Baths

Kind of a late review of Baths' Cerulean up at Dusted today. It's a fascinating piece of work, with elements of hip hop, pop, electronic music, but not really dead center of any of these genres. The album's been out since late summer on Anticon, and it's well worth checking out.

I said, "The tension often arises when Wiesenfeld’s lush, flowery melodies coincide with the hard abstraction of rhythm. His beats are slant-wise, not quite square, and prone to plunging forward then hitching back. They are, all by themselves, worth thinking about, at once physically compelling and off-putting. You feel like a surfer trying to stay on top of them. And even if you didn’t want to think about them, you’d have to, because they are presented at a dominant level, as if the piano or guitar is playing in a room down the hall, but the drums are right there next to you.


You view the melodies, then, as if through a barred window, catching little flurries of baroque ornamentation between massive beats."

The rest of the review is here.


"Plea" and "Maximallist" live