Royal Blood put out one of my favorite songs of the first half of this year, but their self-titled debut album didn’t come out until the very end of August, a long wait from the hype and airplay they received from “Out of the Black” in the first few months of 2014. Royal Blood delivers on the promise of that first track with a compact half-hour of loud, hard, hook-filled tracks, nothing that breaks new ground, just heavy earworms for folks who like rock that rocks.
“Out of the Black” is one of the best songs of 2014, an huge, heavy bass-and-drum track that comes in so loud and hard that you would swear it was multiple guitars, not the work of a two-piece band that recorded everything without overdubs or multiple instruments. The synchronized drum and machine-gun bass riff that opens the song follows up with a vast, distorted sonic boom that, here, announces the entire album’s arrival – this is loud, heavy, unapologetic rock music. It’s produced in a different way, but the aural effect is familiar.
The best tracks on Royal Blood remind me a lot of one of my favorite under-the-radar albums of late last year, the self-titled debut from Drenge, another UK-based two-piece rock. The initial riff to “Come on Over,” maybe the album’s second-best track after the opener, could easily have come from Drenge. Where Drenge stayed in the post-punk lane, Royal Blood runs more with the blues-rock aesthetic of 1970s hard rock and British Heavy Metal. With huge riffs and frequent stops and starts, most of the tracks on Royal Blood would fit in on Ozzy’s Boneyard on Sirius XM in between songs from Iron Maiden and Saxon.
That bluesy feel – it’s not really “blues” in the traditional sense – comes out more when they turn the amps down slightly, as on “You Can Be So Cruel,” which sacrifices none of the heaviness of the rest of the album but drives more than it thumps. It’s also a great example of how bassist Mike Kerr manages to create a full sound just with his bass and heavy distortion, music that you would otherwise swear had come from two six-string guitars working in tandem. His technique is more apparent on “Blood Hands” because he moderates his picking slightly to make some of the individual notes clearer and less distorted.
They’re also going to get a lot of Jack White comparisons because of Kerr’s vocal style and their shared use of heavily distorted guitar lines played in isolation or just over a drum beat. The interstitial riffs on “Careless” feel ripped straight from a great Jack White or White Stripes track – and I can’t figure out how he can produce notes that high on a traditional bass guitar., while the descending staircase vocals of “Figure It Out” also bring White’s voice and songwriting to mind. But there are little allusions to other genres that White wouldn’t incorporate into his straight-up rockers – like the syncopated, funk-tinged riffs of “Ten-Tonne Skeleton” or the hints at early doom on “You Can Be So Cruel.”
Royal Blood‘s brief 32 minutes don’t allow the duo much time to introduce anything new or innovative, although I don’t think that was part of their mission statement. They had a bunch of hooks, and a new kind of sound they wanted to introduce, two counts on which they were successful. At some point, they’ll have to expand the formula; for now, a half-hour that rocks works just fine.
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I also missed the release of Opeth’s latest album, Pale Communion, their second in their new incarnation as a prog-rock outfit. It’s hard to believe this is the same band that produced the watershed progressive death-metal album Blackwater Park, which combined death-growl doom-metal vocals with classical music influences and Gothenburg-style riffing in epic tracks that could run 10-12 minutes. Pale Communion sounds more like King Crimson or Marillion than it does like At the Gates or In Flames, with clean, sometimes harmonized vocals, intricate song structures (the one real holdover from their earlier output), and influences that range as far afield as folk and jazz. Opener “Eternal Rains Will Come” is pure 1970s prog-rock with some gorgeous instrumental passages, while “Cusp of Eternity” incorporates more hard-rock elements with a huge classic-rock guitar solo before the Hammond organ – which practically defines this album – returns.
It’s still brilliant, the kind of intelligent songwriting you can easily recognize, but it’s also a challenging listen because of the unconventional structure and lack of clear hooks. I don’t agree with Pitchfork’s review, which savaged the album mostly because it’s not the old Opeth, but I do agree with the reviewer’s specific criticism that the album doesn’t feel like its musical ideas are new, only its structures and arrangements. Opeth was so groundbreaking in their death-metal phase, defying conventions of even the adventurous melodic death metal movements of Gothenburg and Finland, that it’s a little odd to hear them as a prog-rock outfit that doesn’t seem to bring many new ideas or energies. Pale Communion is still among the best albums of the year, because of its ambition and sheer intelligence; I just want a band that has historically been so full of ideas to bring that same creativity to their new sound.
