In the early 90s, indie rock was essentially synonymous with lo-fi, as upstart artists embraced four-track recording for its cost-effectiveness, DIY egalitarianism, and aesthetic remove from the increasingly commercialized nature of alternative rock. But by decade's end, many of the movement's most visible proponents-- Guided by Voices, Pavement, Sebadoh-- had traded up to bigger labels, bigger recording budgets, and proper producers, effectively defining the idea of lo-fi as a formative phase that bands inevitably outgrow.
Royal Trux seemed destined to follow the same trajectory. While the duo of Neil Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema first earned underground renown with 1990's still-inscrutable sci-fi skronk masterwork Twin Infinitives, by 1995, the band was signing a three-album deal with Virgin Records and hiring Neil Young's long-time right-hand man, David Briggs, to oversee their southern-rockin' major-label debut, Thank You. And despite its infamously retch-worthy cover art, the 1997 follow-up, Sweet Sixteen, was even more sophisticated in execution, swaddling the band's grimy boogie in layers of cinematic strings and gleaming guitar solos. But Royal Trux's increasingly high-concept take on dirtbag-rock didn't exactly light up SoundScan registers: Rather than release the band's third Virgin submission, Accelerator, the label opted to pay Royal Trux to just go away. (Hagerty all but anticipates Royal Trux's exile from Virgin when, on the Dylan-esque "Yellow Kid", he moans, "I don't like this arrangement/ Wild schemes and nothing but bad dreams.")
You can't blame the Virgin execs for running scared-- in sharp contrast to its two refined predecessors, Accelerator pulls an abrupt 180 back to the lo-fi obfuscation of Royal Trux's earliest releases. Accelerator found more sympathetic benefactors at the band's original homebase of Drag City Records, but while sonically of a piece with the hazy, strung-out blooze of 1992's untitled release and 1993's Cats and Dogs, the album continues with the more accessible songcraft the band introduced on the two Virgin releases, making this both the most openly celebratory yet eternally warped entry in the Royal Trux canon. In the hands of, say, Guided by Voices, lo-fi recording could approximate the tinny din of the golden oldies broadcast on your local AM station; Accelerator, however, doesn't so much evoke the sound of a classic-rock band blaring out of a cheap transistor radio as one trapped inside of it, strangled by circuitry and choking on static.
Royal Trux had conceived their three-album Virgin run as a triptych exploring a different decade in recent American pop-cultural history: Thank You was their comment on the 1960s, Sweet Sixteen their take on the 1970s, and Accelerator their interpretation of the 1980s. Not that you could necessarily tell without the advance notice: Accelerator bears none of the MTV-ready sleekness we tend to associate with popular music from the era and, if anything, its acid-damaged riffage, wiggy Wurlitzer vamps, and copious cowbell more closely relate to turn-of-the-70s post-hippie jam-rock. (The latest release from Herrema's post-Trux outfit, Black Bananas, Rad Times Express IV, actually boasts a more explicitly 80s ethos.) But then, for all of the glamor and futurism attached to the 80s, the decade was equally defined by its retro-gazing-- the first wave of aging-rocker reunion tours, "The Wonder Years", and every second film at your local cinema being about the Vietnam War. Accelerator thus captures the experience of 80s kids who grew up thinking the most transformative moments in history had already passed them by, its distorted, disorienting production underscoring the impossibility of recapturing something that's long gone. Closer in spirit to Ariel Pink's phantasmagoric pop than its 90s lo-fi contemporaries, Accelerator is like an Instagram-filtered take on rock's golden age-- an attempt to recapture something authentic through knowingly artificial, premeditated means.
Like the previous entries in Drag City's Royal Trux reissue campaign, this no-frills re-release of Accelerator exists simply to put this essential album back into print rather than try to deconstruct its mystique through outtakes and demos. And besides, bonus materials are ultimately unnecessary, because this album sounds every bit as absurd, chaotic, and exhilarating as it did 14 years ago. The passage of time has brought us no more closer to figuring out the logic of the uproarious roadhouse riot "The Banana Question" or the absolutely demented, street-jive nursery rhyme "Juicy, Juicy, Juice", but their insidious earworm hooks perpetually lure you back into the clamor for further investigation.
Most of these tracks are simply structured, and even repeat the same lyrics throughout, but Royal Trux deviously tweak the sonics so that you barely recognize your surroundings by song's end-- over the course of five identical verse/chorus cycles, "New Bones" approximates the sound of walking through the eye of a hurricane, with Herrema's dead-cool drawl and the song's steady strut perilously on the brink of being washed out Hagerty's alien guitar frequencies and shortwave vocals. But Accelerator's bizarro sound-world is not so overwhelming as to completely obscure Royal Trux's bad-ass essence (see the wah-wah-drenched knockout "Follow the Winner"), nor their penchant for surprisingly lucid, affecting lyricism: in the chorus of "Liar"-- "I've got a taste in my mouth/ just like a burning tire"-- you've got a slogan for your worst Sunday-morning hangover. And in a late-game surprise, Accelerator drops its fuzz-covered facade to deliver Royal Trux's most unabashedly tender moment ever in "Stevie", a suave, string-swept soul ballad that could practically pass for early Steely Dan. Where the song's poignancy was once undermined somewhat by the fact that it was reputedly written in honour of Steven Seagal, today, the tribute feels that much more appropriate: after all, if a B-level 80s action star can go on to play a real cop on TV, then surely Accelerator can now stand alongside the hallowed classic rock it so brilliantly subverts.
