Royal Baths

Creeping tendrils of distortion wrap your legs and pull you down. The sweltering buzz becomes a quicksand, its sultry drone rising as you sink in. Offspring of The Velvet Underground’s “European Son,” San Francisco quartet Royal Baths play stoned-but-driving garage-psych. Guitars vacillate between woolly swells and slashing slivers of reverb, all teased by the tremolo over the tribal thud of Eden Birch’s bass drum. While this isn’t a particularly novel formulation (see most recently The Black Angels), guitarists Jeremy Cox and Jigmaer Baer add an intriguing wrinkle with their dual vocals. Baer’s dry baritone recalls the Velvets’ Lou Reed, while Cox’s tender waver hits a righteous falsetto. Their bittersweet vocal blend is a life raft amid the breaking waves of fuzz.

The band formed behind Cox and Baer around 2009, an outgrowth of the scene that spawned fellow Bay Area garage enthusiasts Ty Segall, Thee Oh Sees and the Fresh and Onlys. Indeed, Baer played with the first two, and the latter passed the Baths’ tape along to Woodsist, who signed them and released the full-length debut, Litanies. That was preceded by a trio of 7-inch releases, the aforementioned cassette and a tussle with an LA laptop artist who’d taken the same name. When his album beat Cox & Baer’s to press, they were forced to change their name from Baths to Royal Baths.

Though Royal Baths mine a persistently smoky haze, Litanies shimmers in shade,  from the space of “Sinister Sunrise” to the eastern thrum of “Sitting in my Room.” The strength of these vocal melodies keep the songs from melting away into shoegazer murk, luring you deeper into Royal Baths’ humming confines. —Chris Parker