Royal Trux : Classic or Dud ?

DC has it listed as LP/CD in there news section, so I guess we'll have to wait a few more weeks to find out. But most DC stuff comes out on vinyl, as you said, and it would just strike me as odd that someone would put out three vinyl only albums, then make the next proper record CD only. I mean, DC has concrete proof people will buy Howling Hex vinyl.

I'm listening to Veterans of Disorder at this moment and I'm fucking sad that I only saw 'em live one time ('97, the Bug Jar in Rochester, NY).

(I heard that song used once over a sports highlight reel)

best rock band ever

On their sixth underproduced album and second major-label release (yet another indie band signed in Nirvana's wake), singer Jennifer Herrema works hard at sounding trashy, slurring lyrics in a raspy tone a la Nazareth. She hisses ultranasty lines like "Sweet 16 and never been clean" alongside guitarist and vocalist Neil Hagerty's own thin warble. Indulgent wah-wah guitar solos bump into disjointed drum beats.

Every song on Sweet Sixteen eventually lapses into a meandering mess, even on tunes where the Trux attempt to mimic Zeppelin's repetitive rhythms or the Allman Brothers' jams. Instead of respecting the music they bastardize, the Trux treat it as low art, approaching '70s rock like a cocky adult playing a kids' game. By mid-album, you begin to wish Lynyrd Skynyrd had crashed this recording session and kicked the Trux's pretentious asses into some sort of cohesive groove. (RS 757)

And it's not like it got better after that either.

How in the world is that record better than Thank You or Cats and Dogs? The songs aren't as good and it's more of a fucking mess. I like messes, but they'd already made messes with GREAT records like Twin Infinitives. Their trajectory at the time was that they were getting tighter -- from the third album to Cats and Dogs to Thank You. Then, all of a sudden they stopped. Why? I really don't understand what the point of that album was (and the psuedo-cryptic stuff about "it's our seventies album in our sixties/seventies/eighties album trilogy" seemed like a bunch of gibberish).

I spent a good three years under the heavy sway of the trux. Twin Infinitives, s/t, Cats and Dogs and Thank You pulled me out of the grunge tarpit and made me ditch most of my AmRep records. That bluesy, classik rok swagger, that mystical druggy miasma, those voices. So fucking cool. I interviewed Hagerty around the time Thank You came out. It was great. He talked about the house they just bought in Virginia. How he hung bells on all the bushes on the property.

I have to admit, my exposure to their later albums is minimal. I'm going to have to rectify that.

I first saw them in 92 or 3 opening for mudhoney and was all - what exactly is going on here? Needless to say, I've been a devotee ever since.

My point: pound for pound = best album. Where's the love, people?