Album Review: The Royston Club - 'Songs For The Spine'
The Royston Club return with a more complex and emotive second album.
Songs For The Spine releases 8th August and is a huge step forward for the Wrexham four-piece. Their debut album Shaking Hips and Crashing Cars reached an impressive #16 in the charts and was an excellent example of a really strong indie debut, but this next effort represents a shift in maturity and an advancement in songwriting.
Alongside the album, the band will be embarking on their biggest UK headline tour to date, featuring an impressive London show at the O2 forum Kentish Town. The boys are excellent live, bringing a passionate liveliness to every gig which results in a fervent energy around the crowd and a right singalong.
The album’s opener is the band’s darker answer to their debut’s closing track. It utilizes the same loud, intense, at times majestic sound, but where ‘Cherophobe’ called out for help, ‘Shivers’ begs for it. It’s double-entrondric hook hints at the dangers of partying a little too hard, a reference that would feel out of place on their first outing but sets the tone here. The dual vocals in the final chorus create a frenzy of emotion and energy. It’s the band telling us their debut was just the start.
‘The Patch Where Nothing Grows’ is more classic Royston Club. A solid riff kicks things off and is sprinkled throughout, there’s a catchy chorus and a bridge to keep us on our toes. As the first single, it was released a year prior to the album, a considerate amount of time for a young, developing band. This track would feel at home on Shaking Hips and Crashing Cars but also fits in here. It acts almost as a checkpoint as to how far the band has come since.
‘Glued to the Bed’ is a good mixture between these two feelings, acting as an effective and natural stepping stone between the albums. It’s gritty and sweet at the same time and describes love as both thrilling and disappointing, wonderful and painful. About the song, guitarist Ben Mathis said, “I wanted to write about the cynicism towards love that heartbreak can bring, the bittersweet memory of a relationship and the raw aftermath of a breakup. It's about the push and pull between needing to forget and wanting to hold on to what was lost, about how grief can become your entire atmosphere and distort your sense of self.
“Looking back, I see a lot of what I wrote as a defence mechanism after being hurt. I dismiss love as this pretentious, performative thing and in the chorus I sound afraid, pleading for the next relationship not to leave me in the same state.”
Lead singer, Tom Faithful delivers all these more sensitive and emotional lyrics with the same earnestness as ever. He’s simply a very likeable frontman that fans can really relate to.
‘Spinning’ illustrates this perfectly, at the same time displaying his vocal versatility. It starts as a very sweet, slower, more ballad-y track which comes as a great surprise. Where often their guitars are heavy, they are more tender here. The song builds louder and more impactful, a showcase of the huge leap forward in the quality and complexity of the songwriting. It’s a rollercoaster in only three minutes.
It was about time that The Royston Club had a real colossal epic, and album closer ‘The Ballad of Glen Campbell’ certainly fits that bill. It’s every advancement we’ve seen in the new album, all come together to fruition. It rises and falls, builds up to be cut down and is packed with passion, intensity, pain and joy in all of its six minutes. For this song to be in a second album is nothing short of impressive, and really speaks for how far this band could go.
The Royston Club have swapped upbeat, catchy indie tunes detailing night outs and run ins with girls with genuinely heartfelt, more complex and emotional tracks about love and loss. It’s a huge and vital step forward, whilst not abandoning their distinct sound and still remaining very recognisable to their fans. They have simply begun to grow and develop. Everyone loves a garage debut that's more like a soundtrack to a bender, think Arctic Monkeys, The Kooks or even The Strokes, but each of these bands had to evolve and grow from these roots, not just to stay relevant and popular, but to build their legacies. That looks like what the band are doing here, and it seems like this is just the beginning for them.
Words by Luca Jarman
