"Royal Blood" is the debut album from the British rock band Royal Blood. The album features an album's worth of in your face heavy rock tracks that leave a small impression on you. The sound is heavy and you can pinpoint influences from a mile away. The sound reminds you if Jack White and Queens Of The Stoneage had a baby in Brighton. The album comes after you quickly and fiercely like a lion would, but it doesn't really hold up as an overwhelmingly memorable debut.
Songs like "Out of the Black" and "Little Monster" provide the album with the hard hitting image it was trying to portray. The duo really does do a great job of generating a full sound from only two members. Though with two members you still feel as if you're wanting more. The in your face attitude from Royal Blood unfortunately doesn't keep your your interest for too long as you find a couple of tracks that you really like, but the album as a whole doesn't congeal the way it should.
Some songs like "Ten Tonne Skeleton" feel very robotic and repetitive in nature and don't add to the overall spectrum for the group. The effort sort of feels limp in places with a smattering of decent tracks in between. Most importantly, I feel the band needs to find its own identity. Its great to be influenced by plenty of bands but not when you can distinguish them blatantly. The band has a great batch of influences that encompass some of my favorite bands ever (The White Stripes, QOTSA, Arctic Monkeys) but what Royal Blood truly needs is its own identity.
Final Summary:
The hard rock stylings of Royal Blood is a breath of fresh air when it comes to new age rock groups. The influences from them are pure and songs like "Little Monster" and "Out Of The Black" stick with you for a while, but overall the band is in dire need of their own identity and an album that showcases what makes them unique from the previous bands mentioned. I enjoyed my first listen through but after further analysis, I gotta say this album is pretty lackluster.
Rating: 7.3/10
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