Concert Review: Baths @ Fairmount Theatre, April 14, 2018

The dim lit glow of neon signs and colourful lights at Theatre Fairmount encapsulated the night of Baths’ concert—beginning with the delicate soloist Sasami, following with a smooth but rugged commotion from No Joy, and concluding the stroke of midnight through the voltaic, emotive harmonies of Baths. Each act brought to the stage a unique sound that the theatre would be foolish to forget.

To begin the night, Sasami Ashworth, a former member of the band Cherry Glazerr, swooned the buzzing crowd with her warming aura of the reds of her guitar and flowing robe. Travelling all the way from Los Angeles, California to melt the snow off the crowd’s shoulders, her soft guitar strumming fluctuated between light picking and head banging intensities that paired profoundly with the lyricism, encapsulating a variety of themes from her hometown to making love. Using her hefty brown boots to operate a floor keyboard for an array of drum pads, she joked to the crowd, “pretend there is a band behind me.”

The show then blossomed into a further engagement of exhilarating guitars with Montreal-based band No Joy. The band characterized the epitome of keeping the shoegaze genre alive in this scene, while supporting Baths for half of his tour. Though the band had no words between songs for the crowd, the vocalist, Jasmine White-Gluz, spoke volumes with her low booming voice amongst the feedback of vibration. Though the presence of the two frontwomen dominating the stage was nothing less than empowering, the light still shone on drummer Casey Weissbuch, who rumbled the stage and tied off the breathtaking ruckus.

With a now swarming crowd, Baths’ Will Wiesenfeld boarded the stage with Calgary-born companion, Morgan, on the synths. His new album, Romaplasm, was released in November of 2017, which draws upon the elegant queerness and digitalized buoyancy of his musical persona. Beginning with a new track, “Yeoman”, punctuates the lively dynamic of the new album, along with the lyricism of a celestial voyage. His movements were effortlessly sinuous as he jerked around the stage to the zealous beats that you may hear at the start screen of a video game. A climactic grace fell upon the stage as the lights faded to blue and Will merged into another new track, “Human Bog”. Heavy-hearted lyrics, “I’m queer in a way that works for you,” formulated the raw, heartache of LGBTQ+ relationships that often this demographic of youth face.

Computerized modulations bouncing back and forth between Morgan and Will, as their voices danced intermediately through songs such as “Extrasolar”, “Out”, and an older tune, “Plea”, from Baths’ first album, Cerulean. To charm the crowd with a finale of a two-song encore, Baths performed “Flux”, an ode to the glowing glory of coming out of the closet, along with the concluding song from his new album, “Broadback”. This last performance exquisitely mimicked the entire show with the fluctuation of how each track, each chorus and unique sound, builds into something whole. A wholly unique experience that pumped the blood to the beat of each fan’s heart.