After letting the water run for eight years, Baths, led by Will Wiesenfeld, is finally ready to submerge in his comeback album Gut. The bathroom has flooded, the floors are wet, and the mirror is steamy. In Wiesenfeld’s words, Gut is “Relentless, Base, and Boorish.” Each track is a shock to the system—tantalizing, tingly, grounded, and unleashing.
While making Gut, Wiesenfeld took hold of a new vantage point. Wiesenfeld described his creative process as, “...trying to make my feelings make sense by not initially psychoanalyzing them–by instead just having feelings said and put on the table.” His Gut(s) are in the listener's hands. The album is equally vulnerable and defensive, with a guttural yell of “Why would I trust you,” in the track “American Mythos” in complete opposition to the pleading of a listening ear in “Eyewall.” That’s what makes this album interesting and exciting. There’s a steady contradiction tying the album up into a perfect bow.
For the lovers of Baths’ records, there’s still the nostalgia that you’ll be craving, it’s just cutting deeper now.
“I don't think the themes [of the record] became different than what I had intended, it was more the depth of them that was kind of surprising. The fact that I sort of wanted to keep talking about them, that I still had things to say about like sex and loneliness and whatever else, that the well was as deep as it was, that, and that I wasn't bored yet! I still had a ton of things to say. It made the whole process more exciting, that they were kind of automatically linked because of this infinite resource of inspiration.”
After eight years since his last album, Wiesenfeld is most of all just excited. Baths is self-releasing the album, which made him feel “the most involved with the entire process of putting out a record that I’ve ever had.” One of Wiesenfeld’s highlights of Gut’s creation was working with the artist Heyshiro Matsuoka for the album’s cover art. It’s a portrait of Wiesenfeld in a video game-esque style. His glasses are melting, and his face is in an in-between feeling of euphoria, topped off with a sparkle in his eye. Wiesenfeld described Matsuoka’s art as being the “...perfect mirror to the nature of the record I had in my head…still makes me emotional to think about.”
When I listened to Gut for the first time, I thought of it as an auditory art piece. It leaves you thinking, coming back around to hear it and interact with the work again. This thought came to me tenfold when I watched the music video for “Sea of Men.” When emailing Wiesenfeld I found out I was sort of right with the whole art gallery motif. The music video “was shot in a gallery space we had to rent haha,” Wiesenfeld replied. He wanted the band and the people to be a seamless but disjointed subject. He explained, “I wanted a performance video that felt really unadulterated…so that there's more of a focus on the people and not so much on camera work or the environment.” Baths as a “band” are all dressed in black, like stagehands turned rockstars. But, his main goal with this idea was “Trying to pull off making myself every band member in the band. Kind of stark, so that the presentation of the sort of “band” sound that exists on the record kind of immediately makes sense,” Wiesenfeld explained. His idea came together perfectly, to the point I had to go back and realize the drummer was him too.
This “band” sound that Wiesenfeld described is present in multiple tracks, but the bands seem to be switching members and genres the whole time. “Sea of Men” has an experimental indie pop vibe, while “Chaos” is electronic and dancey. “I'm just trying to work in service to an emotion and sometimes that starts with lyrics, sometimes it's a sonic set of things that I'm working towards, but whatever it is, it's kind of like atmosphere is the major goal. I want the atmosphere and the sort of world-building of that song to make sense within itself,” Wiesenfeld explained. These mini worlds and different spaces you go through as a listener are grounded in this “relentless” stream that Baths was scooping from. It doesn’t matter what “band” or sound Wiesenfeld pulls out of his hat, Wiesenfeld’s voice scratches your skin leaving you with goosebumps and thoughts swirling while trying your best to dance it out.
Gut is a never ending story that you can jump around or breeze right through. It’s wide open, unleashed energy takes the listener's hand and pulls you right in it. Wiesenfeld is in a confident, cheeky, and deliberate frenzy that will leave you spinning around for more.
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