{"id":65708,"date":"2025-08-13T04:41:07","date_gmt":"2025-08-13T04:41:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/65708\/"},"modified":"2025-08-13T04:41:07","modified_gmt":"2025-08-13T04:41:07","slug":"coatshek-sound-bath-album-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/65708\/","title":{"rendered":"coatshek: Sound Bath Album Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Though it does have a clammy atmosphere, Sound Bath isn\u2019t just a \u201cbathhouse album.\u201d You certainly don\u2019t have to be a Gay History major, or even promiscuous, to get down with it. Beginning with \u201cSoftest,\u201d which feels like a particularly gentle Autechre track from Incunabula<\/a>, Sound Bath highlights the gentle, welcoming side of this kind of electronic music. Like its title implies, it\u2019s relaxing, almost comforting, even when things start to get steamy. With drums circling around, but rarely hammering out, its 107 BPM beat, the LP is almost tantric in its commitment to the rhythm, and it changes positions frequently enough so it never gets stiff or hits the same spot for too long.<\/p>\n

If you want to use your imagination, though, there are plenty of bathhouse characteristics here. Reverb-soaked hi-hats spray sweat and condensation, strange sounds ring out into the darkness, and voices mutter and whisper around you. The mood changes to mirror the feeling of getting lost in the darker corners, culminating in the eerie \u201cThe Feelings,\u201d where the pitter-patter drums start to feel a little paranoid, and Cicelsky speaks directly into your ear. It\u2019s either a suave seduction or a sinister turn\u2014it\u2019s all in the eye of the beholder, or at least the bathhouser.<\/p>\n

After \u201cThe Feelings,\u201d Sound Bath takes a more expressive turn, less seedy and more euphoric. \u201cLabyrinth\u201d is a stunning dub techno track where you can concretely hear Cicelsky\u2019s guitar unfurl like wisps of smoke. A muffled rhythm floats across the soundscape like flashing lights that feel a bit too intense after a heroic huff of poppers. And the closing \u201cEternal Lovers\u201d touches on Moby levels of pathos, blanketing its skippy beat with long, sustained notes until the whole thing dissolves into a blissed-out exhale that\u2019s either the tingly aftermath of la petite mort, or just the relief of getting through something.<\/p>\n

Feelings is the key word here: Sound Bath is one of the more emotional dance music albums of the year, either because of or in spite of its origins. You can assign all kinds of skeevy, sexy feelings to it, but you can also just appreciate it as a beautifully sculpted techno record that highlights the warmth and melody of the genre at its various peaks: late-\u201980s Detroit, early \u201990s UK, mid-to-late-\u201990s Europe. It doesn\u2019t sound at all like a guy with a guitar strapped to his chest, but it does sound like someone made it with their own hands, the music moving and evolving in real time rather than looping on a screen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Though it does have a clammy atmosphere, Sound Bath isn\u2019t just a \u201cbathhouse album.\u201d You certainly don\u2019t have…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":65709,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[342,49,48,75,341,343],"class_list":["post-65708","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-albums","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-music","tag-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65708","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65708"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65708\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65709"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65708"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65708"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65708"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}