Royal Baths
Better Luck Next Life

THE REVIEW

After the impressive debut at the end of 2010, the young sprouts of the new garage-psych scene of San Francisco, “Royal Baths”, return. If the previous “Litanies” lingered on a murky psychedelia between wave and Velvet, this new album maintains a psychedelic approach, strengthening it with a very hypnotic idea of garage, reviving the glory of preeminent Lou Reed-style guitar work.

We are faced with a record of young artists who, willingly or not, we do not know, light a candle every morning to Saint Reed and Saint Cale. Not shying away from smoothing Mark E. Smith's edges.

Illustrative in this sense is the opening track “Darling Divine”, with a guitar riff that twists around itself. Also notable are the 7 minutes of the subsequent “Burned”, a psychotic tour de force very “White Light/White Heat”. In other moments, the boys flirt with a sickly western approach, like cowboys on a bronze horse, but high on methadone ("Nightmare Voodoo"), or else seek a ray of Wilsonian light in a cold room of some seedy motel on the outskirts (“Contempt”).

They are also commendable in the slower paced moments: “Be Afraid Of Me” starts like an OM song, propelled by a tribal and minimal drumming, occasionally interrupted by guitar accelerations; accelerations that characterize the frantic finale of “Faster, Harder”, a sick and lascivious tale, the soundtrack for a drunken stroll on Lexington Avenue.

2012 starts well, and if the Maya are proven right, we will need music like this as the soundtrack for the end of the world.