Los Angeles' Strides

L.A., at least according to certain pop cultural dictums held up and reinforced by decades of musico-imperial gasconading artists and heavyweights, is always in some weird, extant-non-extant insurrection against New York City for who has the better music scene, and it's an odd little bataille, now fought with subzero pretensions, deeper-by-the-month v-necks, and testicle-obliterating jeans.  In reality, it's probably not really there, but at least the illusion of it is. San Francisco, for its part, doesn't seem to care much either way where it fits into the whole scheme. Recently, though, L.A. has seen quite an escalation in not just good local music but fantastic local music which is getting a lot of the attention it rightly deserves (Local Natives [on freaking NPR], Flying Lotus, Active Child, HEALTH, Ariel Pink and his freak show of awesomeness, Fool's Good, to name a few, not even to mention No Age or Liars, whom I would argue, Liars that is, doesn't count for any one particular city and instead resides on a bizarre and vital portal of existence all their own). And unlike a lot of the stuff coming out of New York (read: Brooklyn) L.A.'s music tends, at least to me, to arrive in your ear buds with a little more sonic and tonal and, cutting-down-to-the-bones of matters, stylistic variance. This might have something to do with the demographical and architectural designs of these two cities--New York being denser than a slab of lead and Los Angeles sprawling for miles; so you've got one as this tightly-wound incubator where not rubbing shoulders is a spatial impossibility and the other where vanishing off into your own little world is easily done. Baths is the at-this-time one man project of Will Wiesenfeld, who was in San Francisco about two months ago and dropped into the Lower Haight's Robotspeak to give this in-store performance of "Apologetic Shoulder Blades" and "Plea". First thing you notice is the guy's wicked metacarpal sorcery. Then you notice that the songs are pretty great, and Will's voice, which I personally love, for its almost unbridled childlike strain. Wild, dazzling stuff. An analogous behavior to the music: slow motion diving into a warm, bottomless lake in which you don't need gills to breathe. He's got a record, Cerulean, coming out later this month on Anticon, which you should definitely pick up.