By: Ben Salvo
Rating: 7/11

Pop driven and rock refined, the music of DC’s U.S. Royalty will definitely get some feet tapping.  Their EP Midsommar, features four original tracks of Americana groove and a remix of one track, “Keep It Cool” by Passion Pit’s Bo Flex.  There’s good news and bad news; the EP is a decent debut, but its main tracks are overshadowed by the one for which the band is least responsible.

Its main deficiency may be its tendency to lean toward pop clichés.  The lyrics seem undeniably weak in a lot of spots, using repetition of semi-catchy lines in place of fully developed choruses (“Ain’t nobody gonna tell me to stop, no.  Ain’t nobody gonna tell me to stop, yeah!”).  Most of the tracks sound a little overproduced, with some of the better instrumentation being faded out too much, filters that cause the bass lines to sound iffy, and (I’ll be damned if not) vocal pitch correction.  In the indie community, people only want Auto-Tune to be used in blatantly ironic or aesthetically necessary ways; otherwise, leave it out.  In the end, these guys come out sounding a little too generic, with tendencies toward the Killers or Franz Ferdinand.

Midsommar does have its moments of greatness.  “Rats” begins with a driving tonal orchestration and is soon backed by a rhythmic guitar scratch melody, eventually pulling out all the stops to deliver a terrific rock song.  The first intended single, “Every Summer,” does its job well, giving a quick cross section of U.S. Royalty’s style.  And there’s a hidden synth line in there somewhere (chalk another one up to production) that’s actually really bangin’.  Their misses are pretty apparent on this EP, yet they’re still not without moments of temporary genius. The intro to “Where Are You Now” is a salty cowboy ballad, something interesting for them to expand upon, but it drops the charm and becomes unmemorable.  “Keep It Cool” (their version) suffers from a busted hook that doesn’t really stick, but its trippy bridges and crying guitar solos save it in the end.

The best track on the album is Bo Flex’s remix of “Keep It Cool.”  It gets a breath of life from the addition of instantly recognizable synths, and the “busted hook” mentioned earlier transforms into a real nice sample.
 
U.S. Royalty will play the Knitting Factory December 2.  Look for them to play “Raincoats,” a creaky jam you won’t find on Midsommar (it’s on their myspace), and hope for a guest appearance from Bo Flex.