Album Review: Romaplasm by Baths

When Will Wiesenfeld announced that he had recorded the theme song to a game called "Dream Daddy"--a gay-dad dating simulator where "you play as a Dad and your goal is to meet and romance other hot Dads"--he repaired a curious schism that had lingered between the music he made as Baths and the persona he'd cultivated on platforms like Twitter and Vine. Looking back, the 2013 album Obsidian scans almost shockingly dark. There are songs about suicidal ideation, existential worry, and failed relationships in there, told in desaturated realism over intricate matrices of beats and synths.

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It's been four years since Baths released his last LP, Obsidian (2013), and it seems that in the meantime he's spent some time reflecting on where his heart truly lies. Never as emotional as when he's "neck deep in anime, video games, books or comics", Baths took his passion for fantastic realities and built Romaplasm around it. World-building has formed a part of every Baths LP to date; in 2010's Cerulean, those worlds were built from layers of fragmented or found audio that gently coalesced around melodies to form tracks that transport you to another space or time.

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Romaplasm teems with references to the singer’s diffidence, some more overt than others (“Often meek to the nth degree”), but Wiesenfeld’s reticence never precludes him from attaining happiness. The album’s opener “Yeoman” tracks its narrator’s mounting joy at the prospect of walking aimlessly aboard a spacecraft with its captain in an unbridled tryst akin to Sinatra’s “Fly Me to the Moon. ” Even when voicing a jeremiad on “Human Bog,” in which Will airs his frustrations about compromising himself for the sake of romance (“I’m queer in a way that works for you,” “I’m queer in a way that’s failed me”), Wiesenfeld counterbalances this perturbation with the vim of follow-up track “Adam Copies:” “Become as fire, eat the woods, eat the dark and show where I stood.

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