Royal Trux

PURCHASE:Drag City //
PURCHASE:Amazon

JJ'S TRUXROX LINK!!!


HOWLING HEX 2007 ..
BIO(circa 1997)
dissonant junkie NIGHTMARE
..."In a fit of Miles Davis-inspired bravado, Herrema and Hagerty allegedly spent a recording advance by their label, Drag City, on smack, only to ask the impoverished indie label for more money to make the record."...
revealing INTERVIEWS
..."So, I got my friend to introduce me to Neil, and Neil was just a fucking freak! He was an evil fucking bastard. After the show we were hanging out and this girl I knew was there also. Neil was all fucked up and he was talking to her, he lit this lighter and the girl's hair just went up in flames. But, I knew that I needed to get to know him. Neil was living in this abandoned warehouse with a couple of other guys. The place was like a huge installment place.... These were the days when we were doing a lot of acid, it was very fucked up. I knew I had to get my friend to take me to this warehouse and then I would not leave. So, I did! I didn't leave for two weeks. I brought a half a sheet of acid and got to know Neil. It was very difficult I must say." (Jennifer Herrema)...RTX homepage (archived)
..."We're pretty much writing songs about everyone around us, and they aren't living the rock and roll life. They could be at a gas station, in a bar, in an office, anywhere. But we see them and we try to imagine their lives, try to talk about them in a way that isn't patronizing or reductive. Like, Harmony Korine is the usual spoiled artistic take on everyday life, that transformation of the everyday into some kind of freakshow where the middle-class and the smartasses can spin off on mundanity, either thinking it holds something profound in it, or just cos they think the whole thing's fucking laughable.
"I watched 'Gummo' and I felt like a participant in snobbery. We really aren't that cynical yet, or rather, we came through that kind of attitude to realize how wrong it was, how short it sold things. Rock is based on moments of simplicity. We just base our music on moments where a dozen ideas are happening at once. Because that's how we feel, that's how we rationalize our existence." (Neil Hagerty)... Bleedmusic, October 2000
..."The Voice is just one of those things, like Karl Marx or the Don't Tread On Me flag. The Village Voice staff from 1970. The way I see it, there's a certain force operating underneath social life. To me. Royal Trux is like the trip, like the word life. It's like, I'm on a Royal Trux." (Hagerty) [A conversation here about communism and its connection to the Don't Tread On Me flag too confusing to transcribe.]... Rollerderby, 1992
..."These agents from the other side who are fighting for world domination, but more like controlling people and systemizing everything, they attack Yin Jim and the Bones of a Dead Coyote because they think they've got the crystals on them, but the crystals are at home and all they've got is heroin. Back home, W. Lester Duo can't wait anymore so he starts looking around for the stash and he finds the crystals. He thinks they're heroin. Since Yin Jim's been waylaid by these other agents, he goes ahead and does it up. Cut back and the Bones are just laying there because Yin Jim's been taken away. He has to be in the vicinity so there can be a strong psychic bond to animate him. Yin Jim's concentration was broken by the agents interrogating him about where the crystals are. W. Lester Duo does so much of the crystals that it makes him puke. The crystals come out with his vomit and goes down into the sewer system and this sewage-vomit creature rises out of the San Francisco Bay. Meanwhile, Yin Jim gets beat up and hit so hard that it releases some psychic anger and reanimates the Bones, who run to W. Lester Duo, who's laying in the bathroom all fucked up. The coyote passes on the energy, because they're all psychic agents. Psychic warriors. You know what I'm saying?" (Neil Hagerty)... Bananafish 6, August 1991
...Despite the myth that precedes them, Hagerty and Herrema aren't a coupla' wastoids cruisin' on the vapors of Exile-era Stones. In fact, most folks would be shocked to know just how calculated the plan behind the Royal Trux entity is, and how lucid and down-to-earth the minds behind that plan are.
Which takes us back to the late-'80s and the oft-cited, yet rarely heard (discounting the recent Matador re-issues) garage band-cum-art experiment Pussy Galore... Herrema explains: "I think a lot of people got to see Neil's guitar work through Pussy Galore, and for a lot of people that was what Pussy Galore was about. Of course, there was another faction that was into the cabaret aspect of it, the whole work in progress that was Pussy Galore."
