Send "Royal Bangs " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Mixtapemuse |
 Where to even start with Flux Outside – there’s quite a bit to cover. Royal Bangs are a band that blare confidence and skirt genre classification, as evidenced by this, the band’s third full-length album. Whether it’s garage rock, blues, psych, punk, math rock, or even soul, Royal Bangs make it a point to cross-pollinate their core of rock ‘n’ roll with any and all genres and subgenres. Flux Outside is a title that seems, incidentally, to suggest that while everything around them is constantly changing, they are a band bold and confident enough to accept change and use it to their advantage.From beginning to end, Flux Outside is an album that punches holes in expectations, the ones you may possibly hold for its direction. And while Royal Bangs are ambitious enough to experiment with their sound, they never truly lose any semblance of who they are. “Grass Helmet” sounds like garage rock on speed: an explosion of rattling guitars, the punchy, distorted growl of bass guitar, and a machine-gun hi-hat so sharp it could cut through anything. “Triccs” invokes the snarly, rock ‘n’ roll romp of the MC5 and the bare-bones blues howl of The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. “Dim Chamber” is a pensive, bluesy, soul-inflected song that builds, perfectly turning over into album closer “Slow Cathedral Melt”, a song that takes the soulful delivery of its predecessor, amps it up, and adds in support from distorted organ, classic rock guitar leads, and a warped set of strings. It may not be possible to accurately classify Royal Bangs here, but that doesn’t always work to their advantage. In venturing out across different genres, the album feels less direct upon crossing the halfway point – not because the band is suffering from an identity crisis so much as they have already tried to pack a lot into just a few songs; it feels as though it could have used a bit of tightening. It’s not that the songs are bad by any means, but, overall, the album begins to pack less of a punch until the latter few songs. Everyone’s take of an album is different, and for some, this might just be something that takes a while to fully digest. In the end, this isn’t something that detracts from Royal Bangs clear – not to mention admirable – ambition to avoid the safety of a one-genre denominator....full text |
| Consequenceofsound |
| Schema are cognitive structures that allow us to interpret and act in the world around us, with past experience and social norms dictating the scripts. We know movie theater etiquette. We know how going to a restaurant works. We know how to introduce ourselves to each other. Genre is a type of schema: Its conventions allow rapid classifications and judgments to be made, especially in the world of media. Departures from these patterns feel foreign, and dissonant. Hardly a better example music-wise can be found than Knoxville’s Royal Bangs. Trying to pigeonhole their onslaught of sound – Glam rock? Indie pop? Classic rock? Electronic? Garage pop? - is fruitless. But with their enjoyable third album, Flux Outside, the trio has concocted some of their most cohesive material to date. Flux Outside begins with “Grass Helmet”, a clamoring, surfy guitar riff that easily fits in with last year’s favorite buzz-genre of lo-fi, sunny pop. Haphazard duet vocals chime in, though, and instead of atonal distortion, we get a glam-rock chorus and an eventual breakdown into whirring electronic noise. It works seamlessly, with relentless energy and a fabulously smooth crescendo to the end. This track functions as a microcosm of the album, as both feature glimpses and moments of identifiable influence that are quickly shrouded in multiple layers of frenetic sound, rendering the Royal Bangs’ style solely their own....full text |
| Pitchfork |
| Flux Outside, the third LP from hyperkinetic Knoxvillians Royal Bangs, goes off like a wind-up toy, rattling through 50 genre-eradicating minutes before collapsing into a heap. Matching the spastic rush of math rock with the heft of 1970s arena-fillers and a bit of Tennessee-born Southern boogie, the Bangs' shapeshifting whiplash-prog certainly gets the blood going. And this surging LP is their most spirited, sense-assaulting work to date. Every sound on Flux Outside-- and there are many, coming in from all angles-- gleams, buffed to an electroid sheen. Frontman Ryan Schafer, who produced the Bangs' previous LPs, turns over the production duties to ex-Sparklehorse member Scott Minor, with indie superproducer Dave Fridmann handling the mixing. Minor and Fridmann help deepen the band's drums and tease out some alluringly glitzy new textures without altering the dynamic scramble that powered 2009's fine Let It Beep. For all the instrumental bombardment, the Bangs manage to maintain order, never veering too far off course even when they're taking sharp curves at 100 MPH. The record's got a constant forward motion, and its 50 minutes seem to zip by in double-time. The Bangs' greatest strength isn't so much the almost mechanistic turn-on-a-dime cohesion of their future rock, but how they manage to wrangle their pristine assault into appealing shapes. Highlight "Silver Steps" zig-zags its way into a rousing straightahead chorus, and while "Bull Elk" comes on like a tornado, Schafer shouts out its hook from the eye of the storm. For all its alien textures, Flux Outside is a generous, sweaty, markedly human record, powered as much by groovy southern-rock melodies as the steely synth shrapnel that seems to jut out from everywhere. It's a rare thing indeed to hear a musical unit nail that midpoint between those frequently oppositional tendencies time and again. Still, there are times when the fast-moving currents in the Royal Bangs sound cause them to barrel through their hooks, lessening their impact and causing the distinctions between one ripcord track to the next to blur a bit. But the Bangs seem to place every drum stutter, keyboard whirr, and Schafer howl on equal footing, a nice testament to the tightness and democracy of their musical unit, so pushing the songwriting further to the forefront could come at the risk of toppling the delicate balance the not-so-delicate Flux Outside achieves. May they never learn to sit still....full text |
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