Royal Trux's 1990 four-song album Twin Infinitives holds an odd position in the canon of drug music. Neil "Michael" Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema have said that although the album itself wasn't composed while under the influence (a dubious statement to say the least), it was "quality-tested" while high on such colorful narcotic selections as marijuana, LSD, speed, heroin, and more. Alternately sounding like a subway ride inside a television inside an earthquake inside the end of the world and a pounding death rhythm of apocalyptic now, Twin Infinitives' greatest achievement may be its dissimilarity to any other recorded material ever.
Now that Royal Trux's new joint, Hand of Glory-- really a "lost album" from the late 80s-- has hit the shelves, our chance to sit down and seriously inhale some fresh slowness is upon us. Though it's of the same era as Twin Infinitives, the two records are stylistically nothing alike-- Twin Infinitives was more an electronic music composition than it was a rock album; Hand of Glory is half-rock, half-musique concrete. Of course, it takes people interested enough in discovering and divulging the secrets of the postmortem subconscious, like Neil and Jennifer, to stretch these classifications to their very boundaries, but Royal Trux were nothing if not fearless.
The album is cut in half by sides-- two long tracks, one segmented, one not. The first side, "Domo des Burros (Two Sticks)", seems a meditation on the drum machine-heavy track "(Edge of the) Ape Oven" from Twin Infinitives. Layering a Suicide-esque drum machine over palindromic guitars and the battling voices of Hagerty and Herrema, it initially sounds like token Trux behavior, but a closer listen reveals that it falls entirely outside of that spectrum. It speeds up and slows down, waxes lysergic, and then breeds with a harmonica, all toward very confusing ends. There's staccato piano, more staccato harmonica, and even more staccato drum machine beats-- all with confusingly dubby overtones.
Trux's article from 1989 stands as a testament to the flexibility of the track. The duo repeats words, rhyme, sing, scream, and overdub overdub overdub while never succumbing to self-indulgence or straying outlandishly from what most people might call a "rock composition". The instrumentation listing in the liners probably says more of its sound than any journalistic approximation-- it reads: "voice, percussion, drum machines, mechanical monkey with cymbals, Moog, guitars, violin, bottles, pump organ, radio, record player, piano, harmonica, and tape machines."
Hand of Glory's side two, titled "The Boxing Story", is a composition for tapes featuring recorded materials on cassettes being reversed, cut up, collaged, layered, and drenched in effects. The track has a tendency toward narrative bursts which possess subtle qualities akin to fluid movement. There are recognizable words, guitar solos, drum beats, whistles, screeches, skulls, wings, rats, blood and metal. There is literally abstraction here to the point of no return, but the abstraction has been taken to such a fine point that it can only be perceived as unified. Twenty-something minutes of internalized extrusion is capitalized and completely shredded.
Hand of Glory is an example of two fine exercises of military strength and rigor. The ambling song structure synthesizes with the collage as a whole to create relations previously unconsidered in the Trux canon. It's not quite clear if this is because of their striking quality or their mere proximity, but either way, it represents an essence of artful quality, an achievement which stands to be quite rare.