Having created Royal Trux in high school, at least on a theoretical level, Hagerty accepted [Jon] Spencer and [Christina] Martin's proposition to join the Pussy Galore project primarily as a means of furthering the Trux mission. The two moved Hagerty to Washington, DC, paid his rent, and supplied him with a wage. This allowed him the opportunity to save money and establish a home base where Herrema could join him upon graduating to commence work on the first Trux record. "We had been writing songs (for Royal Trux) before Pussy Galore. I mean, we wrote songs for Pussy Galore [but] it was just something we were doing. And [Hagerty] was just waiting to quit as soon as we could get the money together to record the first record." (Herrema) ... The Big Takeover 43, 1998
...Just when things were looking good for Royal Trux everything suddenly spiraled out of control. Shortly after they completed Thank You, Virgin's president of A&R, who had signed them, left the company.
"He was gone after Thank You was released [in 1995] and there was nobody left in the office who had any idea why he had signed us." Worse still was the news that David Briggs had died of lung cancer.
..."[Virgin Records] wanted to be part of what we did," adds Jennifer. "They wanted our input but there was nothing to talk about with them. I got on the phone with Virgin's vice-president for the last time and it was all about the demographic. We're talking 17 and under, that's all they cared about. Personally I wouldn't talk to anybody under the age of 17, much less make music for them."...The Wire 199, October 2000
...Hagerty and Herrema live nearly two hours out of Washington - far enough so they only venture into the city "about once a year," associating strictly with one another and with Herrema's folks, who live an hour away. The area they've settled in is rural and picturesque - like a jigsaw puzzle sprung to life. The hills roll, the horses rollick, and Confederate flags flap gently in the breeze. It's the kind of place where the rich people name their houses and the poor people name their guns.... I take a left at the Mount Lebanon Baptist Church, onto a narrow, winding road dotted with spacious houses. Herrema had warned me the addresses on their street were laid out nonsequentially - which doesn't sound legal, however appropriate it might be for Royal Trux - but I have no problem spotting their house. It's the one flying a pirate flag from the top of the staff. ("The asshole across the way has a Dixie flag, so we put up the Jolly Roger," Hagerty says later. "Our sympathies are clear."...
...Hagerty and Herrema have been releasing RTX records for a decade. They have eight LPs under their studded cowboy belts, plus enough singles to form a double-CD set (last year's Singles, Live, Unreleased). Each record has featured new collaborators, a fresh recording method, different rules for song structure, and new ways of examining their music altogether. If something's wrong they fix it; if something's right they fix it.
Seeing Royal Trux play live is an even bigger gamble. At times they are an absolutely unbeatable rock-and-roll machine; other times it's like watching your grandfather parallel park. Hagerty has been known to forsake his guitar in favor of a synthesizer, or to sit on a stool and let the audience examine his back for 50 minutes, or play astonishing Hendrix-blessed guitar lines only to bury them behind a heavy-handed keyboard player the Trux picked up from a classic-rock cover band. Herrema can sing as if possessed, swaggering faceless behind her stringy mane and good-guy cowboy hat; or she can grunt her lyrics in a grotesque monotone, seemingly wrapped up in an entirely different number than the band. Or she can ditch her post mid-show for a bathroom break.
The backup band is likewise kept in a state of perpetual flux. A bassist was recently dismissed after a pair of albums as "too skilled"; the couple replaced him with the aforementioned keyboardist, who left after Accelerator, when Jennifer and Neil remodeled the group as a Jefferson Airplane homage with Herrema taking female lead and Hagerty and a former drummer on male backup.
"Rock and roll used to be thought of as a unique combination of individuals coming together to create a sound," Hagerty explains when asked about their rotating lineup. "That idea is total bullshit, just another myth. We fashion ourselves after jazz sessions from the '20s, which were made up of whoever was around, or in the tradition of the Brill Building, Phil Spector, or Stax-Volt, where there were anonymous session musicians. This way there's a different chemistry for each session."...Puncture 42, 1998
TESTIMONIALS
To say that the Royal Trux are an enigma would be an understatement. Even in the indie rock scene they seem to be considered a dirty word... "they were the bastard offspring... the white trash neighbours." Every once in a while their name would be trotted out, more as a subject for gossip or as a way to be ultra-into the scene. You can't just talk about Sonic Youth forever! There was lots to talk about; they were the weird neighbours that would always come home with a trailer full of junk that would clutter up their front yard.... Discorder 118, November 1992
Royal Trux's skuzzy biker image belies a music of great complexity, nuance and imagination. With a wash of organ here, and a little wah-wah there Royal Trux turn their devoted eyes to the music of the 70's, which they charmingly evoke rather than recreate. Their sound, that can rise from dissonant squalor to crystallized wonder in a minute, is filled with surprising instrumental juxtapostions and details not immediately heard. Neil and Jennifer people their songs with sad, deadly, humorous characters worthy of Bosch or Bourroughs. With a great sense of play and expirement, they are able to unearth a wide variety of emotionally revalatory moments, and they lace the brew with spicy guitar solos... Bomb Magazine NY, July 1997
Undoubtedly, there have been some who watched the progress of Royal Trux through the frisson haze added by such studied ghoulishness. Formed in Chicago in 1987 by vocalist Jennifer Herrema and, from the ruins of Pussy Galore, guitarist Neil Hagerty, Royal Trux's early output exuded the very finitude that makes people listen. It was lo-fi madness, drawing such approving appellations as "primitive... futuristic... an avant garde mess-thetic". The haphazard, crazed feedback and dissonances of their first self-titled album (1988, Royal Records) and its successor, Twin Infinitives (Drag City), provoked comparisons with Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica and early Zappa, although it's difficult to talk about the records' musical intention in quite the same way. They contained more references to disposable culture and B-movie sci-fi than anything in The Ramones or Cramps combined, others suggested the music was a product of 'a bad trip to the pharmacy'. The truth is probably somewhere in between. A long time ago.
