The San Francisco garage-psych world isn't a bastion of optimism, but it's a little too sunshiney for Royal Baths. Perhaps that's why the duo moved to Brooklyn ahead of the release of its second full-length, Better Luck Next Life, an album gloomy almost to the point of self-parody. It's nine songs about black souls, black hearts, S&M, and dark lords pounded out over Bo Diddley beats. They don't skimp on the details, either. For Royal Baths, there is no question: The world is a vampire.
In the past, Royal Baths' music has been tagged as psychedelic if only because of their geographic proximity to groups like the Fresh & Onlys, Thee Oh Sees, and Ty Segall. But this latest set of songs yields little in the way of incense and peppermints. It's a sludgy, turgid take on the blues, swiping it's chief inspiration from the Velvet Underground but supplementing heavily with sounds from mid-1980s goth rockers like the Gun Club and the Bad Seeds. Each song is a handful of grotty chords strummed on a guitar with every string tuned to the same note.
Royal Baths' debut LP, Litanies, was cobbled together in the band's practice space on a Tascam 388, the Bay Area's leading choice for fuzz-tinged DIY-recording. The grotty production imbued their songs-- which were bleak and droney, but eerily twee and melodic-- with an extra edge. This time around, some of the grit is gone. So are the Aleister Crowley-meets-Beat Happening hooks. Whatever pop pretenses Royal Baths harbored, they've mostly let them slide, ditching verse-chorus-verse for static Diddley rhythm tracks that buoy Jigmae Baer's seedy monologues.
For a record that concerns itself so heavily with evil, though, Better Luck Next Life is fairly subdued. Baer delivers his lyrics in a reedy, muted tenor that wobbles in and out of key. It's an intentional effect, meant to enhance the music's creep factor by delivering darkness in a disaffected voice, but the blasé attitude makes it harder to buy in.
The ecstatic call-and-response aspect of the blues is mostly missing. On "Burned", Baer allots himself several minutes to trance out and unwind into the music while Cox pummels his guitar. But most of the songs are just short stories recited over droney chords. And the prose gets a little purple: "Bloody landscapes are my daydreams, bodies fall/ If I could touch the hem of Satan I would crawl," sings Baer on "Black Sheep".
But you can't quibble with Royal Baths' sincerity. They look the part, for sure. Dressed in shredded paisley hand-me-downs, guitarist Jeremy Cox resembles a zombie-makeup version of Jefferson Airplane's Marty Balin. Their tour ride is a Chevy Suburban spraypainted matte black. They're an iffy live band, but on stage they project their weirder impulses well-- pummeling the audience with feedback, barely hewing to the structures of their songs. On good nights, the band conjures a singularly eerie vibe. But on Better Luck Next Life, it's not always coming through.
