bio
Royale is:
Carl Douglas Greene - Guitar & Vocals
Greg Cook - Bass
Chad Sturdivant - Drums
Royale has been perfecting their unique brand of good ol’ fashioned rock n’ roll since the Fall of 2008. They’re a simple group of dudes whose favorite past-time is getting LOUD. Influences pinball from Bowie to Black Sabbath to Queens of the Stone Age to The Mars Volta. The result is music that is accessible with frequent tangents into tribal psychedelia, fuzzed-out Latin grooves and boisterously heavy guitar riffs.
Stages all across South-Eastern Michigan have housed their sonic onslaught in recent years, including the Blind Pig in Ann Arbor and PJ’s Lager House in Detroit. With the up-coming release of their debut, self-titled album, Royale is poised to make a lot of noise in Michigan’s rock scene.
Royales’ New Self-titled Record
is available in CD and MP3 from www.CDBaby.com
Become a FAN of Royale on Facebook!
About the Record: It’s rare today to hear a band easily balance deft musicianship, dense composition and mass appeal. Rarer still is the group that does all this with a working understanding of balls-to-the-wall rock ‘n’ roll.
Michigan’s Royale is that rare band, and their debut, self-titled album back this up with huge guitars, rumbling bass lines, relentless drumming and strong, towering vocals, delivering a dense, hard rock pilgrimage mapped by smart songwriting and impeccable chops.
Formed in the fall of 2008 when singer and songwriter Carl Greene teamed with drummer Chad Sturdivant and bassist Greg Cook, the band quickly set to writing, and was gigging by November. The trio quickly built a loyal following in their native metro Detroit on the success of their dynamic performances.
Before Royale, Greene played in the experimental, instrumental group Viva la Machine, and his vision for this new project was to get back to basics: big riffs and bigger hooks, less jamming, more structure. While the band’s earliest tunes, like “The Entrepreneur” and “The Waltz,” stayed true to this new mantra, barreling forward with muscle car force and fuzzed-out swagger, it wasn’t long before the band was stretching out, experimenting with space, texture and form to produce twisting, linear arrangements like the ambitious “Caravan” and airy “Holy,” marked by jazz-tinged drumming, melodic bass and echo-soaked guitars.
Sewn together on the band’s debut long-player, the songs compliment each other to produce a satisfying, varied listen, transitioning seamlessly from the distortion-driven force of “Old Skeletons” to the Latin-flavored, acoustic-tinged “Widow,” and introspective balladry of “Walls” to the cocky strut “The Entrepreneur.”
Lyrically, Greene explores themes of distance, estrangement and striving for the unattainable, all well-suited topics for a music that, even at its most saturated, is in rooted in blues tones.
While countless groups continue to churn out filler riffs and throwaway tunes or brainstorm new ways to be weird to produce more artifice than art, Royale set out to simply make the best music possible and proved with this record that hard rock can still be as relevant, powerful and inventive as ever.
Royale was recorded, mixed and mastered by Dave Feeny at The Temper Mill in Ferndale, Mich., in late 2009 and early 2010, and is available in CD and MP3 from www.CDBaby.com
Recommended For Fans Of: Clutch, The Mars Volta, Muse, Tool, Led Zeppelin, Jeff Buckley, Queens of the Stone Age, Soundgarden, Audioslave.