Herrema, speaking in London from behind a sight-impairing fringe, is impatient on this point. "That's just one little tiny piece of what makes us what we are. It's not the whole picture, but then" - a concession - "it's easy to write about."... The Wire 171, May 1998
The last time I saw Royal Trux, they pulled into town in a road-worn van, unloaded a cheesy drum machine and a few guitars and amps and played a set so extreme, some of the alternophiles in the audience wondered aloud if it was even music. The group was the Trux nucleus of ex-Pussy Galore guitarist Neil Hagerty and voice-shredder supreme Jennifer Herrema. Hagerty played basic riffs and squalls of noise. The drum machine chomped like a drunk dancing on cheese. Herrema struck a provocative pose, pulled a black Stetson down over her eyes and blended her musicianly sandpaper scream with Hagerty's own Keith-Richards-on-the-skids vocals. It was rock & roll without the rock or the roll, getting by on sheer attitude and the most basic wellsprings of personal musicality.
That was half the fun of the indie-period Royal Trux: the holler, the howl, the sweet chaos of two talented people deconstructing rock & roll with the vindictive glee of the Lover savaging the unfaithful Beloved. The other half of the fun was hearing rock & roll ringing power-chord breaks, killer vocal-chorus hooks, rhythmic riffcraft poke its scraggly head up out of the chaos; those stretches of apparent noise and scree kept turning into indelible songs... Rolling Stone 711, 1995
word on the STREET (from "Classic or Dud?", an online discussion)
"Royal Trux played the worst show I ever saw.We saw them out at the back of The Garage afterwards and my friend Ben shouted at them for it."
"I remember when I just didnt get Royal Trux. They were so way out and Jennifer usually just stood there and smoked and didnt say/sing a word while Neil shot his wad on guitar. It seemed all made up at the moment and straight out of a bong to boot. It was 1993 when I got to see them three nights in a row in Chicago at Lounge Ax for a Drag City festival. They played the same 'list' every night but in TOTALLY different ways. They were deconstructing their own music and songs with little to no effort. The songs remaned the same but the forms were totally different, as if there was a subconscience map they were following. It totally blew my mind. They were HUGE! They totally burned. They were Blue Cheer. It was amazing. I have seen them in the last few years and they seem to have locked into a loud boogie blues rock thing that seems pretty simular from night to night. Maybe the drugs DID keep them open ended and hungry."
"DUD!!!!!!!!!...I used to like Cats n' Dogs. NEVER liked Twin Infinitives (also known as music for posers rockstar wannabe junkie art school drop outs) and, even though I thought the "aerosmithy" later album was listenable, I got bored of them. Now, I get nothing out of Cats N' Dogs except annoying attitude from self-absorbed, self-destructive, overgrown brats that think not taking showers is cool. That Aerosmithy one, though (with Ray-O-vac) is STILL okay, but rarely do I think to put it on. They annoy me. Yes."
"RTX will never be classic, but it certainly isn't dud. It's one of these cult footnotes in rockunroll history. Certainly not compulsory listening, but definitely worth investigating if hard drugs, dirty hair and space boogie usually interest you. Although I have "TI", "C&D" and weird live stuff, I confess I seldom listen to them. I mostly play their recent stuff, with "Thank You" remaining their highlight. Along with the now much-scorned "Give out but don't give up" by the Scream Team 94, "Thank You" is one of my alltime fave pastiche records, a proper pop record by a duo of brilliant songwriters who rarely before had released songs as straightforward. I think it's a good thing when a band reknowned for its "difficult listening material" comes out with a set of proper tunes with hooks and a high level of "hummability". The opening cut, "A Night To Remember", is in my mind comparable to such songs as the Stones' "Rocks Off!", the aforementioned Scream's "Jailbird" and "Rocks", Suede's "Metal Mickey" or Bowie's "Watch that Man". You know, songs you play before going out (a category of songs I love, I'll post a thread about that). And that's how I like my RTX: fast rockunroll with a blond cat on a hot tin roof's raspy growl telling me I'm gonna lose."
