Baths
Pop Music False B-Sides

THE REVIEW

Grotesque extremization of limbo, with its little specters praying for a thread of light, in an evanescent and permeating darkness. Butterfly-like slashes of apneas and crystal embolisms. Rising too quickly from the abyss of an immense ocean, while elsewhere apocalypse is impending. 

It's a journey, that of the Baths, which evokes eroding glaciers, barely hinted aurora borealis, but with blinding colors, suicidal sunsets stained with the blood of twilight. A simple journey, without much pretense, yet devastating. Gentle and twisted electronics, almost imperfect, almost in reverse that awakens the intimate wandering desires of those who listen. Like an avant-garde film understandable to all, like a porn without sex, like a child's gaze seeing the world for the first time.

It is a conciliatory chase of small beats and timid voices, whispering modestly, yet with the desire to be aggressive, to attack and dismember. A song like "Lovesick Synthetic" becomes wonderfully indelible, even though it may initially seem like a filler. It is the miracle of music: even when simple, even when banal, it can unleash unstoppable rivers. Ophelia and her last orgasm.

And then there's "Seaside Town", an apparently useless song, but it stands as the perfect balance between dream pop and witch-house, evoking a childhood trauma that never happened. Running under hail, approaching storms. It is the stage spectacle of a torn curtain. It is the vertex of nothingness, the drowning seabed. "Somerset", in its continuous and infallible chase of voices, whispers epitaphs in the void, brands the flesh with fire. 

It is intangible music, that of the Baths, capable of unleashing apocalyptic daydreams that erase the surrounding world. A crystalline journey, useless to describe because it must be lived. Let yourself be carried away. Wildly, but silently. Without destination.