When I heard about the Royal Trux split-up last year, I figured it had to be a joke. Something about the Hagerty/Herrema combo seemed so right and inevitable; the idea that indie rock's Adam & Eve had gone their separate ways was something I just couldn't process. I figured Neil would use the press surrounding the split as a little free publicity for his debut album, and before you knew it the jig would be up and Royal Trux would be back on the rails.
Well, if the break-up was a joke, it's a media prank of Kaufman-esque proportions, because here we are nine months later, with another Hagerty solo album and still not a peep out of Herrema. What's she up to? Neil himself says he has no idea, but he's stayed busy with songwriting and has gone back to collaborating. So, in a way, it's sad that Plays That Good Old Rock and Roll ends up the sound of Hagerty forming a rock band and getting on with his life. As such, we get a full-band effort featuring two drummers, a sax player, and a handful of strings, instead of the first album's lonely, home-recorded homage to classic rock.
Plays That Good Old Rock and Roll has some new textural twists for Hagerty, but one thing hasn't changed: he's pulled the loaded six-string from his back and is soloing his ass off. Only a precious few tracks sneak by without him lurching into a feedback-drenched ode to axe-slingers past, and how you feel about that probably depends on whether or not you play guitar yourself. Quite honestly, the only way a track like "The Storm Sons" (with its pitiful "only god can rescue me, only god can make a tree" couplet repeated endlessly) could have lasting appeal is as an instructional tape. Hagerty's lines are distinctive and weird, with an intriguing internal logic. But with a few exceptions, I'm not somebody who can listen to balls-to-the-wall guitar soloing for minutes on end. Caveat emptor on the fretwork.
Of the nine tracks on this brief record, four seem nothing more than noisy excuses for Hagerty's solos. What's frustrating is that the remainder are solid, and two are even great. "Gratitude" is a shuffling blues/rock number with a killer rhythm hook and minimal lyrics (basically "thanks a lot" said a few different ways) that manages to stay in your head despite its surface-level banality. The obligatory acid-fried guitar solo here works well because of its brevity. Also great is "Oklahoma Township," with its 60s R&B; vocal feel and a clever integration of violin that reminds me of Alejandro Escovedo. The guitar solo on "Oklahoma Township" very nearly spirals out of control, but Hagerty reels it in and sings alongside it in parallel, nicely redeeming it. The violin makes another appearance on "Some People Are Crazy," elevating what is essentially an excellent late-60s Stones ballad with Hagerty on acoustic and a disciplined vocal. And both "It Could Happen Again" and "Rockslide," both of which sound like lost Woody Guthrie songs performed by a garage rock band, are instantly memorable.
So that's two great songs, three pretty good ones, and four stinkers. Hagerty's always been a little erratic, but that's still not a good ratio. One excellent album could have been salvaged from the two he's released in the last year, probably, but in these post-Royal Trux days, we have to take what we can get or move on. I'm edging closer to the latter, myself.