"Total Classic, or Total Dud, sometimes in the same song. Their last three (real, not Hand of Glory) albums were some of the best rock albs of the 90s. Unless Pound For Pound was 2000, which I think it might have been. Come ON, "Sunshine & Grease", "Dr. Gone" fucking awesome and anyone who doesn't think so should be tied to a pillar of salt in Caribou Country."
ABOMINATIONS
ROYAL TRUX, 1988 Drag City/Royal Records
It was my (apparently erroneous) belief that Jon & Julia were the primary form-disrupters in Pussy Galore. Drummers were around and drumming, Cristina was an occasional extra piece of gtr, and Neil Hagerty seemed to be an almost reactionary presence - giving the band his Stones fascination on gobs of Keithic-gtr-spurt and holding everything more or less inside of rock parameters. Well, I guess that wasn't the case, 'cause this debut LP by Neil's new band is as spacial fucked as any PG thing. Indeed, if anything this has less straight-rock-motion to it than any Shove release and I find myself comparing it to stuff like Alvaro ("Jesse James"), Antenna Jimmy Semens' with Beefheart-meets-Jandek, ("Bad Blood") and Billy Childish's recent splatter-blues ("Strawberry Soda"). Unpredictable, floundery, ragged & utterly great, this exists in a universe where technique has never existed in any real acceptable way.
--Forced Exposure 15, Sept. 1989
TWIN INFINITIVES, 1990 Drag City
The album was recorded, over an extended period, in San Francisco, after the first of many Trux migrations ("the Tuaregs of rock'n'roll" is how Neil describes their nomadism). Here, the couple quickly made a number of enemies.
"A lot of people were offended by us - we were pretty wild, when we weren't working on music we were just running around, acting like assholes, and totally into getting fucked up."
At first, Hagerty and Herrema worked with a wannabe session guitarist and rudimentary drummer, playing endless versions of the same four-song set (Velvet Underground's "Cool It Down", The Godz's "Radar Eyes", Graham Parson's "Wheels", Louis Armstrong's "Oh Lizzy").
After six months, the musicians split, and Trux started fucking around with the rehearsal tapes, cutting and splicing, looping and reversing them. They hit upon the idea of writing "basic, classic songs and combining them with totally random and unconscious music."
By this point, with their isolation from society deepening and substance-intake soaring, Royal Trux had gotten pretty estranged from reality. They started writing songs based on books they were reading by Philip K Dick and Thomas Disch, "real complicated science fiction, which we'd try to compress into three-minute rock operas".
"Neil was trying to reach VALIS," recalls Jennifer, referring to Philip K Dick's idea of a Vast Active Living Intelligence System. "Our windows had been smashed out, and we ran an aluminum foil antenna out the window attached to an FM receiver."
Neil: "We were into anything that was connected to that paranoia -is-really-enlightenment thing. Our idea was that the less conscious thought we put into the music, the more the random electronic gizmo element would take over."
Jennifer: "But underneath all the weird shit, we still had our roots, the music we loved at school like AC/DC, Led Zep, Stones. We still judged everything in terms of whether it was lame or rocking."
And so songs like "Edge Of The Ape Oven" compact together kosmik sound debris and crass rock riffs. Royal Trux pivot around the collision of The Cliche and the Anti-Cliche (the hitherto unheard and unimagined noise). Like other visionaries - Suicide, Faust, Fall - they combine minimalism and maximalism, repetition and randomness.
Given free use of a giant warehouse studio, the pair spent nine months recording "Twin Infinitives" using a stack of cheesy effect pedals, a clapped-out Moog synth and other thrift-store instruments.
The result is one of the most groggily disorientating records ever oozed, so crammed with nuanced delirium it'd take a lifetime to fathom. Amazingly, it garnered rave reviews, though Jennifer remains skeptical.
"I wanted to have X-Ray spex and see who really liked it enough to actually listen to it."
