Given the beguiling but consistently jaw-dropping roster the Anticon record label has assembled over the past couple of years, it is tempting to try to figure out where Will Wiesenfeld’s warped electronic compositions fall in with the collective’s hodge-podge mix of left-field hip hop and avant-pop. Released under the Baths moniker, Wiesenfeld’s Anticon debut signals towards the compositional complexity of Martin Dosh, the undertones of Brandon Whitney’s sputtering, cracked beats, and the colossal wallop of Jeff Logan’s improvised, and often chest-crushing, low-end. If these names mean nothing to you that is fine, but it was only a few years ago you couldn’t mention an artist on the Anticon label without somehow acknowledging the incestuous level of collaboration that went on within the core of the roster. The latest release by Baths, while full of odes to the Anticon of the past, is a bold step for a ceaselessly genre-defying record label and an audacious, inspired debut for a young beat-maker.

Baths, like his real world namesake, is easy to slip into, but ridiculously hard to get out of. I have overplayed this record, overplayed it to death, but I still don’t want to give it up. I have been trying to figure why this is. Personally, Baths simultaneously hits all of my auditory pleasure spots: chopped up electro-acoustic arrangements, massive beats, left-field vocal samples, and an impossibly high falsetto voice. It is as if Gold Panda, Passion Pit, and Daedelus are all performing as a supergroup. I can understand if this doesn’t generate the same level of unabashed gushing, but there is something undefined about Cerulean that erases any sort of subjectivity on the part of the listener. The unrestrained joy, intricately crafted hooks, and playful experimentation assure similar returns across the board. Listen to this record, you will feel happy, wistful, nostalgic, confident. Your head will bob. You really won’t have a choice in the matter.

Cerulean is one of those records that makes you feel like you have wasted your life when you find out that Wiesenfeld is only 21. The record, while representing a legion of different voices, is a solid and mature vision sutured by a few elements that Wiesenfeld has mastered. First and foremost, Baths is a beat maker. He reigns in the propensity to let auxiliary instrumentation and formless segues wreak havoc on his airtight beats by never straying too far out of a lock-step, definable beat pattern as a sturdy backbone. Baths’ use of sampled acoustic guitars, organic, household sounds, and piano lines often fall a half-step behind the propulsive beat, deepening the texture, but they always support and lend to the musical superstructure.

Coming in half-way through the album, “Hall” starts out as a delightfully twisted, lo-fi freak-folk strummer before being edited percussively into the rhythm and time signature of the beat. If we can compare Baths to recent Chillwave artists such as Toro y Moi and Boyfruit we can do so favorably in terms of Wiesenfeld’s use of non-percussive rhythmic elements to augment his beats with which he creates a disorienting underwater headphone trip. Pretty amazing stuff.

The surprisingly stronger second half of the album utilizes Wiesenfeld’s multi-tracked falsetto in the fantastic pop songs “Plea” and “You’re My Excuse to Travel” while brooding over the somber, hiccupping “Rain Smell”. The human voice is never absent, either as another instrument or the songs main vehicle. Wiesenfeld’s’ voice packs an emotional weight, whether pushed to the brink of human hearing with an inhuman falsetto, mumbled into a microphone much too close to his mouth, or buried under a landslide of filters and tracked infinitely, it never goes unnoticed.

In a way it makes sense Cerulean was released on Anticon. The label’s ideals are still set on exploring the amorphous black space between pop and all of its derivations. Cerulean’s influences are spread across a vast musical landscape and are repackaged in an album full of candor, humor, and outright virtuosity that belie its authors age and experience.

Track List:
1. Apologetic Shoulder Blades
2. Lovely Bloodflow
3. Maximalist
4. <3
5. Animals
6. Rafting Starlit Everglades
7. Hall
8. You’re My Excuse to Travel
9. Rain Smell
10. Indoorsy
11. Plea
12. Departure