ROYAL TRUX - QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT VINYL (SUPER LTD. ED. RSD BLACK FRIDAY YELLOW)
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SUPER LIMITED EDITION RECORD STORE DAY BLACK FRIDAY EDITION YELLOW VINYL
Release Date: 29th November 2019
Limited edition Record Store Day Black Friday pressing! To celebrate the return of the enigmatic Royal Trux, the noise-psych-pop-rock duo of Neil Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema have unearthed a compilation record with a twist. The twist being it’s made up of re-imaged tracks and unheard gems from the archive! Essential for any Trux fan and also serves as a great introduction of the scope of this duo’s greatest!
FFO: Stephen Malkmus, Ex Hex, Superchunk, Cherry Glazerr
"Sweets from the sweet. The greatest from the greatest. Time is tight. Time is short. Let’s explore the loose, the titanic. Let’s focus not on likes but on loves, those you don’t merely admire but feel in your bones, heart and soul. Let’s focus not on those who’ve spent the last few decades hinting at rock and roll, playing at it, conjecturing about it. Let’s luxuriate in those that have got on and done it, lived it, loved it, that give you that thrill without posture and without pastiche, that give you the dangerous yes/no hit of rock n roll at maximal dose, those who magic those conjurations of sound and vision, fire, sweat, brine and blood into our systems without negotiation, because they know we can’t resist. Those who blazingly show how a band can be more than a set of songs, can be a method, a way of life, a reason to be, a style of being. Royal fkn Trux have blessed us and blissed us and blasted us now for 3 decades. Every record different, the spirit unmistakeable throughout, shape, persona, style and sound fused like no-one else. Let’s for a change have a best of the BEST - the new Royal Trux collection Quantum Entanglement is less a collection of tracks, more a pipe bomb of flash points, contact highs from the imperial phase of the greatest rock and roll band of the last 30 years. Potted myth runs thusly: Trux were always and will always be Neil Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema, who came together as in the mid-80s in NYC. to make records that confounded sense, hustled their own universe out into yours. Their s/t debut, made in ‘87 gave a hint that something unique was coming out of Jen and Neil’s insular obsessions (psyche, noise, bentshot blues and diseased production), grotesque music (million-dollar-sad) that their second LP, Twin Infinitives took to even more deranged levels of delight and intrigue, unforgettable songs played with the freedom of Beefheart, the power of the Stones, the ghostly suggestiveness of Albert Ayler. 92’s Skulls and 93’s Cats And Dogs refined the chaos but kept that diamond-hard integument intact. ‘Junkie Nurse’ from the former, and ‘The Spectre’ and ‘The Flag’ from the latter (all featured here) show that what was clear (despite the media’s lazy rotation of druggy cliches) was that RTX were a band focused on SOUND and the pleasures it could bring, ferociously self-disciplined and focused in the unstinting pursuit of their imaginations. Building a more solid band-basis with a startlingly funky riddim section (Dan Brown, Chris Pyle and Robbie Armstrong) their major-label debut Thank You was produced to a choogling, garage-rock blasting-point by Neil Young’s long-time sideman David Briggs, showcased here on the woozy ventilator blues anthem of ‘Ray O Vac’. 97’s compilation Singles Lived & Unleashed collated divinely unhinged oddments and sodments from across RTX’s career as repped by the brain-jangling ‘Shockwave Rider’ here. 98’s astonishing , Accelerator was another step into a new space, a lysergic re-imagining of the 80s that again proved Trux’ heroic fearlessness, and cast a baleful light on their pootling contemporaries. Where so many bands, then and now, try and erase technology in a misguided attempt to achieve their false notions of a purified musical past, Trux always used technology to break rock’n’roll down, reconstructing it with a fully wonked-out, wacked-out geometry that was utterly unique. On Accelerator, certain sections of your headspace got filled in, overwhelmed, blitzed, emptied, ringing with resonance and echo, seething with tinnitus, no bleed between elements, sticklebrick rock. And always always Neil and Jennifer’s voices, immutably cool, pulling together the sprawling and wasteful into three minute-models of concision. It was the closest rock music got to a RZA production in ‘98, and it still sounds utterly fucking awesome to this day, as you’ll hear on ‘I’m Ready’, ‘Stevie’, and the diseased delicious ‘Liar’. The albums that follow are not talked about enough but gratifyingly form the bulk source for Quantum Entanglement. 99’s ‘Veterans Of Disorder’, here reflected in the mighty ACDCmeets-Zep groove of ‘Waterpark’, was RTX’s heaviest hit of hard-rock menace, an album that reflected the insanely feral Trux live show, at the time something akin to seeing Miles Davis’ early 70s band jamming with Robert Quine. 2000’s ‘Pound For Pound’ sent you back an era, forward an eternity, as enshrined here in the pulsating fuzzy arabic-grind of ‘Call Out The Lions’ and the ragged dub-raunch of ‘Sunshine & Grease’. A glorious last hurrah so devotees thought - the utterly stunning ‘White Stuff’ saw a reconvened Trux bless 2019 with one of its most incendiary highlights as revealed in the title track here. A brief listening note. This isn’t a best of to be dipped into. Deluge yourself, engulf yourself in it, loud, let it dominate your head, your rooms, your dreams and your blaupunkt. Don’t just listen to Quantum Entanglement. Let it fizz under your tongue, let your shoulders loosen and hunker, let your steps become new and ancient, let your eyes see the glimmer and your teeth bite the monstrous wobble of this sound, let your soul sing it back like a tuning fork rapped on a pylon. For the longest time, RTX were the only band around who believed in rock enough to fuck with it as it so righteously deserves, the only band around with just the right mix of tenderness and tyranny to make their experiment a living breathing index of a livable life. Let’s go full tilt boogie and fucking well get DOWN with it and get UP for it and get ON with it and if we’re going to look back let’s grab ourselves an unfulfilled future while we’re at it. Follow the leaders. Quantum Entanglement is both launchpad and glorious dead-end. A record for dancing yourself some new shapes under a new sun. Music for pleasure and life. The greatest from the greatest. Sweets from the sweet."