--Melody Maker, 6-19-93
Nodded-out dreamtime vocals, messy instrumental spills here and there -- Royal Trux's first album and singles were looped enough, yet still within the rock realm. Underneath it all was the blues base you'd expect from a founding Pussy Galore guitarist. But if on that debut, 1988's Royal Trux, Neil Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema spoke a language we could understand, on this year's double album, Twin Infinitives, they create their own tongue, then burn the Berlitz tapes. An indiscriminately dense, sprawled out mess of heavily electronicized sounds, it's not impenetrable, but neither is a bees nest. Stick your head inside and the metallic pulse of ten thousand insect wings might start to coalesce, kind of music. But there's no way you'll emerge unstung....
Slowly, structures and melodies start to appear out of the swirly jumble, like figures hidden inside a Cy Twombly scrawl. A jumble of sketchy melodies fragmentarily trace and retrace the same jagged rhythm, kinda like what Jane Martin calls "psychic cubism". Some of the electronics sound totally cheesy -- "Chances are the Comets in Our Future", with all it's bleeps and bloops, is a kid's nightmare of a haunted video-game room. Other times, as on "Lick My Boots", the gurgling Moogs make it seem as if the band's been listening to Chrome's Alien Soundtracks. Familiar shapes appear. Considering Neil's previous job, it's no suprise to uncover the heavy, heavy blues riff that propels "Yin Jim Versus the Vomit Creature", or realize that "Jet Pet" chugs with the rhythm of an unceasing funk-wah disco guitar.
The vocals seem to be in another language: sung in a choppy, strung-out retardo-speak and awash in distortion. Some phrases stick out, especially the funny ones: "The thinner you are when you die, the closer you get to your bones", "The future seems farther away than Jupiter", "I never met anyone I couldn't drop". Though they both sing, Jennifer Herrema's voice has a remarkle range and power that reminds you of nobody. When she mockingly intones "Oooh baby!" on "Lick My Boots", she somehow sounds like an aged alchoholic woman and a nine-year old boy at the same time. The last track, "NY Avenue Bridge", is the simplest: a stuttering piano accompanying Jennifer's untreated vocals. When she moans "Yessterdaay my jeans looked unreeaauuhl" her singing is scowlingly forceful. There's an intense alienation inside, like the sadness a vampire must feel. Though the words are from outer space, it's the most moving, emotionally communicative point on the album.
Twin Infinitives brings to mind other "difficult" albums: Trout Mask Replica, Philosophy of the World, The Faust Tapes. While Royal Trux lack the crystal precision of Captain Beefheart, the purity of the Shaggs, or the subtlety of Faust, they do share a totalitarian presence that draws all of your attention. It's hard not to think of this music of psychedelic, with its insistence on filling up most every gap. In drawings, guys in white suits call this fear of blank space "horror vacui". Whatever you call it, it means this could never be background music, unless you wanted to clear a party of late-night hangers-on.
--Village Voice, Sept. 1991
untitled (aka Royal Trux III), 1992 Drag City
From the supernatural turmoil of Twin Infinitives, where news from faraway galactic regions collided with a synaptic switchboard of channeled electricity, Royal Trux's [third LP] is no less reality-renouncing, but now a few indentifiable landmarks have been thoughtfully provided. With a laconic, disheveled attitude and druggy, drawling delivery, Neil Hagerty's Rolling Stones fixation blooms and thrives, taking the exquisite torpor of "Sister Morphine" to a conclusion the Stones were too straight-laced to pursue. Using echo to disassociate the vocals and instruments so that everything in the mix seems to be floating aimlessly in midair, the song structures are slightly more conventional, but Royal Trux still passes through spaces normally closed to ordinary four-pieces. Jennifer Herrema's recording contribution is limited this time to vocals, and she and Neil twine their voices in a wobbly, gravelly symmetry, their heavy-lidded, richly languid air imparting a time-suspending cool, one that vividly illustrates the unapologetically heroin-oriented lyrics. Neil's guitar playing runs through the songs disconnected and self-contained: with earthy acoustic strums and infinity-reaching feedback feelers stretching the dimensions of guitar travel, songs like "Air", "Junkie Nurse" and "Lightning Boxer" are safely removed from normal rock constraints.
--Deborah Orr, (original publication unknown)
"The only record that was really rushed was the third one. But that's why it's like half acoustic..."
Hagerty is speaking of the band's self-titled mini-album, as much a change of direction from Twin Infinitives as that record was from Royal Trux. "It's kinda' something like Big Star [their third album]. They didn't finish it, y'know? It's kind of eerie."
The record is indeed a mysterious offering. With a cover image littered with human bones and skulls, and a melange of acoustic and electric guitar styles inside, the atmosphere is befogged, estranged, and decidedly stoned, especially on "Junkie Nurse," the closest the band has ever gotten to a ballad.
