Album Review: Royal Blood – Typhoons


7.5/10

Royal Blood Typhoons artwork




A new album from a band like Royal Blood always fuels that kind of perpetual meta, the one about guitar music as we head into the twenties proper, about bands and/or duos and the future thereof and about rock n’ roll as an endangered species (man).

None of that shit is getting resolved one way or other any time soon it seems – a fat continuum which kind of tells its own story – but Mike Kerr and Ben Thatcher have left it nearly four years since the barnstorming How Did It Get So Dark? before coming at us again, a gap that must mean something beyond getting anybody to press up some records these days without a lead time of nine goddamn months.

One of the main contributory factors to the wait was getting wasted, or in the case of the band’s frontman, not getting wasted anymore; the story is that Mike Kerr found himself less and less equipped to deal with a hard partying lifestyle and, one night in a Las Vegas bar, he decided the drink he’d just ordered would be his last.

For the duo, it was a pivotal moment in a career which to the outsider was to that point spotless.

Such was the personal transformation that Kerr has honestly maintained Typhoons wouldn’t be here without sobriety, but another factor was some mentoring by Josh Homme, a man for whom excess has equally been a famous state of both mind and body in the past.

The output from these early collaborative sessions is Boilermaker, a strutting riff tornado which bears no little resemblance to Queens of The Stone Age at their most accessible, the boogie maxed out with a chorus that hints at more coast than desert.

It’s not the first intentionally bold step. Kerr has described how the essence of playing live has been heightened, like the crowd are no longer behind a wall of fuzz; on opener Trouble’s Coming he offers them a hand and beckons everybody onto the dancefloor, the guitar histrionics of the middle eight feeling like they’re somehow trying to regain some control over abandonment.

There’s nothing better than jolting yourself out of any kind of rut; if titles and words are any marker here then the front half of Typhoons seems to act as a sort of confessional and kiss-off to the pitfalls of history (Oblivion, Who Needs Friends), while the title-track sounds like a story you might be told at the AA: ‘All these chemicals dancing through my veins / They don’t kill the cause – they just numb the pain’.



With some of the personal demons exorcised, the later tracks feel like the work of musicians ready to just groove a little more now the explanations have been given.

Either You Want It rolls out some delicious ultimatums-as-riffs, festival gold just waiting to happen, while Mad Visions and Hold On both take the noise/dance formula to heights on which the duo may even surprise themselves.

As if to prove that there’s even more to be revealed as the world returns to normality and we all get to play outside again, piano led closer All We Have Is Now is a hymn to living for the present, a philosophy made from existing in sharper relief than before.

Records from bands like Royal Blood usually come out of some of perpetual meta, but on Typhoons they’re the ones posing the questions.

Andy Peterson


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