PREMIERE | Baywitch, 'Apocatropica'
Fun with flowers and rocking riffs on the brink of armageddon with Baywitch; press photo courtesy of the band.
End times have gone mainstream. No longer is it exclusively a construct for the manic religious sects or a beloved R.E.M. college rock classic; it's reached a new fever pitch level of ubiquity. If these recent years and continuous current events of previously unfathomable calamities have shown us anything, it feels like something that is inescapable. Practically inevitable. Not just something witnessed in a throwback b-movie flick or a dystopian cyber punk novel but more so a real and imminent reality that has descended on us like an old testament pestilence, in hand with the global civic collapse of our current era. The state of our modern condition is for our intents and purposes abysmal, while that sparkle of hope still shines through the cracks and margins of today's incessant tragedies and nonstop tribulations. For the sake of our collective mental health we have arrived at the threshold of acceptance, learning to live with the gravity of entropy while keeping our consciousness and crafts constructive and kind.
Working within all of the above concepts and more are Seattle’s own DIY surf garage vanguards Baywitch, who follow up the lauded Hellaspawn with the overdue — and delayed for obvious pandemic related reasons — with a first listen to the aptly titled Apocatropica courtesy of Halfshell Records. Lila Burns, Sicily Robinson, Jake Meierdierck and Daniel Onufer resurrect the tidal crashing chords of Dick Dale tunes past in an adaptation to mirror the madness of the world with a PNW perspective. Baywitch covers everything from the menace of gentrification, late stage capitalism, economic woes, the threats from wildfires and subsequent smoky air pollution and the ever present specter of a full scale global pandemic permeating throughout the record. With obsessions of apocalyptic fears reaching an inescapable tilt; the band soaks in the reality of a crashing tsunami like a day on the beach that feels like a soiree on the world’s jagged edge of utter oblivion (beyond the point of return to anything resembling the overused semantics of normalcy).
Welcome to Apocatropica. Consider it a resort at the pacific northwestern corner of the world where humanity as we know it rages toward the end of extinction. The flames and fog of billowing smoke rock and roar on the instrumental horror show of "Hellfog", embarking upon the parts unknown of "Netherwhirl" like entering prohibitive zones never designed for the tourist, colonial classes of arrogant interlopers. "Blunderstruck" is a ballad about those blowing it in the local scenes, as the geist of gentrification materializes like a campy 60s horror film about droves of techie scum taking over neighborhoods and districts on the humorously all too real "Pod People". The perils of economic strife and other associated ills are tackled in a sci-fi sense on "Economicon", before appropriately concluding with the rollicking, mushroom cloud riding "Doomsday" that observes the mess of everything from an objective point of view; furiously floating through the polluted skies as the earth returns to its big bang origins. Apocatropica is Baywitch's awaited return to our universe in crises that is anything but normal, the smoldering ruins of an inconvenient disaster in process that we are all forced to contend with.
Lila Burns from Baywitch provided a generous introduction to the end of days entertaining album, Apocatropica:
The songs were written a whiiiile before any plans for an album, like by a few years for some songs. Some of the songs were in our live set already when Hellaspawn was released! When Baywitch first started a lot of the songs were themed around creepy crawly Halloween classics, some as metaphors here and there but that was what tied it together, ghouls, ghosts etc. With each album the metaphors grew from more personal meanings to larger terrors, but the songs following Hellaspawn kept gravitating towards subjects that are way scarier and giant and imminent, even when the songs started out with a few b-movie characters, the real fears found their way in. Horror movies are a proxy like that too, even the silly ones, it's a way to process some real fears in a fictional space I think.
"Hellfog" is about wildfire/smoke season, specifically how the smoke just kind of hangs in the air — this song was initially written for a live-score of curated archival footage of Seattle via MIPoPS & Puget Soundtrack in 2017, an earlier version of "Pod People" was also part of that performance. "Netherwhirl" is about arrogant explorers going to or claiming places they shouldn't like the legendary Devil's Triangle or spaces that are not theirs to colonize/conquer in the first place. "Blunderstruck" is about being called out or called in, which is often so necessary in accountability, but it can be really intense and ground shaking in the process. "Pod People" is about the rapid changes to cities and neighborhoods that comes with gentrification, admittedly this song is missing a lot of nuance when discussing housing, I was reacting to seeing those apartment pods go up all around me but also the call is also coming from inside the house as it were in my own role in gentrification. "Economicon" is about capitalism and its appeals to specific fears/ideals like aging or unattainable fortune or power, which are easier to spot when it's werewolves, sirens or vampires, but more insidious in Thee Economy — there's also a little nod to the Buffy the Vampire Slayer theme song in the vampire verse, it is a song about monsters after all. "Doomsday" is about how omnipresent and near our many existential threats are perpetually, like how the doomsday clock is three quarters of a century old now but it has been at near midnight for that long — the song kind of sits in that dissonance though between the more nihilist views of those existential threats and the persistence of life and attempts at doing better in the face of those threats — I align with the latter myself, but it sure is surreal to be in that coinciding normalcy & emergency.
"Doomsday" was written the last of the songs, and with plans to record already in the works — we were thinking we had about enough songs to record an album and were trying to see how these tied together and "Doomsday" ended up being the umbrella for the other songs/themes. I was playing with a few different titles in the same realm as Moonstoners and Hellaspawn, combining words and brainstorming around the apocalypse theme, but that process also turned up a lot of weird and scary search results, like fringe group stuff, the concept of apocalypse is a popular theme and used in a lot of manipulative and gross ways so I didn't want to invoke any of that... It's like when you look up your name or something on Urban Dictionary and there's some hyper specific definition that's like really rude or slimy or worse haha. But I landed on Apocatropica (which at the time had NO search results!! it felt like a sign!) as a name for a kind of alternate universe rather than an actual apocalypse, keeping the content & subjects of the album adjacent to each other.
Baywitch live at the Southgate Roller Rink; photographed by Paige Spicer.
The album was originally going to be released in 2020, but that timeline was paused due to actual apocalyptic circumstances... Those same circumstances have persisted and escalated since then, but there's a lot of pushback to say this is fine despite our reality and I think that's the exact kind of dissonance Apocatropica exists in. This album is both a new release and a relic of 2020 grappling with that.
Baywitch’s Apocatropica will be available April 20 via Halfshell Records.