★★★★★
By the late '90s the Royal Trux wound up back on Drag City, the same indie label on which they had begun the decade. After Virgin Records signed them to an extremely artist-friendly major label deal (thanks to being named checked by Nirvana and Sonic Youth as influences), the band did actually refine its sound a bit. 1995's Thank You leaned more toward classic rock and jam band sensibilities and its follow up Sweet Sixteen included cinematic strings and righteous guitar solos...
- www.popmatters.com
2014-01-23
★★★★★
All too often, Royal Trux have been used a signifier, an indicator or exemplar of something beyond the parameters of their musical career - as "the last great couple in rock" (NME) or "the last great rock & roll band" (Bobby Gillespie). What began as a simple rock-oriented project has become a byword for cult credibility, obscurantism and lurid stories of hedonism that have no bearing at all on what Neil Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema set out to achieve with the band...
- thequietus.com
2014-01-13
★★★★★
To this day, it seems bizarre that a band like Royal Trux even happened. As one of the first acts claimed by the early 90s major label 'Alternative' boom, duo Neil Haggerty and Jennifer Herrema were courted by Virgin only to be regurgitated soon after back into the tender arms of Drag City Records. However alien it may be to our currently conservative musical economy that a band of such imaginative, colourful distaste may have once aired outside of pirate radio, Royal Trux have an unsung place...
- music.thedigitalfix.com
2014-01-07
★★★★★
Released 14 years ago,Veterans Of Disorder wasRoyal Trux's final long-playerof the 90s, coming hot on theheels of the previous year'sAccelerator. From thebombastic blues-rock stompof opener Watermark throughthe psychedelic drone ofWitch's Tit and all the way tothe meandering, unpredictableeight minutes of Blues Is TheFrequency, it's an album thatdefies definition. A scattergunof ideas and styles, it is, onthe whole, a successfulexperiment, though the quasitribalpolyrhythms of Yo Se...
- recordcollectormag.com
2013-12-06
★★★★★
To date, Drag City's Royal Trux reissue strategy has been more of a restock strategy, returning the band's '90s-era albums to record-store shelves in their original form-- no bonus tracks, no liner-note essays, no souvenir sticker sets. But more just than hip a new generation to this eternally enigmatic, eminently influential band (Deerhunter's Monomania being just the last album to mainline their scuzz-rock steez), the fat-free reissues speak to Neil Hagerty and Jennifer Heremma's treatment of...
- pitchfork.com
2013-06-17
★★★★★
Accelerator was first released in 1998 - Neil Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema's seventh album, as it then stood - which afforded it that crucial arm's-length perspective from which to squint at, chew over and ultimately batter the fizzing electro-piss out of the FX-bloated production clusterfuck that formed much of what had apologetically passed for 'rock' in the Eighties...
- drownedinsound.com
2012-11-30
★★★★★
When Accelerator was first released in 1998, many alt-rock fans didn't get what the critical fuss was about. The surrounding stuff about Royal Trux's twin bandleaders and Sid-and-Nancy-like couple Jennifer Herrema and Neil Hagerty being unrepentant heroin users, or about the album being the last in a trilogy dedicated to specific decades (following Thank You's tribute to the 60s and Sweet Sixteen's look at the 70s) didn't help, especially as Accelerator sounded nothing like the 1980s...
- www.bbc.co.uk
2012-11-21
★★★★★
Drag City has made a habit of putting out some pretty obscure reissues in the past few years. It may have started with hidden gems like Gary Higgins' Red Hash, but by the time we got to Carol Kleyn's harp records, we were firmly in the outliers category. Now, their new reissue of Royal Trux's 1998 album Accelerator doesn't exactly fit that mold, which makes it curious right off the bat...
- www.popmatters.com
2012-11-06
★★★★★
Drag City has made a habit of putting out some pretty obscure reissues in the past few years. It may have started with hidden gems like Gary Higgins' Red Hash, but by the time we got to Carol Kleyn's harp records, we were firmly in the outliers category. Now, their new reissue of Royal Trux's 1998 album Accelerator doesn't exactly fit that mold, which makes it curious right off the bat...
- www.popmatters.com
2012-10-15
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