Royal Baths - Better Luck Next Life (album stream)

Royal Baths began as so many bands often do -- with a shared passion, the encouragement of friends, and a meager bank account. Add to that heavy influences from the garage-rock scene, a 2" analog tape, inspiration from a headlining tour, and a Pitchfork premiere ["Faster, Harder], and you'll see what the band has grown to become with their sophomore album, Better Luck Next Life. It's a six-track affair, loaded with dark humour and a lo-fi meets garage rock aesthetic that will have you entirely absorbed, and maybe a tiny bit on edge. Give it a spin, and grab it for your collection, out since Feb. 7 via Kanine Records.



Members:
Jeremy Cox,
Jigmae Baer,
John Rau,
Turner Halsey

Jeremy Cox and Jigmae Baer started Royal Baths without a plan in mind but soon the foundation for their writing found inspiration from Cox’s interest in the alternate and open tunings of delta blues, their shared fascination in the African rhythm of early Chicago blues, and Baer lyrically attempting to reflect with black humor and little judgment, and the thrills and troubles they stumble through.

Recording on whatever cheap four or single-track cassette recorder they could find, they eventually borrowed a Tascam 388 to make their first 7″. The unexpected encouragement of the 7″ drove Cox and Baer to perform their first show in a basement in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Six months later they began work on Litanies, their debut full length released on Woodsist.

The band began touring before the album was released, opening for bands the first two of which Baer had previously been a member: first with Thee Oh Sees, next Ty Segall, the Fresh and Onlys, and Wild Flag. The Royal Baths went on their first headlining tour after that, where they found inspiration to write their second full-length record, to be completed this time in a studio on higher quality 2? analog tape. They declared the recording process complete only when their meager bank accounts were drained and they had borrowed too much money. Although the Royal Baths developed amidst the encouragement of friends in San Francisco’s garage scene they felt stifled by comparisons to a movement where their sound didn’t belong to, so they upped and moved to New York to assert their sound. The album Better Luck Next Life was released by Kanine Records on February 7, 2012.

The Buzz

“Royal Baths are kind of a bad trip acid rock, dark and seedy but not atonal. But it’s definitely down the rabbit hole. In a good way.”
-- Brooklyn Vegan

“Litanies draws from the noisier, more freaked-out side of early garage rock. It also takes cues from Neil Young’s lightning-struck guitar sermons and the Velvet Underground’s creeping paranoia.”
-- Pitchfork

“The band has its obvious influences- The Velvet Underground and Spacemen 3- but to define them by these comparisons would be to vastly oversimplify their sound. Songwriters Jeremy Cox and Jigmae Baer draw from psychedelic soundscapes; dark, personal, and esoteric subject matter; and a bit of punk’s apathetic humor and exigency. They conjure up haunting, reverb-heavy hymns to the degenerate and the broken.”
-- Emily Rose Epstein (SF Weekly, Thrasher Magazine, Drummer for Ty Segall))

Links
http://theroyalbaths.com/
http://www.facebook.com/royalbaths
https://twitter.com/TheRoyalBaths
http://kaninerecords.com/royal-baths