by LE Francis
I became a Royal Coda fan organically — I’ll give anything guitarist Sergio Medina plays on a listen out of gratitude for Stolas’ (R.I.P.) “Living Creatures” & “Allomaternal” albums. & Royal Coda started as a collaboration between Medina & former A Lot Like Birds members (another band I dearly miss) — vocalist Kurt Travis & drummer Joseph Arrington.
The band is fairly young, established in 2017. They immediately signed to Blue Swan Records & released their self-titled first album in April of 2018. After a brief stint with guitarist Thomas Erak of The Fall Of Troy & Just Like Vinyl, & Happiness-era Dance Gavin Dance bassist Jason Ellis, they shifted into their current lineup with bassist Stefan Gotsch & DGD guitarist Will Swan.
Their second album, “Compassion,” dropped in 2019 & like many other fans, I was looking forward to finally catching them on the 2020 Dance Gavin Dance U.S. tour. Then the pandemic happened & things got fucky.
The band’s answer to all the chaos is the equally chaotic “To Only a Few at First.” To my ear, this is the first Royal Coda album that actually sounds like what would happen if Stolas and A Lot Like Birds loved each other very much & made a little band that all the Swancore nerds would consider a super-group.
The album wastes no time telling you exactly who it is. It opens with the punchy, meandering second single, “As We Fall Into Deep Waters.” They released a video for the song in early August that plays trippy, unsaturated scenes of the band in an empty room against shots of Travis singing along the banks of a river (watch it at youtu.be/oOEY_R3oy14).
The second track, “We Slowly Lose Hope for Things to Come,” is the frantically dreamy first single originally released in July. Travis creates a sense of awe in the margins of the song where legato echoes, and vocal lines lay across a rhythm with growing tension, that eventually blows the song open. Travis calls back with his signature frantic, staccato creating a choppy, swaying force that barrels into an argumentative descent into oblivion — “Just sign your life away!”
“Insatiate, the Senses” draws the listener in with eerie, fragmented guitars that blend in and out of the softness of Travis’ voice & become a whispering counterpart to the unrelenting rhythm section. The song eventually blooms into a shadowy chaos cast by an increasingly dark resolution in the lyrics. “One Last Time, Like Hypothermia” starts off on the same foot, dancing with a bass line that pops in and out of the mix with dazzling result.
But for me, “Screen Time Overload” hits just right. The song opens on a meandering guitar riff & winds into a punchy, ridiculously catchy chorus that rips open into a soft, phased out postscript, “I’ve been wrestling / with the idea that you love me.” The guitar has feet in this song & seems to playfully answer some of the lines with an almost sing-song quality that makes the mellow-voiced assertion, “You can never hurt me,” feel like a jeer.
The second half of the album opens with the title track “To Only a Few at First.” The song feels irregularly heavy, the soft edges of the verses swell with a romantic sense of rebellion that counters a more chaotic rhythmic undertone. Towards the end, subdued, symbolic fragments of lyric are tucked into reverb-lush lines in a way that calls back to some of my favorite Stolas songs.
There is an frantic, unrelenting sense of motion in “Once Clinging to the Reeds” that mellows out in “It Found a Different Path.” Both songs meditate on connection & while the lyrics vary in attitude there is an existential undercurrent in both – how are we spending our time & what does it mean to be alone?
The album wraps with “Where The Air Seemed To Cease,” a song driven by the opening tension of Travis’ rapid-fire vocals before descending into chaos with a fierce sense of rhythmic punctuation reminiscent of “Conversation Piece” era A Lot Like Birds. The track is threaded together with soft melodic pauses & frenetic rhythmic passages that pull it tightly into the final fade.
When all is said and done, this is easily my favorite Royal Coda album and one of my favorite albums of 2022. It does all the things you expect of it & more. & the more I listen, the more I hear beautiful refrains & whispers tucked into the corners of the songs.
The album is widely available & can be found on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon. You can pick up a vinyl or other merch at royalcoda.merchnow.com. The band is touring in Fall/Winter of 2022 with Eidola, Rain City Drive, & Body Thief. You can follow them on Twitter @RoyalCoda or on Instagram @Royal.Coda.
LE Francis is the fiction editor for Sage Cigarettes Magazine.
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