--The Big Takeover 43, 1998
CATS AND DOGS, 1993 Drag City
After coming off the road, Royal Trux rented a house in the Virginia mountains to piece together their next set of songs comparing the regional manifestations of Rock and Roll's great legacy to that music's ability to open things up wide. Cryptic personal journal entries, letters from prison, photographs and experiences were cross-checked against all available statistics and public information networks and forged into eleven mighty songs with a band that included a guitarist from Florida and a drummer from Kansas. Now it is time again for some action.
--Drag City press release, 1993
Trux's most conventionally beautiful and undeniable record, "Cats And Dogs" is less jarring than its predecessors, more of a gorgeous dream-time blur. Recorded in a Virginian county home, with a proper band, it's at once organic and disembodied, raw and spectral: a consummation/condensation of everything Trux learned doing from the first three records.
The standout track, "Turn Of The Century", starts like the bottleneck blues on a soundtrack to Performance, then crumples and wilts into a dust-hazy ghost-town of a song. Other songs like "Skywood Greenback Mantra" and "Up His Sleeve" have a dissipative, mirage-like quality not heard since Daydream Nation.
But there's also one return to the avant-gardism of Twin Infinitives, with "Driving In That Car (With The Eagle On The Hood)", a clammy, creepy, sound that fills your head with rippling, shimmering murk. With its junkshop synth and dub-like spaciality, "Driving" is a product of Trux's love of electronic music (Suicide, Cabaret Voltaire) and the trance-mantra tradition (Terry Riley). Neil even used to pals with techno-wizz-kid Moby: there's many more strings to this band than a Stones fetish. When I ask what the song's about, though, I'm none the wiser.
"The title was something Jennifer used to chant onstage when she forgot the words," says Neil. "Finally we turned it into a song. It evokes for us some kind of movie Nazi driving around in a low-rider, with a big eagle on the hood. He's cruising downtown, and he's baaad!"
I haven't a fucking clue what they're on about (and out of kindness, I've spared you their baffling explication of "Turn Of The Century"). But that's what's great about Royal Trux: they may be straight now, but they're still floating free way beyond terra firma.
--Melody Maker, 6-19-93
"After all that touring, we were very familiar with the alternative scene and this was basically a little, affectionate parody of that scene, of all these bands that were so sincere and ambitious and at the same time were struggling to survive. It's not a practical joke, we respected them. We had played with hundreds of bands and we got a really good sense of what was going on at that moment. It was just before Pearl Jam and Nirvana and all that crap came out of Seattle. In a way it's just us being involved in that scene and making a comment on it. I don't have that one extra piece of evilness or contempt to make it a parody. I love people, I love people's frailty and vulnerability. There was something kind of pathetic about all these alternative bands, a certain energy that they put into it knowing that it will never come back. I just wanted to capture that contradiction." (Neil Hagerty)
--Scaruffi.com, 1999
THANK YOU, 1995 Virgin
Thank You resurrects the era when bands 'jammed' and pursued vital intangibles like 'feel' and 'vibe'. It was David Briggs who persuaded Trux to do it live. "We recorded almost all the album in a couple of days, with just a few overdubs and the odd fixed vocal," Briggs says. "I approached the album as if it was a gig, with stage-lighting, a full PA, letting the sound into the room. It was an exciting way to make a record."
So will the album turn Trux into stadium-rock stars? Maybe, maybe not. They're still an eccentric band, to say the least. Even when you can decipher Jennifer's elegantly wasted growl, the sci-fi-meets-dirty-realism lyrics are fairly unfathomable. Even after Hagerty's exegesis of "The Sewer Of Mars", I'm none the wiser.
"It's about someone who's the lowest of the low, y'know. He's a sort of psychic scam artist. I got the idea when this guy invited us back to his house 'cos he had all this codeine. I saw this cane up against the door, that used to belong to the guy's dead wife. And I got up and kicked the cane over. The guy was really gratetful, he said I'd freed him of the psychic burden of his wife's cane."
Perhaps those arenas will have to wait after all.
--Mojo 16, March 1995
SWEET SIXTEEN, Virgin 1997
"We produced it ourselves on the heels of the way the previous one had been done. We had the rule that every song had to be 4 minutes long or more. If too short, we would pack in an instrumental break. The musicians had real free reins, they could do little jams... It's really just one big chunk of music. The singing is separated by large chunk of music, not even within a song but even from song to song. We tried to achieve a balance of singing and music. We also tried to push the reggae influence by employing the huge double bass. Well, when they heard it, the record company said you have to do it again. We had to bring the contract to a lawyer and force the label to put it out as it was. They only pressed what was required by law. We went on tour and we were abandoned by them." (Neil Hagerty)
--Scaruffi.com, 1999
Since their first couple of recordings, including the heroin-brilliant soundscape of l990's Twin Infinitives through later, more conventional outings like Thank You (1995) and Cats and Dogs (l993), Herrema and Hagerty have twisted fashionable musical idioms into barely recognizable bits of elecitricity and voice.
