The most interesting thing about Royale Lynn is probably her backstory, in how she started off making one-of-the-boys country music before jumping over to active-rock and alt-metal. In the relationship between these two sausage parties, it’s usually the other way round, though at least where she is now can be a bit more mindful of more than one woman at a time. Parlaying that into tens of millions of global streams is probably pushing it, mind.
Not to denigrate Lynn’s artistic merits from the jump, but it’s not like this avenue isn’t easier to succeed in if you know which buttons to push. The sonic palette is a given, and a living status of Nashville via rural Ontario will likely average out into some picture of true, working-class American ethics to the right audience. Having pre-release single Death Wish dedicated to first responders tickles the patriotic bone that Americans can’t get enough of. Evidently, then, Lynn knows how to efficiently build her radio-rock base for mass appeal. It’s just a shame that, like vast swathes of the others who try, it’s not very good.
‘Unimpressive’ is the more accurate word to use, and it applies across the board. Whereas similar acts might sometimes land upon a fringe confluence of factors that works for them—a good vocalist paired with a similarly okay hook, most commonly—Black Magic is disappointingly lacking in anything of the sort. The closest that it comes is Inside Out, where a cooler lockstep stalk is a sign of what could be achieved more often through a lot of trimmed fat. (It’s not good enough to overlook how it’s not pronounced “nucular”, but hey, it’s a start.) Beyond that, Black Magic produces a series of overweight, ill-defined instrumentals with barely any body to speak of, downtuned to crowbar themselves out of that precise outcome. That’s bad enough, but whenever a programmed beat is implanted (and always with pride of position as everything falls out from behind it), it heaps on another layer of pre-packaged sterility.
Naturally, when that’s all applied to a full body of work, it drags something wretched. E.V.I.L. is where it begins to set in, as guitars, drums and electronics are crushed and blended into a slurry that, all at once, is overbearingly present, devoid of weight, and missing any compelling features. And that’s only track two; there’s plenty more where it comes from! It’d be nice to give some further examples, but Black Magic is so chronically nondescript for its duration that attempting to isolate them is a fool’s errand. It’s all smothered by production that can’t reach its own overblown ambitions, nor process subtlety or quietness in a way that’s not totally canned. You’ll remember that there’s an Evanescence-style piano opening to the title track, not what it achieves (if anything at all).
And don’t even start with the false hope that Lynn can pull something back as a frontwoman, because that’s not the case either. That’s established right from the beginning with Greed, and how the closest she comes to being the leather-lunged powerhouse that women in this scene are predetermined as is still a ways off. Regularly, Lynn isn’t a bad singer; it’s the clinging unimpressiveness that leaves any attempt at liftoff quashed. Irregularly, you’ll pick up on an inexcusable flatness, or a chorus on Dragon where it sounds as though she’s singing through her nose. Worse again is Witch, where a taunting higher register sounds heliumed up before it struggles to even maintain its own ‘capricious’ persona.
A moment of solace on that song comes from realising that, rather than attempting to delve into brat-metal and make this all legitimately indefensible, it’s more just an affect to play up Lynn’s themes of mental health. Far be it for US-based radio-rockers to exercise tact and shrewdness, after all. But taking into account how unerringly Black Magic sticks to its scene’s prescribed norms for that kind of thing, it’s all fine enough. The occasional clanger is to be expected (“I need that high like a drug,” proclaims Death Wish, which…you don’t say!); more often, though, it’s nothing exceptional, one way or the other. Dark Mode deserves a special mention, however, for illustrating the crux of Lynn’s nightmarish smalltown isolation growing up as her inner demons and wearing black clothes. Not exactly Kristin Hayter, is it?
At the end of the day—and despite how most of its noteworthy moments are the ones you can poke fun at—Black Magic will probably succeed in what it wants to do. How could it not? It’s the safe, superficially modern rock product that fast-tracks its way onto US radio, leaving deeper criticism to be functionally pointless. It can be criticised, certainly; there’s enough about it that outright fails to land. And regardless of the yards-thick insulation that Lynn seems to have coated herself in, the music hasn’t been improved by it. Anything to make the playlisters’ lives easier, though, right? At least If We All Drove Trucks was so shameless in its slavishness to the format that it was funny.
For fans of: Flyleaf, Skillet, Evanescence
‘Black Magic’ by Royale Lynn is released on 27th June on Epitaph Records.
Words by Luke Nuttall
