THE WASHINGTON POST

Broke Royals wants its music to ask good questions, not give answers

By: Chris Kelly

All of our great thinkers have toyed with the dichotomy of life’s questions and answers, whether Rainer Maria Rilke (“Love the questions themselves . . . Do not now seek the answers”) or “Rowdy” Roddy Piper (“Just when they think they have the answers, I change the questions”).

Philip Basnight, the frontman of Broke Royals, agrees. “If someone is giving you answers on TV — pundits, horrible presidents — it seems like they are the most full” of it, he explains. “It’s the people who are trying to get to better questions, trying to figure out where we’re going as a society that have the most interesting things to say.”

The D.C. band follows such a character on its new album, “Saint Luxury.” The eponymous creation is a runaway angel who leaves heaven in search of better questions, across an album of pristine pop-rock influenced by the precise songwriting of Spoon and the way “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” crafted a narrative via a “circus tent” full of characters.