1 I'm Ready
2 Yellow Kid
3 The Banana Question
4 Another Year
5 Juicy Juicy Juice
6 Liar
7 New Bones
8 Follow The Winner
9 Stevie

Jennifer Herrema: voice
Neil Haggerty: guitar, voice, and most everything else
Ken "Nasty" Nasta: drum kit

Royal Trux were their own kind of rock icon, albeit Jen&Neil certainly had more than a little Mick&Keef in them. Jennifer Herrema is your classic rock& roll "front man" -- weirdly androgynous, narcissistic, and with a voice that could ONLY work in rock (and is therefore all the more "rock" for it.) Neil Haggerty is the supercool chainsmoking beatnik in black, melting your mind with his stunning guitar riffage. Neil's priors include the NYC scum-rock band Pussy Galore, after which he hooked up with Jen and they became the Trux about 1988 or so. The duo travelled around the country crashing on couches ("No Fixed Address" was an early anthem) and indulging their taste for heroin (a topic which seems to turn up cryptically and not-so-cryptically in many of their songs.)

Their early duo sound is a mixture of living room blues and avant noise experimentation (for the latter see their 1990 double album "Twin Infinitives" -- perhaps the most "unlistenable" album since "Metal Machine Music"?) When Grungemania hit in the early 90's they got their inevitable major label contract and put together a "real band" to play loud "boogie" music (see 1995's underrated Zep-meets-Exile-On-Mainstreet LP "Thank You")-- but like with most underground legends, the big sales didn't happen and they soon found themselves back in the minor leagues of the record industry and without the rest of their band, whence they recorded this gem for Drag City in 1998.

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 Haggerty 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 & 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 comicly 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.)

The first song abruptly explodes out of your speakers with a torrent of deconstructed 70's arena rock riffs and a declarative mantra that answers the zen-stupid question posed by Grand Funk Railroad's "Are You Ready?" almost 30 years ago. Jennifer hollers "Now you know I'M READY! / can't you see I'M READY! / the hell you know I'M READY!" over a jackbooted bluesfunk beat and a wall of super-compressed treble guitar noise. Neil fills up the nooks & crannies with feedback, pitch-perfect harmonic plings and just plain old gushes of static amplifier noize -- proving he truly is the Tom Scholz of gutterpunk.

"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: "I don't like this arrangement / your wild schemes are nothin' but pipe dreams" . . . "We need somebody, somebody to watch our backs / we need somebody who don't care what we did / we need somebody, somebody like The Kid." 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. Musically it's like underwater electric Dylan, including a baleful harmonica wail.

"The Banana Question" is a sublimely ridiculous carnival bubblegum romp, sounding kinda like The Archies with "bollocks." Jennifer sounds apoplepticly pissed off as she repeatedly stutters: "IS THAT A FUCKIN' QUESTION?!?!" and a group of male voices responds: "BANANA QUESTION!" The chorus (or is it the verse?) cautions: "Re-e-e-ed li-i-i-ight / people think we're goin' the wrong way."

"Another Year" features kazoos and claves, yet manages to be sublimely melancholy anyway. In his best Neil Young/Dylan whine Mr. Haggerty sings: "Some day it all comes true / written on the bottom of my shoe / everybody's trying not to disappear / here comes another year." Resignation.

"Juicy" 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.

"Liar" is a sublimely funny low-key number where the digital post-production is particularly important to the overall, I dunno, calculated flatness of the thing. Neil sounds petulant: "I got a taste in my mouth / just like a burning tire / I forgot what I knew if you / don't be a liar!" And then the music pauses as Jen echoes from under a ton of echo: "Don't be a liiiiar!"

"New Bones" is one of the most deliciously psych moments on the album, Neil's ocean of fuzz guitars twinkling away under way, way too much flange and tremeloe (lovely!) Jen chants that the "new bones are rollin' in / our hearts have picked them clean" while Neil yells stuff like "deep pocket resurrection!!!" from out of the echo chamber. "Why run a race when it's already won? / when getting there is no-oh-oh fun."

"Follow The Winner" is a total pompous windbag of a song, all marching beats, poser-metal power chords and echo-drenched Old Testament hollering from the top of the mountain. You can't help but smirk at the irony of these lovable losers/outsiders commanding you to "follow the winner, THE WINNER!!!"

The album closer "Stevie" is a wistful and melodic keyboard-driven TUNE that ends with a 120-second-long blue albatross guitar solo that conjures the spirit of Neil Young at his painterly best. The lyric is about a self-righteous guru figure: "He's a man, defender of the underdog / and not taken in by all that funky narration." He's shown the Trux to see through it all: "People think the United States is a sweet ol' plastic flower / but you're thinkin' something else and man, I'm with you!" Yet he seems somewhat out of touch too: "You don't know how the camera works / there's just always someone there to fix it." A filmmaker perhaps? (Ha Ha! I later found out the song was inspired by kung fu hambag Stephen Seagal!)

Sonic iconoclastic metaphysical temporal millenial angst, but somehow uplifting because even though you can't always figure out what they're trying to say, somehow it still makes you think there's someone out there who knows what it feels like. Unsung.

Reviews Index