After many years road testing their songs, Royal Blush drop their debut EP, A Ways Away, and that time spend honing the songs, learning to enhance and edit the songs live, testing what works and what doesn’t, which songs make the short list and which ones end up in the landfill, has resulted in a calling card of five great songs.
We are in the territory of alt-rock, although so established is the genre that I’m not sure what it is the alternative to anymore, but irrespective of what the genre thinks it still stands in opposition to, these songs have mass appeal, instant accessibility and chart-bound direction of travel written all over them. This is the sound of the underground going overgrown.
Semantics aside, “Go” wanders between searing, squalling walls of noise and spacious understatement, Alison Heckart’s vocals feeling equally at home in either sonic space, and “Ballads in the Sky” is infectious and intense.
“Cherry Cola” reminds us that alt-rock isn’t just about the big stuff; this is a gorgeously serene, effortlessly accessible, mid-paced, almost balladic beauty. “Ice Age” again seems to ooze pop contagion whilst still having its foot in that place where rock energy meets indie cool, and “Butterflies on the Grave” neatly covers all the musical ground they have staked as their own in a slow-burning sonic evolution from the understated to the anthemic.
As an initial set of songs, a first statement of intent goes, this is the business, it shows that here we have a band that has taken alt-rock and turned it into something designed for mass consumption, without any thought to compromise or what current fad or fashion demands.
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