"The long-running Canadian band Royal Ottawa first came onto my radar in 2023 with their massive double album Carcosa, but they’ve been releasing music off and on since the 1990s (and their origins go back even further than that, as multiple band members played in short-lived 1980s post-punk group Bugs Harvey Oswald). Carcosa was a hefty dose of dense, hard-to-classify, long-in-the-tooth rock music; I referenced bands like Eleventh Dream Day, The Church, and The Dream Syndicate when I wrote about it, which should give you some idea.

"After a career spent releasing music fairly sporadically, it’s a pleasant surprise to get a brand-new EP from Royal Ottawa less than a year and a half after Carcosa; perhaps their new partnership with The Beautiful Music has encouraged them, as the Ottawa-based label has stepped up to put out the four-song, twenty-two-minute Here Comes Everybody on vinyl.Royal Ottawa continue cataloguing their version of post-college rock, post-Paisley Underground psychedelia/folk rock on these four songs: like a lot of the greatest moments on Carcosa, opening track “Golden Eyes” is a rocker that sounds like it just came into being one day, or like it’s an excerpt of some kind of eternal jam. “Range Road” similarly conjures up this lost feeling, though it’s a bit of a softer folk rock take on it, pairing nicely with “Pine” (probably the closest thing to the “guitar pop” side of college rock on here). Of course, half of Here Comes Everybody is taken up by the ten-minute title track, and it’s here where Royal Ottawa fully give in to the motorik vibes and endurance-test desert rock music that hover around the edges of their sound. There are plenty of different “kinds” of ten-minute songs out there; “Here Comes Everybody” is the steady, forward-chugging kind, one that doesn’t flag for a second and achieves meditative bliss in a way that’s not unlike how it feels to take in Carcosa as a whole.

"Royal Ottawa are clearly locked into something–their sound is aged, but as exciting as any new band."