Brighton duo Royal Blood, like the vast majority of recent rock acts, have a sound that is entirely unoriginal. As hinted at by last year’s Out Of the Black EP, their eponymous debut full length splits the difference between radio-friendly hard rock and garage rock. What’s revelatory about the album is that the band could keep up the charade for over a half hour without stumbling to the finish line. In fact, there are pleasant hooks and riffs to be found throughout this album.
This album comes at an opportune time for Royal Blood, because this past weekend they played a highly discussed set at Leeds Festival. Fortunately, the album is boatloads of fun to listen to. For the myriad of strengths and weaknesses of Royal Blood, the adjective fun trumps good or bad. Tracks like “Come On Over” and “Figure It Out” are pieces of bar rock that are meant to inspire questions of how great they would sound in a live setting.
While Royal Blood often opt to stay in their comfort zone on this album, Ben Thatcher’s aptitude behind the drum kit allows them to venture outside of confines that would render their debut kin to a Theory of a Deadman release. In fact, Royal Blood’s middle section contains reason to believe the duo have a working knowledge of stoner rock. This keeps the so-called “riff factory” from sounding too manufactured.
Yet for as much upsides as this band and their debut album possess, Royal Blood has some earmarks of a band that were merely trying to sign the major label contract and a myriad of things that come with the territory of being a huge rock band in Britain. The songs are almost invariably loud with lyrics that are uninspired to the point where they just feel there. Bad lyrics are usually never the third rail for rockers, but tracks like “Ten Tonne Skeleton”, a melodramatic conceit comparing being dumped to absurd scenarios like being shot out of a cannon, go to show that the strength in Royal Blood’s hooks come from their instruments more than Mike Kerr’s singing or the band’s lyrics.
Moreover, when Kerr reaches into his high vocal register and finds mixed results on Royal Blood. A prominent example is the hook on “Out of the Black,” a track from their last EP that appears on this album a little more finely tuned, in which Kerr sounds harsh to the point where it is difficult to figure out whether he’s singing the lyrics or barking them. He’s a much stronger singer when his voice is subdued. Unfortunately, that style cannot persist on Royal Blood because it’s too raucous. Still, Kerr is a tactful vocalist given his skill set, considering that he managed not to ruin this album. Any issues with Kerr’s vocal performance on this album can and likely will be ironed out on subsequent releases.
The same can be said for the songs, which were a mixed bag. The big takeaway from Royal Blood is that the group got what they could out of two instruments and the studio and made a big sounding album from that. The band’s sound is substantially more mature than their ideas are, but the latter will have plenty of time to catch up if this album is received as well as their set at Leeds was. What Royal Blood do not have on their hands with their debut album is a transcendent work. Royal Blood is merely fun, inoffensive rock with a couple of frills.
Rating: 2.5/5