Basements Best: ​“1st Bath” a baptism in the name of pop music

For a debut album, Avid Dancer’s “1st Bath” plays more like a confident string of hits from a “best of” collection than a document of a young musician searching for his voice. Brimming with nods to pop from every crevice of the previous half-century, Jacob Summers’ project is the sonic equivalent of a kid in a candy shop, and has the sweet-toothed enthusiasm to match.

The attention deficit of “1st Bath” can be chalked up to Summers’ backstory. Raised almost entirely on Christian music until his late teens, his discovery of secular pop music was a shock to his system. Though the transition wasn’t necessarily a smooth one – Summers recalls thinking that The Beatles sounded “generic” upon his first listen – he’s since nourished a sponge-like knack for songwriting.

Since his aural emancipation from hymns and worship songs, Summers’ appetite for pop music has been unwhettable, evident in the distinct divisions between each of the record’s dozen songs. The soulful spook of “Stop Playing with My Heart” loses itself in a longing haze, breaking on through to the oppositely sober folk-pop of “All Your Words are Gone,” a sure smile-splitter and highlight of the album.

The course of the album’s remainder is littered with disparate, interwoven elements of rockabilly, dance-punk, country, surf and rolling psychedelia, though there are no straight lines drawn from Summers’ influences. The “everything, all the time” approach, particularly to a debut statement, risks critiques of aimlessness, but Summers’ earnestness is obvious in his precise treatment of each individual song, effectively nullifying any argument of genre-sprawling for its own sake.

It’s this earnestness that makes “1st Bath” such a joy to hear. Summers allegedly wrote and recorded one song at a time, using his weeks between to earn enough money for the next recording session. While his sweat and tears are unaccounted for, that is indeed Summers’ blood spelling out the Avid Dancer moniker on the album’s cover.

Summers’ palpable exuberance and innate proclivity to penning time-tough melodies make “1st Bath” a gleeful collection of bubblegum-sticky pop. Even after extensive chomping, the album never loses its flavor.

Notable tracks: “All Your Words are Gone”, “Not Far to Go”, “Why Did I Leave You Behind”

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