[a]Royal Trux[/a] are The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion shagged through a hedge backwards. Cool. They’re Josie And The Pussycats meets The Blair Witch Project – a buncha dead-eyed, slack-jawed, pale-skinned, barely breathing, semi-comatose, |berslacker cartoon zombies, prone to the occasional violent spasms of electrocuted epilepsy-on-a-hot-tin roof blitzkrieg gonk-rock’n’roll. Cool. Everything’s groovy and cool, baby, oh yeah, testify! Shit’s gonna rock tonight for sure, oh yeah.
Shade-sporting, bleached-blonde singer/geetarist Jennifer Herrema wanders onstage looking like a cross between The Mummy and Jennifer Saunders in an Ab Fab ’70s flashback sequence and a mad bag lady wearing the skins of several kidnapped and slaughtered Afghan hounds. Cool. And – after a few witty, pithy and profound quips – der Trux tear straight into a short, savage carpet bomb of a rock’n’roll song that leaves us frantically gasping, mentally annihilated, physically destroyed and desperately begging for more like the unworthy scum-dogs we are. Cool. Except they don’t.
They fuck around tuning up and looking cool and avoiding eye contact for ages. At one stage the bag lady even pulls out a roll of gaffer tape, bites off a chunk and mumbles something into the mic about “more treble on the congas” or something. Oh dear, it’s our old friend we’re-so-fucking-cool-we-can’t-be-arsed. And it’s shoddy. It’s insulting. It’s wilfully amateurish. And it sucks. Big time. Hey, Trux! Here’s a radical idea! How about you spend more time before the gig doing the really boring stuff like tuning up and soundchecking instead of, as my backstage spy informs me, just staring at the walls and being ‘cool’. You twats.
OK, now they’re gonna RAWK! ‘Cos when Trux RAWK, then they fucking RAWK! And tonight Trux RAWKED so bastard hard they imploded our kidneys. Literally. ‘I’m Ready’ RAWKED! ‘Waterpark’ RAWKED! ‘!Yo Se!’ RAWKED! Oh yeah.
But the gig SUCKED! Duh! How come? ‘Cos in between these splenetic bursts of frenetic energy, Trux WANKED! We are talking utterly tuneless, watery-jizz spurting free-style jazz type mock rock bollocks by the fucking arid acre. They even whipped out a set of Incantation-style goat-herder nose-flutes at one stage. Toot toot. Jesus!
What Trux need is a couple of huge neon signs above the stage. One that says RAWKS! and one that says SUCKS! That way their brain-dead moron fanbase would know when to jeer – “Hey! Trux! Knock off the shit-awful pseudo-muso puke and play some fucking rock’n’roll, you over-indulged spoilt-brat hippy-filth tossers!” Yeah, then they’d be good.