Baths

Terrible Cell Phone pic, sorry. There were fake candles all over the place.

This guy is a lot of fun. And that’s saying a lot considering I generally don’t think much of those electronic artists who might as well press the “play” button on iTunes when they perform live. Now, I’m not an idiot. I know that a lot of those artists do crazy things, mixing “tracks” with soundboards and… stuff, and I’ve seen some really sophisticated, fast-thinking music-makers get up on stage and impress the hell out of an audience, most notably at the Seattle Laptop Battle a few years ago (and DARNIT, I just realized I missed it this year — it was last night), but the fact remains that they could provide virtually the same experience by simply pre-recording the track, and then… dancing around on stage?

This is pretty much what one of the openers, Teen Daze, did. Peeling off layer after layer of ironic hipster attire a la Girl Talk (and yes, I’m talking about his clothes, this is not some weird metaphor about music), he could barely get himself enthused enough to tap a toe, and the beats he pumped out were decidedly too “chillwave” to provoke any kind of response in the audience.

Then Baths came out. First, I have to say that he is an attractive man. Becca, a girl I’m trying to impress, was, I hope, only slightly weirded out by my repeated remarks about how “I would go gay for him.” He is a little chubby, yes, but he exudes a self-confidence that allows him to reclaim that as part of his character, kind of like the Wife of Bath — haaaa, PUNS. In any case, his music is bomb: He makes kind of woozy beats with lots of falsetto, amounting to love songs tinged with electro-underpinnings. And on top of all that, it’s very pop-y and “listenable”; the experiment in genre-blurring doesn’t sacrifice the listener’s experience at all.

I first encountered Baths two summers ago when I was in LA; he got written up in the LA Weekly, and I went to a concert to investigate. I liked him enough to get his album, Cerulean, which was new at the time, but then I kind of forgot about him until Capitol Hill Block Party this last summer. Unfortunately, he was playing at the same time as TV on the Radio, so I only caught the last few songs of his set, but they were predictably dope. In retrospect, I might even have skipped TVOTR entirely to see the whole thing.

Then, a few days ago, when I heard he was coming to Seattle again (as a make-up concert for a gig he missed due to illness during Decibel Fest, apparently) and that he would be playing in the Neptune Theater — which used to be a favorite movie theater of mine, and was recently converted into a concert venue by Seattle Theater Group — I flipped shit. And, as it turns out, Baths delivered again. An all-around repeatable experience. The Neptune, by the way, was also excellent; kudos to STG for their work restoring the place.

Here are a few of his tracks:

• “Plea”
• “Indoorsy”
• “Apologetic Shoulder Blades”