There seem to be two schools of thought concerning Royal Trux. One sees Accelerator (Drag City, 1998) as RT’s magnum opus, the long-awaited distillation of the heroin-damaged chaos that marked their earlier work; the other sees it as an album eight years past their prime, a perversely muted affair in comparison to the monomaniacal purity of 1990’s Twin Infinitives.
Regardless of the poison you pick — and don’t be fooled, it’s exactly that — you’re guaranteed a generous helping of hydrochloric substance. Royal Trux could always be counted on to provide an essence of something altogether broken, whole, dead, and alive all at once. Their sound? A nocturnal, Stooges-like mess of broken glass, smog, motor-oil, and frayed nerves. If Twin Infinitives was an exquisite corpse of shattered parts — the result of a monstrous structure collapsed from unbearable perversity — Accelerator was the sound of putting the Humpty Dumpty back together again. In the two records one can find both poles of the Royal Trux spectrum, a sort of diptych of their delightfully grotesque legacy.
Hanging somewhere in the void is everything else the band recorded, which includes 98’s 3-Song EP. After Accelerator’s unexpectedly warm reception, a tour was soon scheduled. This entailed assembling a full-fledged band, one made up of many Drag City players, most notably bassist David Pajo. After arriving at Royal Trux’s Virginia ranch for rehearsal, the newly formed band was hurriedly prepared for the recording of a new EP. The end result was the 3-Song EP, a relatively straightforward, proggy, and low-end heavy set of songs; which didn’t make them any less intoxicating, mind you. After all, it was still Royal Trux, for fuck’s sake.
The 3-Song EP has been rather difficult to track down as of late, being out of print for almost a decade. But! Drag City (swooping in to save the day) has been unearthing the Royal Trux archive piece by piece, and the next step will be reissuing the 3-Song EP on June 18.
And if you don’t already own the first few albums (as well as Accelerator) don’t worry, everything is going to be okay; you can still rectify your impoverished situation by picking them up at the Drag City store.
• Drag City: http://www.dragcity.com