Bands multiply very fast in Los Angeles, and each time I see a new one, I wonder how it will possibly manage to bring something new to the table,… so much have been done already, and it must be quite hard for a new band to avoid the ‘sounds like…’ pigeonhole. But the American Royalty trio, who got a July residency at the Echo, is trying very hard and is being quite successful at this game, with an intriguing collage of… about everything. On Monday night, people were dancing, cheering and having a fantastic time during their set.
I was first disconcerted by their weird and eclectic range,.. were they pop, electronic, funky, bluesy, rock, and what else? Each song had its bag of surprises and more shifts in the same song than you would think you could handle, but miraculously, it was working.
Constantly switching from Korg synth to guitar to electronic equipment, the two frontmen were both contributing to vocals, which were ranging from a bright and upbeat tone to a Prince-like falsetto, whereas the music in one song seemed to be undergoing more series of mutations than a bacteria colony during its lifetime. In the same track, you could hear some stripped down piano-vocals parts, followed by long bluesy jams, almost Black-Keys-esque sessions, turning into jumpy electronic beats, morphing into a funky psychedelia dance-party, unwinding even more surprises… their music was quite inventive, built of interruptions and detours, as if they wanted to cover the whole musical span of their generation.
Especially, it was these upbeat energetic dance parts that were the total crowd pleasers, and a few dancers in front of me got the rhythm right away, and never stopped dancing till the end of the set.
Me? As I said I found it first quite weird, but they definitively got me at ‘Matchstick’, a song they played at the end of their too short set, an apotheosis of their patchwork-y-bluesy-funky psychedelic delirium beaten down by electronic pulses.