Réedition en cd et vinyl
Rising from the silence, shaking the muck of level-Z rock and roll detritus from their feet, Royal Trux returned to action in October of 1992 with an untitled album, their third. It had been two years since they’d vanished into the negative zone with Twin Infinitives, an ultimate left-turn that appeared to have no endgame. A few half-aborted live shows and several attempts to make another album had occupied some of the time since then. Neil and Jennifer had played out the string in San Francisco and moved back to D.C.
The music never stopped, but the face to whatever world Royal Trux was living in had gone silent.
Up to and including this moment, Royal Trux worked the fringes. To taste-makers of the period, what they were doing “had something to do with the future of music.” While this was to continue to be the Trux’ private M.O., untitled began a process of reversing those opinions. As organically as Royal Trux moved from their first album to Twin Infinitives, they continued their transformation, confounding their watchers with a personalized, yet elusive, elemental design.
For untitled, Royal Trux strung together eight pieces of varying vintage that clearly communicated their rock and roll desires with the most direct approach to playing songs they’d yet taken. Royal Trux recorded untitled as a duo, their second and last album in this configuration. Hagerty handled the instruments and sang with Jennifer, taking a solo acoustic turn on “Junkie Nurse.” “Lightning Boxer,” “Sometimes,” and “Hallucination,” all featured in the “What Is Royal Trux?” tour of late 1990, gained additional bite on untitled, generally arranged with several guitars, a drum kit and their
vocals. “Most direct” should be considered relative to what is Royal Trux — for the most part, untitled displays a murky finish, with distant, dissonant and fuzzy guitar leads, half-buried vocals and a meticulously underproduced sound.
At the time of the untitled record release, the notoriety that Royal Trux had for being druggy drop-outs was only fortified by the blinkered horrors of “Blood Flowers” and “Junkie Nurse,” not to mention the dark shadows of “Hallucination” and “Sometimes.” Not to be overlooked however were the affirmations of “Air” and “Sun on the Run,” where energy derived from living in the real world translated into fuel to take the band and listeners further into the rock and roll adventure. This was to lead to dizzy heights of achievement for Royal Trux in the pseudo-commercial realm in the times immediately ahead.