Cerulean
Rating: 4.5/5.0
Label: Anticon
The world of the bedroom electronic artist just seems to be getting harder and harder these days. While it’s true that advances in recording technology have allowed works produced on a thin budget to sound lush and full with an almost infinite amount of possibility, it’s also opened the doors to waves and waves of pretenders; mastery of Ableton does not an artist make. But there is a sly benefit to this steadily growing pond: the true geniuses are getting craftier and craftier. Like his Anticon peer Dosh, Baths falls clearly in this category, having developed a sound that is a unique distillation of his myriad talents and endeavors on Cerulean, full of crackling, glitchy beats and worlds of vocal samples that showcase a talent behind the laptop that not just any amateur could achieve, no matter how many late-night hours one might log.
Similar to Dosh, Baths has a background that isn’t all 808s and Kaos pads, instead featuring origins in the folk circuit. The folk roots are subtle but necessary to Cerulean’s achievements, allowing Baths to utilize a knack for structure that even some of the best electronic acts lack. Baths’ skills lie in making the artificial sound real, wielding samples much the same way the Books do at their best, decorating edges and imparting a degree of antiquity and fuss to tracks that might otherwise be a little too clean. What Baths could be after is a mood, a whole emotional experience to enhance the audio one- chillwave with a heart instead of an overly nostalgic brain, IDM with a sense of wonder rather than intense isolation.
You could separate Cerulean into a few stellar tracks but to do so would be to miss out on the true experience, like catching a movie scene out of context or hearing a quote without background. Key track “Lovely Bloodflow” emphasizes this, coming as it does on the heels of opening salvo “Apologetic Shoulder Blades,” an almost ambient intro to the album as a whole that builds a tension that “Lovely Bloodflow” relieves beautifully. “Lovely Bloodflow” may be the key to the formula of Cerulean, an incredibly strong and resonant song that feels like an embrace, its wordless background cooing gently moving the song forward before Baths’ Justin Timberlake-meets-Joanna Newsom main vocal arrives.
Curiously, Cerulean is the rare progressive album that is incredibly user friendly, its advanced dissection of electronic and pop music tropes as digestible as they are heady. The rhythms that Baths crafts are often complicated and unpredictable, stopping and starting at random but they somehow feel just right. Equally odd are Baths’ vocal choices, his melodies almost ghost-like and his words nearly always indecipherable- yet they work. “Hall” is an especially effective example, with its pitch-shifted backing vocals stacked so high and full that it’s almost impossible to figure out what’s human and what’s synthesized. The beat of “Hall” handily pushes it all forward, giving the song a sense of urgency that is a clear contrast to the relaxed state of the vocals.
This is pop music, almost always filled with secret hooks and catchy elements, but it’s cerebral too, as much of a tonic for your mind as it is your hips. There’s even handclaps and a danceclub bassline on “You’re My Excuse to Travel,” a track that also finds Baths one-upping Passion Pit at their own game. Even Baths’ weaker moments work in favor of the album’s emotional navigation, with late album entry “Rain Smell” turning lo-fi hiss and a barely-there clackety beat into the morning-after juxtaposition of the afterhours theme that “Excuse” is.
As flooded as the market may have become, Baths gives clear justification for the relevancy of the confessional electronic artist. Cerulean is easily one of the more innovative, exciting works of the year and its mastery of emotional cues and classic song structures should assure its crossover potential even as it makes its case as an advanced work.
by Morgan Davis
