Back to the Water Below
Album by Royal Blood
Released 1 September 2023
Alternative Rock
Label – Warner
Rating – 3/10
Royal Blood ruins rock music.
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I was never necessarily angered by Mike Kerr’s onstage hissy-fit whilst performing at this year’s Big Weekend to a quiet audience. My response was always one of humour; he made a jackass of himself by pedantically asking the audience “who likes rock music?”, as if he’s a bad boy from a bygone era, when in actuality, he flipped off a children’s party for its lack of alcohol.
If it has at all annoyed me, it’s because I have no idea how the Royal Blood frontman thinks he has the right to be the one who stands up for the guttural essence of rock music, when his band has always sounded like a late-career Death From Above, no longer caring about expression, creativity or sounding naturally energetic – but as long as it has guitars in it, it’s hip, right?
Disembowelled Death From Above are sounding as disembowelled as ever on Back to the Water Below, save for the fact that Kerr is putting slightly more emphasis on instruments other than Royal Blood’s usual unimpressive bass + drums setup. That’s right, those keyboards he debuted on How Did We Get So Dark plump up a few of the tracks – Pull Me Through, How Many More Times, There Goes My Cool, Waves – at least doing something to stop sounding like music for beer commercials and EA games, a.k.a. the downfall of Typhoons.
But they still don’t do enough, nor do the more traditional-sounding songs. While Mountains At Midnight makes decent use of a fuzz pedal, its lyrics are pure ChatGPT – “I’m a bruise you soothe in your dancing shoes / I’m a ticking timebomb hooligan come to light your fuse”. Wow, that’s deep, man.
Despite revving Shiner in the Dark up to make it seem a bit more electronic, it too refuses to evolve, held back by its classless pop rock chorus. The Firing Line tries, mostly by utilising a friendly chord progression from outside the usual realms of Royal Blood, but it’s hardly an unheard-of progression. Basic riffage curses the rest of the album, particularly on High Waters.
I wonder if Mike Kerr thought in that moment that maybe the underwhelming response from the crowd could’ve been due to his music just not being that good. He expected the kind of crowd theatrics associated with an audience at a rock show (whilst at a pop festival), and confirmed a stereotype that has suited Royal Blood for a while – their name may as well be “The Rock Band”, as all they’ve ever done is embody the fundamentals of rock music whilst starving themselves of any extra desires. Talk up the two-member approach all you want, but blasting out riffs on a bass guitar drenched in distortion isn’t as difficult as one might assume. All that emerges from that approach is cookie cutter riffs, cookie cutter choruses, cookie cutter lyrics, and everything else that makes Royal Blood feel like part of the furniture.
Rating – 3 out of 10
PEANUTBUTTERPOPE 