Pound For Pound (2000)

Pound For Pound (2000)

Anyone who caught the Trux live in 1999 saw, essentially, the Thank You lineup reunited, with the addition of Ken Nasta (who drummed on Sweet Sixteen) joining Chris Pyle on percussion, along with bass master Dan Brown. The band wasted no time at the conclusion of the tour to enter the studio to record Pound For Pound. As the band stated at the time of its release, Pound For Pound was essentially an extension of Veterans’ closing opus “Blue Is The Frequency.” While the lineup was essentially the same as Thank You, Pound avoids the sterile, time-capsule feel and comes off as a much more loose, living, breathing document. In short, it swings. Songs here are allowed to stretch out. There’s room again for Hagerty’s solos, drum solos, middle breakdown horn solos, etc. This might be the only album in their repertoire that Royal Trux seem comfortable as a band. Unfortunately, Royal Trux playing more or less straight-ahead rock songs isn’t as memorable as, say, Cats And Dogs or Accelerator. Still, Royal Trux were a great straight-up rock band when they wanted to be. And if you wanted an album’s worth of “Blue Is The Frequency”-sounding jams… well, here it is. There are, however, some elements just under the surface that separate the Trux from, say, the Black Crowes. It was around the late ’90s that Hagerty began referencing avant-garde jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman’s theory of Harmolodics in interviews. For the unfamiliar (and non-musicians) Harmolodics is a difficult philosophy/approach to grasp. For our purposes here, let’s just say that it seeks to free musicians from traditional expectations and rules of European music. In Royal Trux’s later records, one sees this approach more and more, but none more clearly than, say Chris Pyle and Ken Nasta’s drum solo section on album-closer “Dr. Gone,” which is Royal Trux’s version of “Drums In Space.”