Photos: Royal Coda Outgrows the Room in Downtown Las Vegas

A show booked for Backstage Bar & Billiards ended up across the hall at Fremont Country Club as Royal Coda brought the Nights of the Blue Swan Tour to Las Vegas.

There is a door inside Backstage Bar & Billiards that leads into Fremont Country Club.

On August 20, Royal Coda needed what was on the other side of it.

The Nights of the Blue Swan Tour had originally been booked for the smaller Backstage Bar & Billiards room on Fremont Street. Enough tickets sold that the show was moved onto the larger Fremont Country Club stage. Same building. Bigger room.

It also said plenty about the audience Royal Coda has built.

This wasn’t a package stacked with four interchangeable bands. Las Vegas’ Amarionette opened the night, followed by Strawberry Milk Cult and Dwellings. By the time Royal Coda came on, the bill had moved through several different versions of alternative and post-hardcore music.

Amarionette had the hometown slot. The Las Vegas band has been around since 2010, moving between post-hardcore, pop, funk and R&B across a catalog that has never stayed particularly interested in one genre. They were also the natural local addition to this tour. Singer Quinn Martin’s higher register and the band’s cleaner, groove-heavy songs fit comfortably alongside the bands that followed while sounding distinctly like Amarionette.

Strawberry Milk Cult changed things immediately.

The Denver band doesn’t come from exactly the same musical neighborhood as the rest of the bill. There is indie rock, punk and garage rock in what they do, with songs that are much less concerned with showing you how many notes can fit inside a measure. On a tour full of musicians capable of making guitar players stare at other guitar players, Strawberry Milk Cult provided a different reason to pay attention.

Then Dwellings started bending everything again.

The California band is much closer to the technical post-hardcore associated with Royal Coda. Guitar lines overlap. Songs turn abruptly. Clean vocals sit over sections that can get surprisingly heavy before moving somewhere else entirely.

Trying to photograph music like this can be funny. You wait for the obvious moment, and the song has already changed.

Dwellings are particularly good at that. A section starts to settle into a groove, then a guitar comes through from another direction and suddenly everybody onstage is somewhere else. The crowd knew the material well enough to follow every turn.

Royal Coda took that idea even further.

Kurt Travis walked onto the Fremont Country Club stage with one of the stranger collections of musicians you can put in a single band. Will Swan and Sergio Medina on guitar. Joseph Arrington on drums. Steffen Gotsch on bass.

There is an absurd amount of history between those five people.

Dance Gavin Dance, A Lot Like Birds, Sianvar, Stolas and several other projects all intersect somewhere around Royal Coda. You could spend half an article drawing lines between everybody and still end up explaining why somebody played with somebody else fifteen years ago.

None of that was necessary once they started playing.

Swan and Medina are very different guitar players, which is exactly what makes watching them together interesting. Swan can drop a strange, almost funky guitar phrase into the middle of a song that otherwise has no business being funky. Medina moves through the other side of it, adding another guitar part instead of simply doubling what Swan is doing.

Arrington somehow has to referee all of this from behind the drums.

Then Kurt Travis sings over it.

Travis has always had an unusual voice for heavy music. He doesn’t need to fight the instruments for space. His melodies can sit above complicated guitar parts and make a Royal Coda song sound deceptively simple until you start paying attention to everything happening underneath him.

From the crowd, there were plenty of people paying attention.

This audience knew the details.

Heads turned toward Swan when a guitar part came around. People shouted lyrics back at Travis. Phones appeared when somebody recognized what was coming next. There were fans watching individual musicians as much as they were watching Royal Coda as a whole.

That makes sense with this band.

There is an entire section of post-hardcore fandom that follows musicians through projects the way sports fans follow players after a trade. Kurt Travis fans followed him from Dance Gavin Dance into A Lot Like Birds and his solo work. Will Swan has Dance Gavin Dance, Sianvar and Blue Swan Records. Sergio Medina has Stolas, Sianvar and Eidola connections. Joseph Arrington played alongside Travis in A Lot Like Birds.

Royal Coda could have survived as a curiosity based on those names alone.

Eight years after their first record, that’s clearly not what happened.

The people packed into Fremont Country Club weren’t treating Royal Coda like a side project.

They came to see Royal Coda.

And that circles back to the best part of the night.

Las Vegas has plenty of shows where everyone knows exactly what room they’re walking into months in advance. Arena tour goes into arena. Theater tour goes into theater. Club tour goes into club.

This one changed.

Royal Coda was advertised at Backstage Bar & Billiards. The ticket listing still carried the BBB address. The crowd kept buying tickets. Eventually, the little room wasn’t going to do it.

So they opened the other door.

Fremont Country Club has hosted bands far larger than Royal Coda over the years, but on August 20 the move itself was more interesting than the size of the room. A post-hardcore band on its own headlining tour came into downtown Las Vegas and sold enough tickets that the original plan had to change.

No manufactured milestone was needed.

The bigger stage was right there.