Album Review

After Royal Trux split up, it seemed that Neil Hagerty reclined into
easy glory as the act’s enduring talent, while Jennifer Herrema got
played as “just the singer.” Singer she is, but there is no “just”
about it. The woman has as much weird vision and is as enigmatic of a
talent as her former partner; she’s also got a skeezy superstar steez
(classic edition) and skunks around the stage clad in tails of animals
she’s skinned herself.

After a rough start (approximately no one liked that first record),
Herrema’s dirt-rock spectacular RTX are doling out the skankiest stank
rock with pitch-perfect aplomb. The forthcoming third album, JJ Got
Live RaTX, is all riffs—a detonated jumble of
1974–’78’s hottest licks, it could pass for bona fide vintage,
save for the part where Herrema sings about using a fax machine at
Kinkos. JJ Got Live RaTX owes less to, say, Van Halen than their
previous works, and more to the Eagles’ more antagonist moments on
cheap street drugs. Songs take a backseat to solos, chugging, and
noodling that sounds like Joe Walsh rocketing off the top of Cocaine
Mustache Mountain.

Early cheese-metal thunder is ironic high art these days, but
Herrema keeps it in the gutter where it belongs, growling and spitting
with a dead sort of anger, her voice purring like she’s on her ninth
decade of a strictly Dorals-and-gin diet. On the ballads, she goes with
more of a medicated whine. While the record is a righteous 36-minute
ripper, half the fun of this band is to be had live, watching Herrema
creep around onstage like a spider, snarling through her long bangs and
filthy skintight jeans, commanding rock mythos revivified.