Obsidian - Baths Review

I don’t think there’s a greater discrepancy than between Will Wiesenfeld’s personality on Twitter and his character as Baths. As the former he comes across as an overtly excited, sheltered Anime fanboy, his vocabulary consisting of ‘OOOOO’s, ‘AARRRGGGHHHHH’s and ‘OMFG!’s; as the latter he is a deeply expressive, divinely talented and wholly conflicting poet, capable of crafting the most stunningly beautiful discourse as well as the most horrifically vivid introspections on morbid paranoia and carnal obsession. Even within his work Wiesenfeld exhibits a stark contrast in his disposition, the transcendent, romanticist aesthete, ‘I still smell you, distance aside’ / ‘in Victorian doorways, in tempestuous foreplay,’ plunges into uninhibitedly sexual, brutalised rhetoric, ‘nurse this erection back to full health’/ ‘this isn’t a matter of “if you mean it”, it’s only a matter of “come and fuck me”’. A dissociative personality disorder within a dissociative personality disorder if you will; Ian Cohen acutely describes Obsidian as Cerulean’s (Wiesenfeld’s debut) ‘evil twin.’

Obsidian’s Baths understandably represents Wiesenfeld’s Mr Hyde given the context of what happened to him last year, when he suffered E. coli. That first brush with his mortality provides him with a sensitive cognizance of omnipresent decay; he sees death lurking in the quaintest of objects and delights in exposing man’s deluded fallacies, faith and hope, ‘where is God now that you hate him the most?’ Wiesenfeld is a satyriasis-suffering, nihilistic misanthrope, unable and unwilling to readjust to the banal structure of his life prior to his disease. Obsidian is a forlornly bleak window into the tormented soul of a man stuck in a form of eternal purgatory; an indefatigable, unrelenting apathy.

Lyrically, he’s magnificent. His ferocious, obscure, at times impenetrable, notes on the fragility of human nature is reminiscent of Thom Yorke, his satirical analyses of the absurd rigidity of contemporary social protocols, James Murphy, his elegiac, subtle observations of emotional behaviour, Mike Hadreas or Joanna Newsom. He is concurrently a sociopathically malicious messianic saviour of mankind, unravelling the reality of our moral debauchery for our own good, and also a bitterly self-conscious philosopher, utterly horrified with the role entrusted to him. In ‘Worsening’ he delivers one of my all-time favourite couplets; ‘when the mouths in the earth come to bite at my robes/at the cold, the lifeless, the worsening souls.’  He comments that ‘I was never poetic.’ You lie, Will. You are poetic, and your poetry is perversely gorgeous.

Interestingly, Wiesenfeld’s vocals haven’t changed in the slightest since Cerulean, but they’re utilised astonishingly effectively given the disparities in subject matter. His voice’s trembling, crackling instability perfectly accentuates his self-portrait of perpetual inner turmoil. The ‘OOOOO’s and ‘AARRRGGGHHHHH’s translate from his Twitter persona, but they’re terrifying, haunting, eroding, broken.

Musically, Obsidian is a warped collaboration between Burial, Zomby, Grimes and Hot Chip; tap-tap, minimalist pop with heavy dubstep influences. It’s intensely atmospheric, soothing violins playing over samples of what sounds like snapping fireplaces. ‘Ossuary’ is probably the most mainstream track, constructed with synths and a more traditional song structure, while ‘Earth Death’ is bombastically house, the exhaustively loud percussion almost, but not quite, drowning out Wiesenfeld’s furious rantings.

Having listened to Obsidian at least ten times now, I’ve concluded that it’s probably my all-time favourite album lyrically. Its poetry is simultaneously soul-enrichingly beautiful, opulent with heavenly imagery, and candidly, unreservedly malevolent. Obsidian is really the long-lost love child of Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath, a delectably enticing prospect for myself, if no one else.

It’s my favourite album of the year so far; an unmitigated, headfucking, dazzling masterpiece. Embrace it.