Royal Trux

There's a good 2 hour special here on Royal Trux, who were the most consistently great rock group of the 90s. This is a career retrospective of the band and Jennifer Herrema is interviewed throughout by Ajay(?).

Herrema has now got her own dublab show named after an old Royal Trux tune The Banana Question. There are 2 episodes so far and it's an amateurishly ramshackle affair with 80s hip-hop, metal, disco, classic rock etc. all sort of shabbily dub mixed. Quite entertaining. I imagine pro DJs will hate it.

Take the 90s Avant-Rock challenge here with Twin Infinitives. Hey, it took me a couple of years to realise this was a mental scuzzy masterpiece.

They started to get a bit more accessible after Twin Infinitives. Driving In That Car was a few years later from the great 1993 Cats & Dogs LP.

Morphic Resident is reaching almost FM worthy commerciality but they're still them. I'm pretty sure the story goes that the band handed over these tapes to Greg Archilla and he just did what he wanted with the mix. The band liked it and 1997's Sweet Sixteen was the result, another classic.

Another gem from Sweet Sixteen.

a good laugh

I've been havin a great laugh with 2 records lately. First there is this Kraut-Prog record Paternoster by Pater Noster. Recommended by several people on the Blogosphere and the Cosmic Egg guys. I thought it was gonna be great. Well maybe it is. I love the music. I just need to get used to the vocals which are a little bit over the top and a little bit funny. Then I had to rewind the 3rd track, Stop These Lines, to make sure that's what he had just sung....."Dressed in clothes you always wear/Go to work I wont be there/Luchtime snackbar eating chips/Ketchup's running down your lips/Deadeyed waiters selling bibs/Which you have to fix with clips/Sitting waiting find an end/Meaningless with no comment"..........It continues on in a very serious and intense manner. I was in fits of laughter. Comedy gold.

*Spellcheck offered an alternative word for Kraut-Prog which was geriatric. Rather fitting I thought and well................. fucking strange!

So serious they're hilarious.

Then the next record had me filled with glee. I found St Helens Heavy Profession for $6 in a bargain bin. It can't be that bad, I thought, it was in end of year top 10 lists etc...some of it must be good. First track, had a smile on my face. Great. Second track, wow! How do they do this? Smiles all round. They were Australia's very own Royal Trux tribute band. It must be a hard thing to do considering how idiosyncratic Royal Trux were. You could have put it in a Royal Trux sleeve and said this is their lost record from 1996 and I would have believed you.

Honey have you seen my
Royal Trux t-shirt my
boobs are getting cold?

It's a bewdy!

Anyway it had me diggin' out me old Royal Trux albums. Possibly my favourite 90s rock band. The one I'm diggin' at the moment is Sweet Sixteen. What a mammoth sound they had on that!  Fuckin' great songs, epic keyboards, funny riddims and out there production make Sweet Sixteen the triumph it is!

During a dinner party conversation once the question being asked was 'If you were stranded on a desert island and could have one record what would it be blah blah'.........I answered Twin Infinitives to bemused looks and silence...............

Desert Island Disc