Like so many groups fond of noise, lo-fi recording, and insolence, Royal Trux were often classified as a garage band. But for the duo of Neil Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema, the word "garage" didn't so much represent a dirty-D.I.Y. aesthetic as a messy, greasy place where things get stripped down, torn apart, and welded back together. Throughout their 12-year run (from 1988 to 2000), Royal Trux took a chop-shop approach to pop history, deconstructing their favorite FM-radio icons-- in particular, Mick Taylor-era Rolling Stones-- and reassembling the scrap metal and wires into heaving junkyard jalopies, with the hoarse-voiced but imposingly beautiful Herrema serving as the hood ornament who could sell their mutant custom jobs as classic rock.
Given their amorphous aesthetic-- which yielded works as incongruous as 1990's byzantine bricolage Twin Infinitives, 1995's biker-bar boogie-fest Thank You, and 2000's ghetto-blasted breakdance-athon Radio Video EP-- there is no truly definitive Royal Trux album, a fact reflected by the band's myriad contemporary admirers, who range from Bradford Cox, Liars, and the Kills to Bat for Lashes, Hot Chip, and MGMT. As a 3xLP collection of the band's early-90s ephemera, Singles, Live, Unreleased may not seem like the most logical entry point into the Trux's phantasmagoric universe. But for newcomers, it's the stand-alone release that provides the best big-picture perspective of Royal Trux's see-saw relationship with rock music and the avant-garde.
Originally released in 1997 (and now reissued in unchanged form), Singles, Live, Unreleased was more than just a stop-gap measure between albums; it also represented a symbolic homecoming to Drag City after a brief stint on Virgin that constituted one of the more bizarre byproducts of the post-Nirvana major-label signing blitz. After Thank You and 1997's Sweet Sixteen failed to realize Virgin's dreams of turning Royal Trux into the next Black Crowes (the puke-stained album covers probably didn't help), Singles, Live, Unreleased heralded the band's eventual return to the weird with 1998's fuzzed-out triumph Accelerator. Its chronology-- covering the years of 1988 to 1995-- roughly aligns with the period when Hagerty and Herrema were in the throes of an infamous heroin habit that effectively defined the band in its early years and provided an unavoidable lens through which to interpret its music. But as far as junkies go, they were highly functional-- on top of the four official albums released over that span, the band recorded several non-album singles, compilation tracks, and Peel Sessions. (Of the 32 songs collected here, only five appear-- in different form-- on Trux albums proper.) And just as the duo was struggling to get sober over this period, its music was also undergoing its own slow, difficult lurch toward trad-rock accessibility.
Going one step further than Hagerty's Rolling Stones desecrations in Pussy Galore, Royal Trux's initial singles sound like all the individual recording tracks from Exile on Main Street spliced up and reassembled at random. Songs like "No Fixed Address" and "Hero/Zero" possess discernible raunch-rock riffs, vocal hooks, and rhythms, but they sound like they each belong in different songs; at the same time, the duo's use of drum machines and weird synth frequencies-- not to mention Hagerty's Hendrixian facility at pushing standard blues-rock scales and solos into lobotomizing squalls-- lend this primitive music an oddly futuristic, temporally dislocating quality. In the same spirit, Singles, Live, Unreleased negates any kind of linear reading of Royal Trux's evolution, favoring instead jarring juxtapositions of era, musical style, and recording quality. But now, with the band defunct for over a decade, this illogical approach makes a lot more sense today than it did in 1997, transforming the listening experience into an archaeological mission, as each excavated track provides another clue to decoding this strange band. Royal Trux's music may not always make sense to you, but even at its most-messed up, you can still hear how it made sense to them.
The more straightforward rockers here ("Steal Your Face", "Gett Off") aren't quite on the level of the ones heard on 1992's self-titled effort and 1993's Cats & Dogs, while the glaring omission of "Delta 70 of Hearts"-- a "Can't You Hear Me Knocking" to call their own-- from the 1994 Hey Drag City compilation still confounds. But Singles, Live, Unreleased reveals intriguing new sides of the band that were lamentably never explored on their official albums, like the sampledelic pimp-funk of "Shockwave Rider" and the blissed-out proto-chillwave of essential '93 Sub Pop single "Back to School" (recently covered by Of Montreal). And in contrast to Royal Trux's formative kill-yr-idols tack, we hear a more sincere interpretation of their influences here, including faithful covers of Milton Nascimento's Tropicália chestnut "Faca Amolada" and Jefferson Airplane's freedom-rockin' "Law Man", and, most curiously, a '93 Peel Session take on "The Theme from MAS*H". But in the last case, what on paper appears to be a cheeky exercise in 70s revivalism proves surprisingly devastating, as the song's chorus-- "suicide is painless"-- takes on a several layers of significance when sung by a couple who once endured prolonged spells of addiction, poverty, and homelessness. Only in the hands of a band as peculiar and indefinable as Royal Trux could kitsch sound so affecting.
