A Royal Trux reunion was always going to be a questionable proposition, partly because stability has never been central to the chemistry between Jennifer Herrema and Neil Hagerty. Nearly two decades after the duo split, White Stuff sounds less like a mature reconciliation than a relapse into the same beautiful dysfunction that made the band compelling in the first place.
The album's title, artwork and general atmosphere leave little doubt that the old fascination with decadence survived the separation. The music suggests some half-abandoned underground club at the end of a very long night: cheap synthesizers, guitars that sound ill, grinding bass and voices stacked into screams, whispers, fragments and noises. There is dirt everywhere.
Yet White Stuff is also surprisingly tuneful by Royal Trux standards. Hagerty and Herrema have often pulled against each other from opposite ends of the avant-garde and classic-rock spectrum; here that tension settles closer to the middle. The title track and "Under Ice" carry the loose, narcotic feel of the Rolling Stones around Black and Blue, while "Suburban Junky Lady" contains a melodic shape that might almost pass for conventional roots rock if the band weren't determined to damage it.
Elsewhere, the album actively dismantles those familiar forms. "Get Used to This" collides minimalist electronics with hip-hop, "Every Day Swan" pushes toward metal, and "Purple Audacity #1" approaches funk as though the musicians have forgotten several essential parts of the instruction manual. Even "Whopper Dave", for all its deformation, contains something unexpectedly tender.
The appeal lies in those contradictions. Royal Trux can sound amateurish and exact, arrogant and vulnerable, familiar and completely unstable at once. Producer David Briggs does little to sanitize that chemistry. The record has enough definition for the songs to register, while retaining the sense that the entire session could come apart at any moment.
That instability matters because a polished Royal Trux reunion would have been far less convincing. The band's music has always depended on abrasion: Herrema and Hagerty take recognizable elements of rock, blues, punk and funk and leave fingerprints, cigarette burns and unidentified stains all over them.
At 37 minutes, White Stuff doesn't overexplain the reunion. Eleven songs arrive, make a mess and leave. Whether Royal Trux were capable of functioning again for any meaningful length of time almost feels beside the point. For one album, the old chemistry returned intact, and it still sounded dangerous enough to require supervision.
GENRE: Rock
RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2019
PRODUCED BY: David Briggs
LABEL: Fat Possum Records
RATING: 8/10