Live Review: Baths, Flamingo

You'd never have known Sunday was the last night of the Adelaide Fringe, with hundreds of punters venturing to the other side of town to see Baths at Rocket Bar.

With an infectious stage presence, local three-piece Flamingo lured stragglers from the back of the club to the dancefloor. They tested out some new material ahead of their upcoming EP release and also played a few crowd favourites: tropical number, Laissez-faire and the triple j-endorsed Heart, My.

Up next: Baths. The LA producer played Rocket Bar in late 2012 and made a solid impression with the way he handled the technicality of his show on his own. Since then, Baths (moniker of Will Wiesenfeld) has released Obsidian, a record much darker than his first, 2010's Cerulean. He's also enlisted beatmaker Morgan Greenwood (formerly of Azeda Booth) to man most of the mixing in the live shows.

Listening to a Baths record is nothing like listening to it played live, described by a nearby punter as “fucking intense”. For one thing, there was the bass, which bellowed throughout the club, making drink surfaces tremble à la Jurassic Park. For another, there was Wiesenfeld's singing: Freddie-Mercury-high notes one minute, gutturally screaming the next. Every so often, he used the reverb to tweak his vocals into a persisting dissonance.

But the gig wasn't all noise. Accompanied only by his keyboard, Weisenfeld sung an emotive ballad to an enthralled crowd. When it's over, we waited patiently for him to start up again. The lack of applause startled him for a moment. “This is the best kind of crowd… You're attentive, but you're also quiet,” he remarked.

Highlights of the show included a beautiful rendition of Lovely Bloodflow, off Cerulean, Wiesenfeld professing his love for Australian men.