Review: Russian Baths offer severe ‘Penance’ on debut EP
The grunge-rock group don’t hold back in any way, from feverish guitar roars to their frank songwriting.
You don’t know who you really are until you’ve hit rock bottom and felt your bones crack. In that cold and desolate state, things come into sharper focus. You regret the mistakes you’ve made, and so, you turn your heart over to atone for your sins. It’s a brutal transition, to go from blame and loathing into spiritual healing, but it is a piercing needle connecting us all to one another. Grunge-rock troupe Russian Baths attempt to iron out those inexorable wrinkles, washing the blood off their hands and regaining self-worth, with their debut EP, Penance. “I’ve never ridden this far / 
I’m having bad luck / Out in a sleepless house, my people answer the door,” vocalist Jess Rees, who also kills on guitar throughout the record, beseeches in the corners of her mind, murmuring onto record with weepy resignation. The breakup hit her harder than expected, taking with it a chunk of flesh for good measure.
A pound of flesh for redemption is a courageous act to absolve the past ⎯⎯ but it’s a price she’s willing to pay, tenfold. A choir of devilish guitars moan in unison, and while the pain throbs in her chest, the adrenaline high soothes the ache which cuts much deeper. The group, rounded out by Luke Koz (vocals, guitar), Evan Gill Smith (bass) and Jeff Widner (drums, synth), conjure up a haunting soundscape, beckoning the demons of rage and sorrow to be their muses. “Look for it at every rate / State gives you a kind of space / A rational trap to all get paid / But it’s not yours to lose at all,” Koz heaves in disastrous pleasure on “Black Cross,” a punk-fueled centerpiece tearing at the eardrums.
Recorded at Brooklyn’s Time Castle, Penance is a simply- but eloquently-written work of carnivorous passion. “We just want to be safe and done / In your cold skin / Feel it open,” Rees sings on “Slenderman,” blood freezing in her veins as the arrangement gusts ferociously beside her. Her voice glides across a hardened shell of electric guitar, and it’s almost as if it is her ghost doing the talking. It’s hauntingly beautiful and reverent and disturbing. “Kill the ego / Kill the charm / There’s a part of myself / Don’t show anyone,” they then detest with the rugged intensity of “What’s Your Basement?,” the set’s most metal of a headbanger. In the disc’s final few seconds, as the harsh arrangements drip out, the scratch of guitar going off like a doom’s day alarm, the listener is left with only troubling unease, which rebirths into their own kind of existential crisis.
Grade: 3 out of 5
