Royal Baths
Litanies

“Review Slowly”

Yes, because while it may be true that great albums aren't released anymore, as many people think (usually wrongly), it's clear that there's increasingly less time to listen to them. The hammer of “produce-consume-die” falls relentlessly on the anvil of our once carefree lives, pulverizing “free time” into small particles to catch on the fly. The only way to reclaim your vital spaces is both by taking as much time as possible from work and by enjoying the (few) leisure moments left. And don't be in a hurry.

The current musical landscape faithfully reflects this schizophrenic social dynamic: trillions of releases, millions of reissues, hundreds of limited editions, and no one has time to listen to them, once you're over 30. And if it continues like this, given the state of pharmacological coma the world of work is in, soon the only ones to have time to listen to music will be children.

That preamble is to invite us (the few of us left) passionate about music, not to give up, to give the right time to the right albums. Like this “Litanies”, a little gem released between the end of last year and the beginning of this year, the debut work of the Royal Baths, from Frisco.

The city from which they obviously inherit osmotically the taste for hypnotic melodies, but nothing sunny, as the dark cover suggests. Hovering spectrally here is the ghost of the skeletonically psychedelic Velvet of “Murder Mistery”; the odor of the corpse in the next room filtered through psychotropic substances (“Sitting In My Room” brilliant in its simplicity), blends with Neanderthal drumming, fuzz and choruses from very poorly taken Beach Boys (“After Death”). The rest is a succession of litanies (indeed) with a generally unsettling effect, but with undeniable unhealthy charm. It's just a pity that the pattern repeats itself a bit too often in the 9 tracks that make up the album, but the thumb is absolutely up for both the timelessness of the proposal and the good compositional ability.

Avoid listening in spring if you don't want to ruin your picnic with a nice deluge. You've been warned.