In terms of sheer audacity, Sweet Sixteen trumps'em all. In a kind of (bear with me as I try to make sense of all this) post-retro modern rock, Sweet Sixteen is as revelatory as alternative rock is likely to get before the millennium. Ahead of its time but with distinct remnants of vintage 70s sound strewn across it like fast-food trash on a Vegas strip, the record has songs-- "The Pick-Up" (with funky touches of Curtis Mayfield), "Cold Joint" (with flourishes of Led Zeppelin), "Can't Have It Both Ways" (with a Big Star chord progression), and "You'll Be Staying in Room 323" (with a Santana-esque breakdown)-- that come together with so few contemporary cliches you'd think someone had finally invented something you hadn't heard before.
Not that this is some kind of weird sonic experiment. Well-produced with decent fidelity, Sweet Sixteen is very much grounded in rock and roll-- power chords, lots of wah-wah, some synth, and just the right amount of dark jamming. It's just not the kind of rock and roll you, your kids, or your kids' kids are likely to hear again.
--Stereophile Monthly, 1997
"Take every bad idea that rock's ever produced, put it all into songs and then use a contemporary rock producer from 1996 to mix it in a complete middle-of-the-road rock way and it couldn't be better," comments Neil about the way Sweet Sixteen was constructed. "That was our ace in the hole. Greg Archilla [who had worked with chart rockers Matchbox Twenty] was mixing it but when we brought it to Virgin they didn't know who he was. We miscalculated their greed."
--The Wire 199, Oct. 2000
ACCELERATOR, Drag City 1998
Is it true that this album continues a trilogy of tributes to the last three decades?
"Yes, that was the original agreement with the major we signed for a few years ago. We wanted to employ the original recording techniques of each age and, obviously, try to imitate the spirit of the time. This one is about the Eighties, and specifically the mid-Eighties, when musicians started switching over to digital. We used tons of electronics, and maybe that's why it sounds the way it sounds. Also, this album was supposed to be for a major label too, but we ended up dumped. Nonetheless, we decided to finish the record as it was, it would have taken too much work to re-do it...
"...In retrospect, it plots a linear progression, and offers a counter-revision of the music of the time. By "revision" I mean when you romanticize the period, and by "counter-revision" I mean that we actually re-establish the true spirit of the era. A counter-revision counter-acts the phantasy [sic] that surrounds an era. Over the last 30 years people have developed the idea that not knowing the past is better than knowing about it. We simply remember the icons, the surface. We wanted to go beyond the icons and resuscitate the age as it was. And, yes, it was also a way for us to make a music that is more commercial and skillfully played, so as to please the label."
You sound more like a historian than a musician...
"Well, I am an historian to some extent. Meaning that I am very conscious of the past, of the evolution of style. It is a very important factor and it is sad that people don't pay enough attention to it. People are focusing more on Elvis Presley instead of Chuck Berry, because it's easier to pursue an icon than a real genius who changed the way we play. At the same time, the past is a useful reference, it provides you with a built-in unlimited reserve of dynamics and anger to work from." (Neil Hagerty)
--Scaruffi.com, 1999
Musically Accelerator was a leap forward for the Trux and set the tone for the last stage of their career (they seem to be defunct since a couple years ago.) Instead of the warm analog lo-fi sound they were somewhat known for, here Neil Hagerty goes all-out for digital recording techniques. The result is no less chaotic and abrasive for it, in fact I think of this album as a real trailblazer in the development of digital music -- because it's so sloppy, loud and human. All the songs are super-compressed so that even the quietest sounds are deafeningly loud. Songs abruptly stop and finish with precise digital edits into and out of pure digital silence, sounding almost comically sloppy at times which is so deliciously ironic in the age of endless digital knob twiddling.
In terms of songwriting and lyrics this album is also one I view as a personal landmark of sorts -- it captures the mixture of optimism and foreboding in the pre-millenium 1990's better than any other record I can think of. And in a larger sense, what they're really singing about is the passage of time in human terms -- longing, regret, determination, and taking responsibility and assigning blame for things that have gone wrong. Funny how seeing three zeros in a row on the calendar can make you think about that kind of stuff. (And the album cover is just too perfect: a cloven hoof on the "accelerator" pedal, your car heading for a crash as the odometer flips over from 1999 to 2000.)
