Gut (by Baths), Longing, and Queer Ennui
Gut was medicinal though a brutal spring. My health was at its worst in my life, my family was undergoing tragedy after unfortunate development after tragedy, and I was stuck in a dorm with two varsity baseball boys on a college campus I'd started to hate. The list of bullshit weighing on me went on. None of it was interesting or novel. I was tired. I was saving all my remaining fight for when I most needed it, restoring myself where and whenever I possibly could. It was a fuck of a disconnect from my previous year in which I lived on my own for the first time, started using my name for the first time, and felt like a grown human for the first time. First tastes to make the subsequent absence all the more tiring. I felt like I'd witnessed who I was, loved them, and then (temporarily) lost them.
Gut saw my angst, my exhaustion, my wild disorientation, and made it a poppy anthem.
Will Wiesenfeld (who composed, produced, and sang the album under the alias Baths) writes hooks meant to be screamed or crooned. The faggotry and vulnerability of the album gives it a deep edge, too sharp for most straggots in my life. Just sharp enough to hook straight through my skin and into my flesh. Unloved flesh. Longing flesh. Gut longed too. Or, rather, a few specific songs longed too. The album is rather hit or miss, even when the spirit (of faggotry and vulnerability) shines across every track. Sea of Men, Eden, and Governed were anthems to restore my flagging soul. There's other tracks I like, like Chaos & Homosexuals, but the prev mentioned 3 stand in my mind in place of the whole. The rest sorta fail to stir anything in me, mostly due to a combination of less evocative writing and somewhat boring production. Synth-y pop anthem-type beats ride a thin line between empowering and trite.
That being said, my lack of feeling for half the album does little to undercut my feelings for the standouts.
Sea of Men is fresh and bouncy with an optimistic undercurrent that arrives and fades with impeccable timing. The strings are haunting and empathetic, the percussion lends incredible momentum, the keys are joyous. The song lands for me as a hopeful prayer: "And everybody's on their knees." Before the good lord of good dick. After the coupling ends and the longing sets back in. The desire hurts. The lack hurts. Sometimes I wish it would leave altogether, but then it roars back again. An awful volume. An awful stink. Tumbling, bouncing ever forward. And so it goes in me, so it goes in everybody else too. We're all on our knees, in longing, in lust, in lack. Altogether in life.
Eden. Relief to the longing. The moment between the before and the after. Double entendres and overt lust abound, faggots forever. "Slip into my ellipses" is a truly brilliant invitation to sensuality. The beat rolls and rolls, lively and dynamic, only relenting for the dreamlike, aftercare strings. Oh Eden.
Governed. One of my favorite songs of the year. All my longing, all my angst, all my exhaustion: crystalized in 5 hypnotic minutes. I will die waiting. I will die governed. This love that begs to erupt from my chest. That sears and boils my insides into mush every day it goes bottled. This self that I smother. How brilliantly it shines. How brilliantly it shines. I will croon this song until my lips freeze, until my last breath escapes my shell. My voice carries evidence that something beautiful was here. The synths maintain the boil. The percussion shapes the mush back into organs and bones. I will burn however long it takes to finally, once again spill.
To conclude. One of my best friends and I connected over this album at the start of this year. In his words, Gut is "what i see as a rarer work of queer ennui." It, for both him and I, crystalized the passing sorrow that so often haunts queer sexuality. It spoke to me specifically in its loneliness. In the feeling of disconnect Will expresses across the album from queer community, lovers, and friends. Social media and the internet show me queerness constantly, but I rarely feel connected to/in community with any of what I see. I connected to this album. Gut made my loneliness and longing and hope feel seen, and commiserated.