173. Royal Blood
Village Underground
14 June 2017
I have now seen Royal Blood twice, and both times have felt like being hit in the face by a scaffolding pole. The first time was in a record shop, a tiny gig, all sweat and vinyl, where they exploded from between the LP racks with all the subtlety of a bin lorry rolling downhill. Their debut album had landed like a meteor: bombastic, gloriously dumb, and packed with riffs so catchy that even people who claimed to hate them still hummed along.
Of course, the backlash came instantly with accusations of being “one-note wonders” levelled at them. To be fair, there’s a kernel of truth there although, if that one note is tuned low enough and played through enough pedals, it can still level small buildings.
Still, I was curious to see whether they could stretch their formula beyond “loud” and “louder.” So, I was very much in, when the invitation came through for their “secret” album launch gig, which was about as secret as a fire alarm in a library. I assume that I was on some list from the first album launch that I had attended. Either way, I dragged along one of my gig-partners in crime and we joined the queue snaking round Village Underground on a balmy June evening, whilst watching all the Shoreditch hipsters lock up their vegan, anime-themed artisan coffee shops and pedal away on their unicycles.
Now, for the uninitiated: Royal Blood are not complicated. There are two of them. They play loud. There are complicated pedal boards involved. That’s pretty much the entire business model. And yet, there’s something undeniably charming about their thuggish simplicity, as if two lads from Brighton discovered the blues and thought, “This could be improved with explosives.”
They opened with the title track from second album “How Did We Get So Dark”, and within seconds the air turned solid. Mike Kerr’s bass roared like a freight train running on whiskey, while Ben Thatcher hit his kit like it owed him money. The first twenty minutes were exhilarating, pure sonic carnage, the kind of thing that makes you believe rock might still be dangerous, or at least mildly irresponsible. But then… the déjà vu set in.
By song six, I realised I’d lost track of where one track ended, and another began. It all blurred into a massive, relentless assault; impressive, yes, but about as nuanced as a fireworks display in a phone booth. Their new material was darker, more dynamic, more “loud-quiet-loud”, but even that quiet bit felt like standing inside a jet engine politely idling.
My notes from the night read: “The sound they make is the sonic equivalent of being kicked across the deck of an iron-clad Dreadnought by a kind-eyed Sioux Nation medicine man during a lightning storm.” Which, on reflection, still feels about right.
By the end, I was both exhilarated and exhausted. Royal Blood are still thrilling, for about twenty minutes, after that, you start to wonder if maybe a third member might be revolutionary.