Jennifer Herrema's former band, Royal Trux, released their first album in 1988 at the height of the hair-metal era, and at the time, their brand of lo-fi blues-concréte couldn't have been further removed from prevailing, poofy-coiffed rock trends. But with each new album from Heremma's post-Trux outfit RTX, it becomes clearer that former partner Neil Hagerty-- now releasing increasingly inscrutable albums under the Howling Hex mantle-- was holding her back from her true calling of denim'n'leather metal queen. Where 2004's RTX debut Transmaniacon featured a handful of Trux rewrites and last year's Western Xterminator detoured into strung-out psych-folk, with JJ Got Live RaTX (actually a falsely advertised studio album), Herrema exorcises every last vestige of her former band's avant-rock influence and finally gets to enjoy the 1988 she never got to experience the first time around.
But for Herrema, the real attraction to hair-metal isn't the panty-peeling riffs and wiggly fingered solos-- though those are in bountiful supply here-- but its androgynous implications. With her lean, statuesque physique and long blonde locks, no one is ever going to mistake Herrema for a guy, and yet, when she asks "are you a boy, or are you a girl?" on the track of the same name, you have to wonder if she's talking into a mirror, her gruff, three-cartons-a-day voice sounding several degrees more ballsy than those of the spandexed pansies who once populated "Headbanger's Ball". The irony of 80s cock-rock is that most of the dudes singing it sounded like they didn't have one, so leave it to a woman to correct that deficiency; with the talk-boxed strut of "You Should Shut Up" and the open-sunroof charge of "How'd You Do It?"-- RTX's most straight-up, no-bullshit rocker to date-- Herrema embodies the kind of ultimate rock chick that a young Vince Neil or Axl Rose aspired to be when they were applying their eyeliner and hairspray.
Where past RTX albums sometimes apologized for their heavy-metal love with deliberately messy production (as if still trying to appease Royal Trux's indie-centric fanbase), JJ Got Live RaTX unashamedly revels in authentically 80s details: The slowly swelling synth intro to "You Should Shut Up" that sounds like Giorgio Moroder's intro theme to Scarface; the squealing lead fills on "Are You a Boy or Are You Girl" that fly by like orange globulars on "Guitar Hero"'s expert level; the crunchy-riffed break in the middle of "Virginia Creeper" lifted straight from Scorpions' "No One Like You"; the brief, ZZ Top Eliminator-style techno-boogie denouement to "Mr. Wall" that's actually more interesting than the song that precedes it. RTX can't transcend all genre clichés-- namely, numbskull choruses ("Fuck that! We don't give a shit!") and intentional typos ("Too Badd")-- but they score where it counts: In the power-ballad department, though JJ Got Live RaTX's lone slow-dance moment, "Cheap Wine Time", is less "Sweet Child O' Mine" than "Sweet Jane" had the Velvet Underground been the house band at the Whisky in 88 instead of the Factory in 66. In a sense, RTX's de-cheesing of 80s pop-metal couldn't better timed-- provided that disgruntled GN'R fans spend their Chinese Democracy refund money on this.
