Obsidian
Baths
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"I might walk upright, but then again, I might still try to die," Will Wiesenfeld whispers on "Worsening," the opening track on Obsidian, his second album recording as Baths.He bemoans against eerie broken glass electro beats cutting into the pillowy softness of his voice: "Where is God when you hate him most? When the mouths in the Earth come to bite at my robes?"
The first track is an announcement that this album explores the depths of a human heart nearly devoid of the will to live. It's a major departure from his critically acclaimed debut album Cerulean, which paired sandy synth dance tracks and minimalist vocals with cheery experimental noise.
This time around, the songs are full of Wiesenfeld's R&B falsetto with a bigger emphasis on storytelling. And though the songs did indeed come from a dark place—a serious bout with E. coli that laid the singer up for months—Wiesenfeld explains on his Soundcloud page that Obsidian was nothing more than a vacation into that depression.
"The songs and lyrics all came out of a pretty fucked and arduous process of trial and error," Baths says. "But I hope people understand that I'm not the depressed, suicidal and death-obsessed person the record may paint me as being. These are just darker areas that I wanted to explore."
While Obsidian definitely flirts with succumbing to morose emotion, on songs like "No Eyes" and "Inter" just enough of Wiesenfeld's sanguine creativity bleeds into the grating beats to keep the album just above the surface of unfettered agony. Think of it as bungee jumping into a gloomy pit and being snapped back to happiness just before impact. SW
