Baths - Romaplasm
The Quietus
The capitulations of the body form the basis for every Baths record, a foreign field eternally compromised by grand massacres and little deaths. At the time of Will Wiesenfeld’s last outing, the dark heaven that was 2013’s Obsidian, his body had just begun to recover from its loudest rejection yet: a fierce bout of E. coli that left the artist barely able to eat or sleep for any length of time. That album, like Sufjan Stevens’ Age of Adz two years prior, was less a joyous celebration of new health than a post-mortem at the body’s point of failure. This was billed in interviews as Baths’ “weird version of a pop record” at the time which, even as a qualifying statement, may have been a stretch; its most urgent highlight (‘No Eyes’) found the artist pleading to be fucked, with or without sincerity. On Romaplasm, Wiesenfeld seems to have finally made something that could pass as a pop record, exuberant in both its content and execution.
Certainly its opening trio of songs could each feasibly muscle their way onto a daytime radio playlist. First single ‘Yeoman’ opens the album, its sad-brass intro quickly dissolving into a skittering, electronic love song, replete with moments of surprisingly au courant pop tropes. When the beat briefly drops out before the first chorus it’s pure bubblegum, the listener spiralling into an alternate dimension where Owl City’s Adam Young discovered Xiu Xiu and methamphetamines instead of The Postal Service. “Would you show me green,” Wiesenfeld sings, “and would you show me blue?” For the vast majority of its duration, Baths’ third album is verdant with hope.
There’s a spring clean taking place here. ‘Extrasolar’ is one the artist has taken to date, a positively wholesome reflection on “all the junk I’ve jettisoned” that appears to find Baths somewhat carefree, at least momentarily. When the album does eventually drift into shades of blue, it doesn’t feel jarring; happy or sad, Romaplasm consistently sounds more contemplative than frustrated this time out. ‘Human Bog’ is a graceful portrait of the artist reflecting on the performative elements of his own identity, and even as he sings “I’m queer in a way that’s failed me,” it feels oddly constructive. Indeed, in a year that artists like Perfume Genius have expressed an explicit desire to transcend the body, Wiesenfeld seems to have made room for small instances of joy. “I’m not a big fan of my body and I would like to leave it,” Mike Hadreas stated earlier in the year, as much in relation to his struggle with Crohn’s disease as conversations about sexuality and gender. Both artists have traditionally rallied against the body and its disappointments; both are presenting that conflict in fascinating and intelligent ways in 2017. But while No Shape deals in outright posthumanism – understandably informed by Hadreas’ more chronic physical condition – Romaplasm seeks to make truces. “I beg you, mine good ore from me,” Wiesenfeld sings on ‘Coitus’, and while the song’s sexual connotations are implicit, there’s a heartbreaking honesty in the line’s delivery: the belief in self-worth, an invocation to the possibilities of joy.
More than anything, it sounds like he’s having fun. Tracks like ‘I Form’ showcase a more impressive falsetto than usual, set to catchier melodies. The album closes on ‘Broadback’, and it’s instructive that Wiesenfeld screaming “I don’t want you to die” feels so euphoric. At this point, it barely matters whether the song – the whole record, even – was intended as an affirmation of the spirit or a eulogy for a dying friend. Its effect is overwhelmingly the former, and if we perhaps read more green into a text that is abundantly blue, the result is no less vibrant.
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Wed Dec 20 17:19:57 GMT 2017Pitchfork 79
On the latest Baths album, Will Wiesenfeld launches his beats and synths into the realm of vibrant fantasy. Of all his releases, it’s the one most rife with pure pleasure.
Mon Nov 20 06:00:00 GMT 2017Tiny Mix Tapes 70
Baths
Romaplasm
[Anticon; 2017]
Rating: 3.5/5
It’s poptimism for intelligent dance cynics. After the moribund dejection of 2013’s Obsidian, Baths’s Will Wiesenfeld turns a new leaf in the form of fidgeting virility here on Romaplasm. A record wherein the glitching dynamo transmutes his disillusionment following a ruinous bout with E. coli into eccentric exultations and plaints, Romaplasm sees Wiesenfeld embracing computer-generated ebullience while maintaining an understandably hesitant air about him.
Romaplasm teems with references to the singer’s diffidence, some more overt than others (“Often meek to the nth degree”), but Wiesenfeld’s reticence never precludes him from attaining happiness. The album’s opener “Yeoman” tracks its narrator’s mounting joy at the prospect of walking aimlessly aboard a spacecraft with its captain in an unbridled tryst akin to Sinatra’s “Fly Me to the Moon.” Even when voicing a jeremiad on “Human Bog,” in which Will airs his frustrations about compromising himself for the sake of romance (“I’m queer in a way that works for you,” “I’m queer in a way that’s failed me”), Wiesenfeld counterbalances this perturbation with the vim of follow-up track “Adam Copies:” “Become as fire, eat the woods, eat the dark and show where I stood.” For Will, lamentation often gives way to intrepidness on Romaplasm.
Highly personal, but sensationalistic by turns, Wiesenfeld’s lyrics serve as both his greatest strength and his greatest weakness. With lines like “I let the fulcrum buckle under me/ Deny my inhibitions/ And find modernity” from “Superstructure,” there’s a clear sense of indignation, but the sentiment never devolves into a maudlin whine by virtue of the double-tracked austerity in his vocals. However, on the couplet from “Coitus,” “Like a dream too wide for the brain/ I can but hold to your shoulders like the edge of a cliff,” Will drifts into sentimentality without his typically spasmodic musicianship to ground and temper his indulgency. Romaplasm relies, above all else, on the delicate enigma of an artist channeling emotions through the artificial landscape of electronic music.
The city of Rome, though often contested among etymologists, is typically agreed to have origins in the word Rumon, meaning “flowing water,” while plasma, in the field of biology, refers to the malleable liquid in which blood cells are suspended. As the portmanteau Romaplasm, the two words intimate a sense of looseness, of that which can be molded. Wiesenfeld, when recalling his early music education, expressed a distaste for the perceived rigidity of the music he was learning, yet now finds creating music digitally to be a liberating practice . In Romaplasm is a feeling of fluidity, whether on “Broadback,” whose freewheeling arrangement sees various sounds and textures entering and leaving the song, never beholden to remain or linger, or on “Abscond” whereby ethereal background vocals wantonly occupy the song, only to vacate at a moment’s notice.
Will Wiesenfeld lacks the proper sensibilities to become a bona fide pop star as Baths or either of his other sobriquets. His oft-experimental approach to electronica and his indie label affiliation place him as more of an underground hero, albeit one who’s enjoyed a prodigious amount of praise and coverage. With a sotto voce that at times leans too hard on the adenoids, Will knows better than to preen his voice for Top 40 radio. His home is with the glitch crowd. But pop star or no, Wiesenfeld, as Baths, taps into those universal feelings that makes pop music so accessible and so, well, popular.