Palaye Royale - The Bastards (2020)
2020's "The Bastards" is the first album Palaye Royale put out after I started listening to them. In their discography up to that point, it seems like more of the same, which certainly is not a bad thing. Their music has always felt like it fell into the intersection between Emo and Grunge to me, two genres which I'm heavily partial to, and both their instrumentation, vocal style and most signature production give them a very particular sound that makes them interesting and immediately recognizable to me. The album as a whole is very cohesive with it's sound, as well as its lyrics. It seems to work from a similar place as Green Day's "American Idiot", following a long line of bands working with indie labels. It might be a little quaint to center the inconceivable warmongering of American culture in a counter-culture music album, but as long as it remains basically true, I feel vindicated in enjoying this music without reservations. This album's mission statement is very overtly stated in the second track of the album "Massacre, The American Dream", and returns in different facets again and again. At a first listen many songs might not actually center the topic, this track sets up the rest of the album very nicely. In a way, the construction of the album does add a lot of nuance to the songs which might be illegible if the listened to on their own. I'm as of now unsure whether that's a good thing or not, as I'm personally a great advocate for beating people over the head with criticism. As a piece of art, it's at least interesting. While the first two pieces set up the theme of the album for me, the rest each pick up some aspect of the topic, and they usually make a catchy, sometimes difficult to scan 3 minutes of it. There are songs centering explicitly dissociation ("Hang on to Yourself") and propaganda ("Fucking With My Head") as well as the various internal anxieties associated with wars ("Anxiety", "Lonely", "Tonight is the Night I Die"). I'm not entirely convinced the order of the tracks matters beyond the first two and the last two.
I've liked the several of these tracks before I listened to them as an album, especially those they chose to feature as singles. I think Palaye Royale - or whoever is doing their marketing - have a very good eye for identifying the catchiest brain-worms to put out as singles, something not entirely to be taken for granted when it comes to these bands. "Hang on to Yourself" in particular has a hookline that is impossible to escape once it's got its hooks into me, and even though most of their songs are harmonically constructed very simply, they usually require a very specific instrumentation to sound right. It's what I've heard referred to as the "Metallica effect", where the music isn't technically complicated or put together with any special geniality, but instead it's the specific musicians, the energy they bring to the performance, and the actual specific sound engineering that makes the songs kick properly. I think "Masochist" is a nice example for this tendency. Remington Leigh's signature deceptive cadence that I'm not sure aren't just adlibs performed in place of regular cadences. Is used here over and over again, and harmonically, the song oscillates between two or three chords, but it still somehow has decent forward momentum and sounds like a complete song that is genuinely not easy to just play.
The final two number depart from the rest of the album and with that, from the usual Palaye Royale Style. "Redeemer" is almost colla voce for the longest part, and "King of Lies" is... well, it's a little experimental. Not really in a way that makes it difficult to listen to, but enough that I probably wouldn't have listened to it were it not in the album rotation.
The structure of the album doesn't really help me appreciate any single song more, than I would have otherwise, but it's definitely made me notice "Redeemers" and "Little Bastards" more than I would have otherwise, when what's presented is the top rated or listened to titles of a band.