Whilst some artists’ modern day pursuit of confounding their audience with each release looks increasingly like a game of career Russian roulette, Royal Blood were never likely to be taking those sorts of chances.
With worldwide sales of their eponymous 2014 debut on around a million of the “units” label-suits love so much, south coast based duo Ben Thatcher (plays the drums) and Mike Kerr (ditto bass, plus vocals) have turned their chunky, whip-crack strain of garage rock into an unlikely arena staple, an all-the-more-remarkable feat given the pair’s determination to eschew star theatrics and any related excess.
When you’re consciously trading on image free, the other side of the success equation needs to be music which can be easily digested, and a couple of listens to Why Did We Get So Dark? quickly reveals that pragmatism has shaped it rather than a desire to fix the unbroken. Clocking in at an attention span minded thirty five minutes or so, like its predecessor there’s a familiar economy at work, both in terms of creative vista and song-craft.
What the two have tweaked is to generally turn everything up to 12; Kerr’s crunching riffage is now brutal to the point of mild hysteria. On the titular opener he sits this muddy, unrelenting low end against his own puckish vocals, the falsetto harmonies ascendant with the middle ground a vacuum where no prisoners are taken. This sort of precision hitting turns the grind of Where Are You Now? and its early 70’s power vibe into a the briefest of love letters to modern retro, whilst Lights Out throbs with familiarly tortured blues chords, sounding anything like the post breakup defiance its words suggest.
There’s something reassuring, defiant even, in How Did We Get So Dark’s conformity. Sure, the spectre of Muse without some of the frills haunts almost everything, but as a recent critic asserted, the duo make good old fashioned rock songs when good old fashioned rock songs are in short supply. The nuances in this formula are just those – minor concessions that when on point give us the libidinous glam of She’s Creeping, or a rare glimpse of their more playful side which furnishes I Only Lie When I Love You, with its almost pop veneer, a butt shaking swing which their anti-frills zealotry normally hides.
It’s also fair to say that the two-man wall of sound formation is something we’re deeply adjusted to now, its strengths and weaknesses largely obliterated by feel. Royal Blood sound serious, but once you realise that Kerr is singing about dysfunctional relationships rather than making roadside pacts with the devil, the cat’s out of the bag. Not so dark then, and when they get it wrong you end up with the Kasabian-esque stream of consciousness of Hook, Line & Sinker, aimless rote punctuated by a stream of over compensatory drum fills, noise on noise for noise’s sake.
Sometimes the best answer to the question about what’s key to your success is that you don’t know the answer. Royal Blood, like their hometown soccer team Brighton, have just reached the Premier League in their respective field, and now you feel would be time to reveal a grander design. Why Did We Get So Dark? offers plenty of evidence of the qualities that got them there and its integrity isn’t open to question. The reality however, is that it leaves them in 2017’s musical safe space, in stasis where the only worry is whether they’re going to be above or below The Courteeners on some European festival bill.
For now, it’s probably enough – next time round however Kerr and Thatcher need to stop being grateful just for being there, grab the bull by the horns, and kill or be killed.
