Album Review: Baths - Obsidian

In No Eyes, the sixth track on Baths' sophomore record Obsidian, Will Wiesenfeld whines “It is only a matter of/Come and fuck me/And it is not a matter of/If you love it”, which is kind of a conundrum. Swearing in a song when that swearer is a gangly 23-year-old dude is really hard to pull off without sounding like you are trying way too hard, especially when you're swearing and petitioning someone to fuck you without loving you, a process wherein the appearance of trying too hard is presumably toxic to your ambition of getting fucked.

Digression aside, Obsidian sounds like Wiesenfeld crying while drunk and half-submerged in a bathtub of cold water, but he actually makes it sounds sexy. The 24-year-old's had a hard time of it – on top of the alienating process of becoming a super-internet-famous-hype-act (which in itself is a brutal emotional levy) he almost died from an E. Coli infection last year, and god only knows how he translated that experience into songwriting material. The nauseating drone of synthesiser and lugubrious mid-tempo beats is pregnant with pathos – opener Worsening sets a gloomy pace, Miasma Sky sounds exactly like what its title proposes, Phaedra is immersive and compelling. Obsidian is haunting, sprawling, and really well produced – it's been a boring year for Wiesenfeld's particular hybrid of electronica and alt-rock, a genre that was waxing full barely two years ago. Baths has been compared to Neon Indian and lazily classed as chillwave, but the act's true ancestor is probably sprung from '90s alt-darlings Placebo's monsoonal sexual frustration. It's not a matter of if you love it, but to finish Baths' sentence – “This isn't the adulthood I thought I wrote”.