Alone At The Microphone

Royal City are Aaron Riches, Jim Guthrie, Simon Osborne and Lonnie James and they hail from Toronto. The Rough Trade label affectionately refers to their music as “spacey drunken blues”, and they more than live up to that description on the second album, Alone At The Microphone.

Fast developing a reputation as one of the hardest working and most interesting live bands around, their sophomore effort is a bizarre, bewildering but always charming collection. They deliver stark melancholia (‘Dank Is The Air Of Death And Loathing’) and quirky humour (‘My Brother Is The Meatman’) by the songload, and elsewhere mix up a cocktail of blues, country, folk and jangly pop, which they’ve refined into a very distinctive and idiosyncratic sound. Cuts like ‘Daisies’ will linger in the memory box marked catchy and strange.

There are no duds here, even if a couple of things are a little underwhelming. Having said that, Royal City sound like one best live propositions around. Catch ’em if they’re round your way.