Perennial players of the "love it or hate it, we don't care" gambit, and still flaunting their trademark cruddy guitars and loudmouthed, bully-ragging vocals as though all that stuff were still somehow outrageous in this day and age, Accellerator nonetheless shows that Royal Trux have evolved into prime, mature form. "Juicy Juicy Juice" and "The Banana Question" are almost great pop singles (but ditch that tuff-chix voice, willya?), while "Another Year" and "Stevie" show that the band rocks even when they aren't exactly playing rock: the one floats slide whistle over a cowbell beat, while the other reaches for '70s soul of the Mellotron variety. A great disc for the smirking urbanite we all aspire to be (or love to lampoon) and a pick-hit to slow down a party that's gotten too jolly. --Gavin McNett
Review by Stephen Thomas Erlewine
Not long after they received Sweet Sixteen, complete with its notorious cover of an excrement- and vomit-filled toilet, Virgin Records realized Royal Trux may not be a crossover act. They were willing to let the band go, giving them severance pay and the master tapes to their recently completed album, Accelerator, which was then released on their old home, Drag City. Listening to the album, it's hard to believe that a major label funded such an exhilaratingly noisy record. Ostensibly the third installment in their ongoing salute to particular decades in rock history -- that is, Thank You took on the '60s, Sweet Sixteen saluted the '70s -- Royal Trux deconstructs '80s rock on Accelerator, running all the instruments through some sort of electronic distortion, taking away the bass, trying to make it sound processed. Since this is Royal Trux, the result still is indebted to the Stones and astoundingly messy, but that's why Accelerator rocks like a demon, running over everything in sight. The album sounds chaotic, but there are some great songs hidden under the cacophony, like the explosive "I'm Ready," the soul vamp "Juicy, Juicy, Juice," and the soul-tinged closer, "Stevie." Royal Trux have rarely had both their songwriting and noise under control like they do here, and the result is pure dynamite -- possibly their best album to date.
Royal Trux
Accelerator
[Drag City; 1998]
Rating: 7.6
The Glimmer Twins are back! Easily their finest album since Exile on Main Street, Accelerator throbs to the grimy garage beat the band perfected in the early 70s and... uh, hey, wait a minute, this isn't the Stones. It's Neil Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema, the First Couple of Ultra Lo-Fi, known since 1988 as Royal Trux. Hey, it was an honest mistake. I mean, who else but these Rock History Ph.Ds could write the best Jagger/Richards tunes of the past twenty years?
After a couple of uneven efforts, Accelerator finds the band generally eschewing the more experimental side of their identity to explore fun, loose, simple rock and roll. This is music played for the love of playing, with any given song featuring a half-dozen voices screaming the chorus gleefully off-key. It's a beautiful noise-- one that grows on you like the scraggly hair on your indie rock head.
The fist-pumping "I'm Ready" kicks things off, exploding in your face like a heavily shaken can of warm Bud. Next is "Yellow Kid", a playfully bittersweet honky-tonk tearjerker in the spirit of, well, the Stones' "Sweet Virginia". It's followed by "The Banana Question", the flat-out rockingest rocker on the album, a near-masterpiece of sing-along catchiness. Axl Rose would shave his head and have his tattoos removed to write a hook like this, and when Hagerty and Herrema come together for the chorus, you can smell the sweat and see them back to back, screaming into their mics like the old-school rock stars they are. Fuck irony, let's have some fun.
The rest of Accelerator is good, but doesn't quite live up to the high standard set by those first three tracks until the final moment, "Stevie". A trashy, gospel-tinged workout from another era, "Stevie" feels like the theme song to the "Good Times" spin-off that never was, a tasty slice of 70s nostalgia that manages to sound supremely fresh.
Ten years on, Royal Trux continue to surprise. And if the world doesn't end at midnight on New Year's Day, 2000, I'll be putting my money on these kids in the next decade, too. Pull up a half-rack, won't you?
-Mark Richard-San, June 01, 1998
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