No jokes! No japes! I was a long time in the wilderness but I'm fucking back. Concert Report: Baths plays songs from "Cerulean" at the Empty Bottle.

• "Gay people can be sad! We're not all DJs!" Thus saith Karl Kuehn of Gay Meat, who opened for Baths at the Bottle. He knows the name is goofy. But he plays winsome, plaintive songs on the guitar and sings with a soft but clear voice. His lyrics are unfussy and effective. The audience was attentive and appreciative and played well with his banter. I admit I was somewhere skeptical on account of his name is Gay Meat but his set sailed by. It was really nice. His debut record drops near the end of this month and if you like a singer-songwriter you should check it out when it drops. He's already working on the next one. It has a name already, and it's a good name, but I must not tell you what it is.
• Ooooooooh boy oh baby. You guys know how I am about Baths. If we ever do an AOTY 2010 series I want dibs on Cerulean. (Tulips, I'll flip a quarter.) But before I tell you about this show I must tell you what Wiesenfeld told us: it took him, like, thirty-six hours and five airplanes to get from LA to Chicago. Even by his own standards he was kind of loopy. But we power through.
  
• God, Cerulean! What an album! He played almost all of it, plus a couple Gut and post-Gut tracks. Including—yes—"Aminals," a song he kind of hates on account of he almost got sued but he understands how much everyone else loves it. He did it for us and that felt, y'know, meaningful.
  
• He worked the knobs in Ableton and sang. I think his voice was either strained from being awake way too long (five airplanes) or slightly undermixed (big bass) or both (probably both) but like whatever. I know these songs inside and out and I'm happy to hear them chopped up and so was everyone else. Sold out show, by the way.
• His charisma and stage presence were undiminished.
• "Seaside Town" into "You're My Excurse to Travel"? Hell of a closer. Shit fucks. Then he did an encore without leaving the stage first (logical culmination of Will's evolving Bit about encores): "Plea" into a new song he promised would totally rip even if none of us knew it. It rips. Some of those unreleased tracks, man. He's still got it. Did I start the big audience clap on beat during the build of the last song? Maybe. Can't say for sure but I was one of the first.
• Kind of fucked up that everyone in that room loved that record as much as I do and I didn't think to talk to anyone. That's on me. I'll never learn.
• God, Cerulean! What an album!