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Mar 01, 2019 Royal Trux By Michael James Hall

It’s been 19 years since the profoundly fucked up Washington, D.C. duo dropped their last studio album, Pound For Pound, and 21 years since their last great record, Accelerator. Aside from some, shall we be kind and say “shambolic” live shows in recent years, there’s been little reason to reflect on the perma-stoned garage psych gurus, but here with a clutch of brand new material they sound, at least, awake, if not entirely revitalized.

There’s about a thousand bands around this week shopping a tepid version of down n’ dirty crack-rock but none can walk it like they talk it in the way Jennifer Herrema and Neil Hagerty can; from statement of intent opener and title track “White Stuff,” a rumbling, crumbling smoosh of a thing, we know where we stand—or, more accurately, stumble. The first actual tune on the record comes a little later in the shape of “Suburban Junkie Lady” which boasts brilliantly silly lines like “Someone throws a sandwich at you from car that’s passing by,” while “Shoes & Tags” is a prime example of their near-jazz tendency to throw instruments and vocals at one another and just see what lands where. It’s actually pretty exciting.

Herrema and Hagerty’s mismatched voices are augmented, madly, by Kool Keith on the funky, almost brilliant “Get Used to This,” which takes a disco base and throws on all kinds of incongruous toppings—perhaps giving sense to Mr. Keith’s repeated line “champion pizza.” Who the hell knows?

“Sic Em Slow” assures us that “rock ‘n’ roll’s not dead” while tossing out a 45th-hand riff, while “Whopper Dave” takes its melodically pleasing premise and, despite their worst efforts, is capitalized on to make the record’s most appreciable coherent-incoherent moment.

Influential they sure were, for better or worse, but right now, as heroically, monumentally crazed and unconventional they may be, Royal Trux are more a curio than compelling. (www.fatpossum.com/artists/royal-trux/)

Author rating: 6/10