The lovechild of a studio experiment that was never meant to make it out into the wild, Los Angeles’ American Royalty constructs an unlikely yet glowingly functional blend of dark garage rock and poignant electronica. This creative soundscape is topped off by the two vocal leads of Marc Gilfry and Billy Scher, whose pipes both seem to fall somewhere in the realm of where eerie and soul meet back on the other side; altogether resulting in one of the most innovative sounds to haunt independent music today.
The psychedelic blues-rock three piece has already begun making their mark on the road over the past year, turning heads in the touring circuit with their unorthodox stage set up, a penchant for sprinkling in reworked bits of both the classic and obscure, and an explosively energetic and entrancingly unique live performance.
The group has won over supporters in both the rock and electronic genres; playing on both coasts with friends and advocates Drop the Lime, Superhumanoids and Hanni El Khatib... warming up the crowd for everyone from Metronomy and Digitalism to Kisses, and sharing festival bills with the likes of The Flaming Lips, Snoop Dogg and Thievery Corporation
Matchstick, the group’s newest offering, was written in the summer of 2011 in Venice Beach where Scher and Gilfry were couch surfing, waiting for their tour to start.
“We came to the studio with these demos that were inherently very electronic, because we wrote them in our friends’ living rooms,” said Scher, “We were lucky enough to record at Infrasonic Sound with lots of great vintage equipment that helped us sonically flesh out the demos by adding a complementary analogue instrumentation.”
The EP showcases the trio experimenting with the balance between both genres. “We had this idea for the EP to try to highlight the interplay between analogue and synthetic,” said Gilfry, “At times in the final recordings it's hard to tell what is man and what is machine – there are electronic drums using samples of our live drum kit, synths running through grungy amps sounding like guitar. We're excited because we feel like this is a step in a new direction for us, which is obviously exciting for any artist.”