“Map of the City,” a song on Royal Trux’s terrific Thank You (1995), includes these lyrics: “I’m drawing up a plan for the city / Filled with ten thousand crooked stairs / Some lead up to heaven….” If we freely allegorize and think the “plan for the city” as an account of the Royal Trux’s strange career and the “crooked stairs” as their many, many songs, then some do “lead up to heaven”: “Back to School,” “Ray O Vac,” “Blue Is the Frequency.” We could go on. But as the lyric notes, only “some” lead up into the beautiful blue, while others descend into decidedly more disordered, berserk domains. For a map of those abject regions, you might consult Twin Infinitives, the band’s 1990 double LP, which has been reissued by Fire Records.
Some may wonder if the world ever needed the initial release of Twin Infinitives, much less a reissue (available as a “limited edition Double Silver LP,” natch). It’s a notoriously difficult record, and there are audiences that liken its racket to the relative “unlistenability” of other perversely audacious double LPs: Trout Mask Replica (1969) or Metal Machine Music (1975). Twin Infinitives lacks the poetic spirit and structure of Captain Beefheart’s songs, and it doesn’t have the conceptual rigor of Lou Reed’s infamous noise project. Mostly the record seems to document the bodily rhythms and psychological extremities of dope addiction, which Neil Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema were deep into during the album’s creation.
There’s some relevant historical context there, if we recall the early 1990s period of so-called “heroin chic” — we might summon the seductive image of Vincent Vega (John Travolta), high as hell and cruising LA freeways in his cherry red ’64 Malibu, from Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. The junkie vibe suffusing the Royal Trux’s early records intensified their scuzz-punk rep, but there’s nothing superficially sexy or effortlessly cool about the music on Twin Infinitives. Songs like “Yin Jim Versus the Vomit Creature” and “Lick My Boots” are too ragged and distorted; they sound unhealthy. If the heroin chic amounted to a sort of cynical slumming in vicariously hazardous aesthetic territory, Twin Infinitives feels too urgently dangerous. It’s the sound of minds purposefully reducing themselves to wreckage.
For all that grim junkie detritus, Twin Infinitives has its moments of musical power. Most compelling is “(Edge of the) Ape Oven,” a fifteen-minute tour on the road of excess. It never clarifies into anything vaguely song-like, but it has ideas about musicality that provoke. The bursts of cowbell, Hagerty’s guitar tone, the spectral organ that occupies a space out in the distance of the mix: the track feels assembled with a variety of idiosyncratic artistry.
Listening back to Twin Infinitives, one has the sense that the run of excellent records that followed, from Untitled to Sweet Sixteen, owes something to the cauldron of infernal weirdness Hagerty and Herrema baked in for a while. Check out the mutant blues of “Move,” the spooky vibe-out of “Driving in That Car (with the Eagle on the Hood),” the pacing of “Shadow of the Wasp.” They all bear the traces of the chaotic welter of Twin Infinitives, and for audiences still engaged by the best of the Royal Trux (in spite of all the messy drama), it’s sort of interesting to track the band’s work through the 1990s, as they stitched songs and their souls back into more coherent forms. Just watch your step on those crooked stairs if you’re headed down the other way.
