Baths

For anyone who’s seen Passion Pit or post-Strawberry Jam Animal Collective and thought, “That could all be accomplished by one dude,” the Los Angeles-based Baths registers a resounding, “Yes, it could—and it could sound way more artful than ‘Sleepyhead.’” An out-of-the-bedroom project of falsetto-voiced, 22-year-old beatmaker Will Wiesenfeld, Baths traffics in a glistening, glitchy psychedelia, fortified with the low kicks and hard bops ping-ponging between Wiesenfeld’s sampler and MacBook. Simultaneously intimate and ceiling-bustingly huge, Cerulean—Wiesenfeld’s Anticon debut—marks an engaging turn for contemporary solo electronic acts, a place where hearts and hooks need not be stunted by lack of production values or manufactured cassette-tape aesthetic. He skews more toward real instruments on September’s Cerulean follow-up, Pop Music/False B-Sides, less of an album than a mixtape made entirely of a single artist.

Updated 11/15/2011