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ROYAL BANGS is five electric gents from Knoxville, Tennessee, sentinel of the Smoky Mountains and sometime exporter of baked beans and sunny guitar pop. Home to a prolific but unsung underground music community, it is a city that keeps its secrets, but over the past few years ROYAL BANGS has become a hard, hard secret to keep. Frontman Ryan Schaefer, drummer Chris Rusk and guitarist Sam Stratton have been making music together (under ROYAL BANGS and various other guises) since their high school days, which stretched into their college days, which stretched all the way into 2006, when they home-recorded and self-released their breakthrough album We Breed Champions. The record's potent noise-pop wormed its way into hearts throughout the southeastern US before finding its way to Black Keys drummer Patrick Carney, whose correspondence with the band led to We Breed Champions' reissue on his own Audio Eagle Records in May 2008. In the meantime ROYAL BANGS went on hiatus as Schaefer spent a year in France, soaking up Euro dance music and entitlement culture while penning the early stages of a follow-up; after his return to the South, the band (with new additions Henry Gibson and Branon Biondo, filling the hole of amicable but road-averse departures) took the promotion of a brand-new, two-year-old record as an opportunity to refine their live show. The result has been an incessant touring schedule, including stops at Bonnaroo, SXSW and the New American Music festival as well as a stint opening for the Black Keys in the fall of 2008. In February of 2009, on the eve of City Slang Records' well-received European release of We Breed Champions, ROYAL BANGS traveled to Tangerine Sound studios in Akron, Ohio to record its long-awaited follow-up. The resulting Let It Beep finds the band's sound looking more than ever in two seemingly conflicting directions: an increased emphasis on the electronic -- from spastic, syrup-thick synths to dancy drum programming nearly accomplished enough to keep up with Rusk himself -- coupled with earnest echoes of fervid 70s rock legends like Springsteen and Thin Lizzy. But the core of their sound, rooted in the indie rock renaissance and Schaefer's hook-heavy arrangements, embraces both tendencies without allowing them to diverge, and the result is an album that might be described as both challenging and accessible if "pure goddamn fun" weren't around to cover both bases at once. ROYAL BANGS » We Breed Champions « |
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