (now his wife) move from an apartment near 8th and Kennedy streets NW, when he bent over on the sidewalk to clean something off his shoe. He heard tires screech.

“I never even looked up. I just said to myself, y’know, ‘that sounded like a jump-out.’ And then the footsteps were coming closer. I look up, there were two cops that ran right up on me,” Nicholson says. They grabbed him.

“They sit me on the curb, cuff me, never told me why. There was a younger cop and an older cop. The older cop couldn’t wait to tear into me … the younger cop, he just said, ‘you fit the description,’ but he never said of what.”

It turned out that Nicholson’s North Face jacket and then-long dreadlocks were enough to cause a serious case of mistaken identity. He says the officers “paraded me up and down 8th Street while at the same time waiting to get an ID for whoever it was they were looking for,” he says. Eventually they let him go.

The ordeal—specifically being cuffed without an explanation why—caused Nicholson to contact Metro Police Chief Cathy Lanier, congressional Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton and other politicians. He got responses, but no official investigation was mounted.

It all led to an anthem, though: Thaylobleu’s “Locked,” a hard-driving tune that owes its energy to Bad Brains and ’70s metal. “There goes that chicken hawk circling/With that costume jewelry,” Nicholson sings—with the officers as his inspiration—while the main guitar riff by Darrell “DP” Perry punches forward and the rhythm section of Joe Hall (drums) and William Vaughn (bass) stays—yeah—locked.

The chorus—“I got it locked locked locked locked locked!”—is a true fist-pumper, and the second verse pulls away from the original incident to offer a dire warning for society in general: “Smoke em’ if you got em’/Baby, we goin’ out like Pompeii.”

Despite the confrontational tone of the song, Nicholson—who teaches kung fu and tai chi, works in summer-camp programs and also teaches art—says education is his primary goal. At shows he gives out ACLU pamphlets that explain how to handle a situation like his 2010 episode.

“It’s not even just about black folks, and you’re mistaking yourself if you think that it is … basically, just get your mind right, and understand the times that we’re living in,” he says, “because it’s going to get worse before it gets better. If it ever gets better.”

The 1991 graduate of the Corcoran School of Art—who went by Sub-Z in one of D.C.’s first noteworthy hip-hop groups, the jazz-influenced Opus Akoben (with Kokayi and Black Indian, both still active as MCs)—says he’s reached a certain level of acceptance that D.C. has irreversibly changed from the era when U Street was a funk and hip-hop hotbed in the ’90s. (Other members of Thaylobleu are deeply connected to D.C.’s hip-hop history: Perry is one-half of the pioneering Poem-cees, and Hall and Vaughn have been musicians in the scene for years.)

Nicholson had a moment of clarity when playing the Funk Parade festival in May on a big red carpet across the street from the famous Ben’s Chili Bowl. Looking around at the new buildings, “I had to process the idea that the U Street that I knew … it’s a playground, it’s like Disney World. I feel like the developers are the winners.”

The changes are “sad,” he says, but not stifling.

“My friends, we sort of made a collective decision that if we let what U Street in particular has become get in the way of our being creative, then we’ve lost,” Nicholson says. “So the idea is, keep on playing … I use this stuff as material.”

Thaylobleu plays the Kennedy Center Millennium Stage Aug. 23.