Royal Trux #1

With Royal Trux's 1988 debut, it’s hard to discern if the group was worshipping at the classic-rock altar with primitive musical skills or if it was hell-bent on destroying the genre’s pedestal by bastardizing rock ‘n’ roll trappings. Either way, Royal Trux is a seminal snapshot of a young Jennifer Herrema spewing vocal temper tantrums over the shambolic guitar wizardry of Neil Michael Hagerty (who'd just left Pussy Galore). Hagerty takes the lead vocals on “Bad Blood,” a deconstructed garage rock number that plays like somebody pushed a '60s psych-punk band down a flight of stairs mid-performance. Herrema makes Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon sound like Karen Carpenter on the following “Incineration,” where her inflections are even grittier than the distorted guitar fuzz that’s barely holding the song together. By the time “Hashish” plays, it starts to sound as though these loose, dissolving arrangements are rooted in '60s free jazz. The swampy stomp of “Sanction Smith” and the closing “Hawkin’ Around” recall Pussy Galore’s 1986 reworking of the Stones’ Exile on Main St..