Album Review : Royal Bangs - Let It Beep
- Written by Fraser McAlpine
Some of these songs appear to have been written backwards. Some have been grown in vats of primordial goop and industrial waste, and left to assume whatever shape they will. Some of the instruments appear to be made from bits of dirty old valve radios and deep-fat friers, and played with a boot. No, two boots, no five. No none, it's a spanner.
Most of these songs seem to have been recorded in Oscar The Grouch's dustbin on microphones which are little more than a condom stretched across a coat-hanger. I trust we are all sophisticated enough people to realise that these are all plus points.
Royal Bangs are the kind of band who know the value of hiding their best abilities until the point at which most of their audience are digging their (*cough*) wayward vibe, yeah? Then blinding them with a display of awesome togetherness. They also know the value of starting a song in a very harmonious, machine-tooled, precise fashion, then kicking it until the wheels fall off.
Imagine Babyshambles covering Kid A, having never heard it. It's that kind of a thing.
The most commercial, upbeat, happy and therefore POP song on the whole album, the song which suggests that a Metro station with the talent to back up the 'tude and the tattoos might be a good thing, the song which could garner proper radio play, word-of-mouth success and therefore some kind of mainstream breakthrough for the band so that, y'know, people have heard of them, is called 'Shit Xmas'. That's Royal Bangs in a nutshell.
The major step on from last year's We Breed Champions is that this is a beautifully sequenced run of songs. They flow into each other like a stream of unfinished thoughts. The jagged, wounded guitars 'n' howls of 'My Car Is Haunted' bleed into the clockwork electronica of 'Brainbow' as if one was a remix of the other. The same trick occurs with the unhinged ADHD malarkyfest 'My Gorilla King', which childishly, brilliantly destroys all the work they put into '1993', to prove how good they are at their instruments and stuff.
And they ARE good, really very very good indeed, it's just they're too busy enjoying themselves to have to act like boffins, despite the hard science involved in creating their astonishingly potent snake oil.
T-shirts should be commissioned at once - Royal Bangs: It's not rocket surgery, but I like it.