Royal Baths: Litanies

Royal Baths
Litanies
Rating: 2.5/5.0
Label: Woodsist


For anyone in the mood for an album filled with crushing and absolutely all-fucking-encompassing dread, boredom, cynicism, sickness and death, Litanies comes highly recommended. The song titles - "After Death," "Drudgery," "I Detest," "Bad Heart," "Sinister Sunrise" - leave little room for misinterpretation and, with the exception of closing track "Pleasant Feeling," likely aren't meant to be taken ironically. The debut release from San Francisco quartet Royal Baths - Jeremy Cox, Jigmae Baer, Eden Birch and Eva Hannan - it is about as far removed from the psychedelia most frequently associated with the city by the Bay as possible. There is of course nothing wrong with a band that exists in perpetual darkness, but the music that accompanies such brooding must be original enough to offset such a narrow and redundant scope. Litanies is not that album, and all too often the band fails to frame its inner turmoil in anything but recycled sounds.

Unless it's some sort of cosmically-sized coincidence, the band owes a large debt to both the Velvet Underground and Spacemen 3. The vocals and especially the arrangements - coated in layers of fuzz and distortion - are reminiscent of those two groups, most noticeably on "Needle and Thread," "Sitting In My Room" and "Pleasant Feeling." For some listeners it might be difficult to get past these similarities - and make those listeners cut their losses and just go straight to the source material - but there are a few promising inclusions here. The album works best in its moments of tension that exist in the vocal interplay of singers Cox and Baer; "After Death," "Nikki Don't," "Drudgery" and "I Detest" contrast leading vocals evoking pure misery with bright and bouncy background harmonies. The effect is unsettling and is easily the most memorable aspect of Litanies. The lyrics fit the tone set by the band's sound; the album is a well of gothic misery with seemingly no bottom, with references to insomnia brought on by being too high and too hot, the "desolate country" and the "malnourished sick" scattered among warnings not to fall in love and cheerless sentiments like "coldness cannot hide the spirit that flutters in fear." Oh happy day indeed.

But the album wallows in such thoughts so much that after a while they lose their impact, and coupled with the songs' heavily derivative sound, it makes for some pretty ponderous listening. Rare is the record that can last for very long in such abject despair; even a renowned master of melancholy like Will Oldham ended I See a Darkness with the hopeful "Raining in Darling," while artists as morose as Bill Callahan and the National at least sometimes couch their songs in sardonic humor.

Royal Baths could learn something from those artists about such nuances and shades of gray throughout Litanies. The band unarguably has impeccable influences and usually makes the most of them, but absent a truly genre-breaking style, clubbing the listener over the head with a barrage of gloom only gets a band so far.

Various Artists: Welcome Home/Diggin' the Universe: A Woodsist Compilation

Various Artists
Welcome Home/Diggin' the Universe: A Woodsist Compilation
Rating: 3.5/5.0
Label: Woodsist


The people behind the Woodsist label hope you still have a Walkman (if you're old) or a record player (if you're really old) stashed away somewhere, as the limited release Welcome Home/Diggin' the Universe: A Woodsist Compilation is available only on cassette and vinyl. While vinyl remains almost uniformly revered - with numerous artists still releasing their albums on the big disc - the cassette's legacy is more ambiguous. In some ways cassettes were unarguably awful: the sound was frequently shitty, goddamn if the ribbon didn't always somehow get eaten by a hungry tape deck and there were no aesthetics to speak of, as album covers that looked glorious on vinyl were mercilessly shrunk down to fit the cassette's rectangular shape.

But cassettes made that most sacred of musical artifacts - the mixtape - possible, and for this reason alone, they deserve some respect and a bit of wistful nostalgia. For those of us of a certain age, it didn't get much better than spending hours compiling that perfect batch of songs, either for personal use or for someone else. Relationships could be made or broken from the content of such a cassette mixtape. It was a serious endeavor, man, and it took serious effort; we didn't have the luxury of letting Amazon or iTunes Genius make recommendations for us. And we walked to school in the snow uphill both ways.

Welcome Home/Diggin' the Universe displays all the best traits of such cassette tapes, with 12 of its 13 songs exclusive to this compilation and almost every last one of them showing that the state of modern indie is still pretty damn good, for one label at least. The songs included here don't sound like oddities, one-offs or leftover scraps, not even the curious Grateful Dead and Cure cover songs from City Center and Skygreen Leopards, respectively. For the most part, the songs adhere to the lo-fi/punk-lite template with which Woodsist is most frequently associated, an approach that works especially well on Nuggets-recalling garage rock tracks like Run DMT's "Richard," White Fence's "The Love Between," the Fresh & Only's "Heel.Toe" and Nodzz's "Old Clothes." There are also some worthy anomalies: Alex Bleeker's "Gettin By" features an unadorned guitar jangle and breezy country-inflected vocals, while Ducktails closes the album with the brief acoustic instrumental "Sun Out My Window." As with any compilation, a few songs aren't quite up to par - the echoed vocals on Moon Duo's "A Little Way Different" quickly become tedious, while the vocals on Cause Co-Motion!'s "Over You" suggest the ghost of Joey Ramone was channeled for this song - but it's easy enough to forgive a few clunkers when so much good stuff surrounds them.

Welcome Home/Diggin' the Universe starts with "I'm Not Gone" by Woods, label founder Jeremy Earl's band. Certainly ownership has its privileges, but regardless, it's a fittingly auspicious start to a set of tunes that rarely disappoints. Though this release isn't on the same level as gold standards like Nuggets or even the recent Dark Was the Night - and there are some notable exclusions, most obviously Wavves and Real Estate - it serves as validation for Woodsist as a label and the solid talent roster it has built up. It also just might make some listeners long for those olden days when cassettes were like currency for many of us.