Royal Trux, back in the beginning, was a set of delightfully horrible people. Jennifer Herrema and Neil Hagerty met and fell in love together on an acid trip where they stayed on wooden plank, thinking they were in the ocean. Bonding on any sea-faring voyage is always a great way to fall in love. So is ripping off your indie record label for money for smack, then asking for more money to actually make an album.Now that the glamorous introduction is out of the way, there is the music. For those of you less comfortable with this sort of thing, you can call it sound. Either way, it is an absolute abandonment of any sort of conventional structure, melody, or even rhythm. Hell, it sounds like even their drum machine isn’t feeling so good, spitting up sounds and convincing you that yes, time is passing by.
“Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, BABY!” Jen cries on “Jet Pet”. All the lyrics are dark, horrible, and disfigured through the arrangements. Heroin has clearly gotten to them, though both claim that this album was recorded sober. No Wave ever got this intense; it is as if the two felt that Mars and DNA were a little too accessible.
By far the winner on here has to be “(Edge of the) Ape Oven”. Starting out with a jaunty, almost recognizable melody (nah, just kidding, it makes no sense) the sounds starts clouding over with so many external events. Then the singing begins, with the most bizarre, otherworldly lyrics imaginable. It is as if they’re trying to channel the ghosts of dead white trash. Direct hits scored indeed.
Yeah, so hopefully that prepares you a little bit. This isn’t some cutesy, oh aren’t we so clever, kind of recording made by well-educated arts students. Rather, this is the intense nightmare of drugged high school dropouts trying to make sense out of the grimy world they call home. I mean, for Pete’s sake, Jennifer now writes for Vice Magazine and was the original “Heroin Chic” girl of the 80s, and Hagerty worked in Pussy Galore, a disgusting filthy band if there ever was one.
Don’t even bother with their other albums, after this they pretty much started making 60s and 70s nostalgic albums. This one they created a whole new identity. You’ll either love it or hate it, there is no in between. If you’re into the weirder edges of rock and noise, this is ideal for you. But if you think that this will be similar to Sonic Youth or grunge rock, you’d be dead wrong. Twin Infinitives is the result of so much slag populating the underground for most of the 80s, coming to rear its ugly head in the early age of grunge.
