When Will Wiesenfeld recorded a Daytrotter session under his Baths moniker earlier this year, he chose to include three piano ballads in his four-song set. There's a certain logic at work there, considering the emotionally charged material on his debut full-length, Cerulean, from last year, but it's still not a move that most beat-obsessed bedroom producers would have the balls to try out. Wiesenfeld's post-Cerulean career has partially been shaped by a series of left turns, whether it's through his desire to work in piano balladry and on his more passive Geotic project, or in his affable banter with audiences during his live shows. During the Pitchfork Music Festival in July, he seemed to spend most of his non-stage time wandering among the crowds with his shirt off. Wiesenfeld clearly doesn't care to be bracketed, either personally or professionally, and Pop Music / False B-Sides is his latest attempt to crush all those competing sides of his personality into song.
What's most impressive about Baths is how that all-embracing approach never devolves into sloppiness or identity loss. Wiesenfeld is always careful to string recognizable, Baths-like traits through his sound so that the listener never comes completely unshackled from his world. Sometimes it's through those stringy beats that he's so adept at constructing ("Seaside Town"); at others it's when he drenches a song in bathos via a few twists of his immaculate falsetto ("Iniuria Palace"). Frequently both of those elements are deployed, such as on the standout "Pop Song". This isn't supposed to be a proper follow-up to Cerulean-- it's a collection of tracks Wiesenfeld has worked on since that album was released, originally made available to fans who attended a tour from earlier this year-- which illustrates the strength in depth he has at his fingertips when something as appealingly frail as "Pop Song" is buried here.
If this is an indication of where Wiesenfeld is heading, it feels like a spot somewhere between Geotic and Baths, with a greater emphasis on traditional instrumentation. Strangely, it's often reminiscent of work by artists who have walked backwards into the electronic world and assimilated some of its elements after wringing all the inspiration out of the guitar-bass-drums format. "Somerset", for instance, skews close to the kind of dolorous studio experimentation Blur were tooling around with on 13, all tied to a looping, post-rock bassline that could have been uprooted from Tortoise's Millions Now Living Will Never Die. That material points to Baths' future, although there are still a few ties to the Cerulean comfort zone (on the jumpy "Seaside Town" and the fuzzed-out "Damnation") that make Pop Music / False B-Sides feel like a passing of the baton from old to new.
That could be how this album is viewed in the Baths' discography in future years, depending on where Wiesenfeld heads next, which is another testament to his sequencing skills. There are no huge stylistic leaps here, just a subtle testing ground laid out so new ideas can be unwrapped and worked into the sound. It's clear that Wiesenfeld has progressed as a lyricist too, with tracks like "Nordic Laurel" and "Iniuria Palace" easily among the best song-oriented works he's produced. There are occasional misfires, particularly when Wiesenfeld channels his inner Robert Smith on "Tatami", but in the context of this release he can be cut a little more slack than if this were Baths' actual second album. For most of this record, he's still wrapped up in those sci-fi lullabies that made his name, while also gently prodding his surprisingly malleable aesthetic into welcome new territories.
