Royal Trux
Accelerator (Drag City)
by Nik Rainey
Scuttlebutt on this one has it that this is the culmination of a thematic trilogy for Royal Trux, a regular Krzysztof Kieslowski-esque Red/White/Blue sort of thing (each color corresponding to the pallor of their skin at different hours of the day). Let me get this straight – Thank You (1995) was their ’60s album, Sweet Sixteen (1997) their ’70s throwback, and Accelerator, their skulk back to the Drag City limits after a few years sullying Virgin territory, is the ’80s all the way. Hmmm. I kinda get the first part of it: Thank You, like the sixties, was a moment of fecundity for RTX, the underground poking its lolling head out of the downtown dirt to taste the air of the mainstream (I’ll reserve all “mainline” jests for the next Weiland project); Sweet Sixteen had enough excessive, aimless guitar solos (most of which didn’t bother to wait for the singing to stop before kicking off) to serve as a crash course in “Me” Decade-ish decadence and overindulgence – somebody shoulda tapped Joan Didion to write a review; but Accelerator? The eighties? Hard to figure. Certainly, no ’80s band I can think of sounded like this melangé of oversaturated fourth-hand R&B; sluggishness (a description, not a criticism), not even when Neil Haggerty’s old combo Pussy Galore covered Exile on Main Street (a reference I, like every other rock crit in the world, make with authority, although none of us have actually heard the thing – I’m increasingly convinced that it only exists as a joke these mugs played on us to make us look like idiots – hardly seems worth the effort, really, but a lotta sound-scribes said the same ’bout PG, so there ya go). All the cool groups of the period were busy “expanding the parameters of punk” (i.e., putting back all the shit punk was s’posed to have cleared out) while RTX always seemed like they were retreating into some primordial shell of bone-basic rock ‘n’ roll mores, and their albums were all the stages of the dream they had once they curled up in there and went to sleep – some parts unfathomably abstract, others uncomfortably vivid, but all somehow private, self-indulgent and laden with code that even they couldn’t decipher once awake. Which is hardly Reagan-era rawk’s m.o. – even the prog bastards of old had learnt to be annoying in one-third the time by then. Musical echoes of the functionless-zippers era are scant, apart from the occasional cheap-ass keyboard that in a couple of places sounds like what Ric Ocasek woulda done if he’d taken his alleged VU fixation to heart and went out of his way to make his records sound like shit. But then, once you de-furrow your brow and stop looking for full-on trace patterns from the decade and start thinking conceptually, it all kinda makes sense.
Think of the ’80s as the return of bubblegum, full of three-minute teenybopper novelties and the like, and Haggerty and Herrema’s approach comes (reasonably) clear. These songs are as short, sharp, and punchy as any they’ve ever waxed – hell, you could even call most of ’em catchy and when’s the last time the Trux have had that mantle strewn across their skinny shoulders? Somehow, these two’ve pared their shambling, Alphabet City scuzz proclivities into rough concision like never before (comparing favorably with Boss Hog’s first DGC album for abuser-friendly configs of the PG ethos), and even though it meant retreating to Indieville and scuffing most of the primer off their sound to do so, it’s the most accessible piece of used cotton in their scabby career to date. Up ’til recently I vowed to keep a respectful/nervous distance from these reprobates –Accelerator makes me wanna stop the world and melt with them.
