Royal Baths’ third album, Better Luck Next Life, is a dreamy sort of dark, flirting with the line between the darkness of adolescent rebellion and a deeper, more cynical kind. Like many of the songs in the album, opener “Darling Devine” starts off lightly, hinting at the ethereal, only to build a feeling of dread with rhythmic walking bass and immediately raise the tempo. The album beguiles with pleasant, light harmonies and chanting choruses that blend with a whiny, deliciously sarcastic singing style; this delivery is what gives the album its overwhelmingly nihilist viewpoint.
Tight walking bass lines give the album a highly rhythmic feel, and many of the songs eventually drift into long instrumental meanderings that seem the end goal of every song. The central Asian and surf music influences make Better Luck Next Life what Dick Dale would sound like if he turned into a vampire. But the rhythm that these lends the album comes at a price; some of the songs seem to repeat to the point of redundancy. The lyrics in every song mock meaning and exalt nihilism, although at times the lyrics can devolve into a superficial affectation of rebellion. The lively “Burned” complains against the man, “Be Afraid of Me” never asks you for much more, and “Black Sheep” disappoints with “I have learned to laugh at the black in my soul.”
The album reaches its highest — and darkest — points when it teases the listener with loving entreaties only to deliver true cynical sadism, as in the final song, “Someone New.” “Faster, Harder,” the album’s best track, does the same — it starts off at a languorous pace which could almost turn into something sweet, only to bring that sardonic delivery again as the singer begins convinces you that he “loves his damaged girl,” eventually explaining why: “And when she begs for punishment, I obligingly experiment.” At its end, the song reaches a screeching high tempo while a continued falsetto chant of “Faster, Harder” entices even as it chills the listener to the bone. The song, along with the rest of the album, is an ode to the darkness in people, if only because it makes them that much easier to exploit.
Better Luck Next Life makes a pied piper of Royal Baths, leading the listener (mostly willingly) into madness. Part coast, part surf music, a dash of trance and a lot of rock ‘n roll, you should play this album if you’re holding a rock séance in the middle of the desert.