..."Yellow Kid" shows the first signs of that old millenial angst, but is also a negation of the present and a longing for the future... And if you've developed your coded-Heroin-reference-radar from listening to their prior records and think the "Yellow Kid" is really about Chinese rocks, that only adds another mournful interpretation...
..."Another Year" features kazoos and claves, yet manages to be sublimely melancholy anyway. In his best Neil Young/[Bob] Dylan whine Mr. Hagerty sings: "Some day it all comes true / Written on the bottom of my shoe / Everybody's trying not to disappear / Here comes another year."...
..."Juicy Juicy Juice" may be another tune about the big H: "It's in your blood / It's in your brain / Drives 'em all insane!". And when Neil's guitar unleashes a spine-tingling tsunami of clear light halfway through this stuttering R&B thunderer, it's as good a musical approximation of drugs hitting your brain as I've ever heard.
--Julian Cope's Unsung, 1998
VETERANS OF DISORDER, Drag City 1999
"Well, it's a collection of singles... Pretty much an album made for the channel-surfing generation, going from sound to sound, as I said, for people with very low attention spans."
Even though you've got a ten-minute song with a seven-minute solo on it?
"That's why it's at the end," she laughs. "so you can just turn the TV off." (Jennifer Herrema)
--Bleedmusic, 1998
For all their talk of harmelodic theory and album-length genre explorations, the fact remains that Royal Trux, at their best, are a straightforward rock band... Jennifer Herrema and Neil Hagerty now want nothing more than to sound like Rocks-era Aerosmith meets the Isley Brothers. And they're good at it, which is a lot more than you can say for Lenny Kravitz.
And so it is with Veterans of Disorder, a characteristically uneven record sprinkled with moments of conventional pop brilliance. Tunes like "Stop" and "The Exception" are so deeply rooted in rock/soul tradition one could almost label Hagerty and Herrema retro revivalists. From the boxy production that calls to mind mid-60s Stax recordings to the tinkly piano riffs stolen from the cradle of newborn 50s rock 'n' roll, this is a sound that happily pilfers from the most traditional of sources.
Hagerty's tortured crooning on "Stop", which breaks into a cracked falsetto during the chorus, is a dead ringer for a British Invasion-era rocker's take on the phrasing of Sam Cooke. Of course, this rearrangement of time-honored elements wouldn't mean a thing without top-notch songs, and again Royal Trux delivers. In addition to the surefire R&B hooks in the aforementioned tracks, "Yo Se!" offers a rousing, inanely catchy vocal refrain that deserves to be pumped over the sound system at Yankee stadium between innings.
-- Pitchfork Media, Dec. 1999
POUND FOR POUND, Drag City 2000
The Trux have concocted a smoky summer-lovin' brew of decidedly cool tunes in the key of chic. The record begins with "Call Out the Lions," whose first 30 seconds sounds not unlike something found on Ween's seminal Chocolate & Cheese album before breaking into a Nuge-worthy power riff accentuated ever so sexily by Jennifer Herrema's Marlboro rasp. Elsewhere, on cuts like "Sunshine and Grease," the vocal interplay between Herrema and main songwriter/guitarist Neil Hagerty's slightly obnoxious drawl works wonders in upping the sweat factor, if that is such a measure of greatness. His guitar solos flow like a molasses-on-rye sandwich of mid-'70s era Miles Davis and Keef at his strung-out six-string best (check out the seven-minute "Deep Country Sorcerer"), while percussionists Chris Pyle (son of Lynyrd Skynyrd drummer Artemis Pyle) and Ken Nasta provide psychedelically Latin-infused rhythms to compliment Hagerty's array of axe effects.... In a rare case of equal parts style and substance, the band continues to provide improvisation and experimentation with reverence for its forefathers yet without giving a shit about what they, or anyone else might think.
--PopMatters.com, 2000
"The whole idea of Pound for Pound was to take straight off of the last song on Veterans of Disorder, ["Blue is the Frequency"]... it was to segue straight out of that song into Pound for Pound... That was a song that was done the last day of touring, and we taught it to the band that day in the studio, and it was taken, like second take, that was it, and that was the end, so it was meant to represent a live vibe, kind of an immediate feel, and so Pound for Pound was an extension of that. It was done in five days, the last five days of the tour, we taught the band the songs, we just jammed on them, jammed on them, stopped, reevaluate, jammed on them, jammed on them, and pressed record and it was done." (Jennifer Herrema)
--Fabula Magazine, June 2000
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