White Stuff

White Stuff may not be as experimental as some of their past efforts, but it is an incredibly enjoyable dip into the dumpster of dirty grooving rock and roll whose sound is surprisingly appropriate thirty years after their formation.

Even though this work does not find the band at its most adventurous, it is an album that completely represents what Royal Trux is all about. To retain that flame for that amount of time, and through a 14-year long break, is quite astounding.

Royal Trux remain unique, one of a kind: still going wrong like a hydrogen bomb.[Mar 2019, p.36]

It's got some absolute burners on deck. ... It's also got plenty of noisy psychedelic horseshit they did in the early 90s, but even that stuff sounds glammy and cool. [Mar 2019, p.88]

White Stuff once again feels like the work of avant-garde self-mythologisers inveigling themselves into the Stones' Nellcote basement. But the riffs, cutting a swathe through dense electronic meltdown, are the strongest they've engineered, together or apart, since 1997's Accelerator. and there's a neww, mature pathos to the likes of Suburban Junkie Lady. [Apr 2019, p.96]

Trux life feels more brilliantly warped than ever. [Apr 2019, p.114]

Forsaking the earthier vibe of later Trux records like Veterans of Disorder and Pound for Pound, White Stuff feels like an extension of Herrema’s work with Black Bananas, thriving on the tension between old-school authenticity and modernist manipulations.

While fans of Royal Trux's inventiveness might find more of that in Hagerty's and Herrema's solo work, White Stuff is still another entertaining part of a reunion that once seemed impossible.

Few would mistake White Stuff for golden age Royal Trux--the vocals are more subdued, the songwriting is more straightforward, and anyone looking for something as confrontational as "The Banana Question" won't find it here. But hearing Hagerty and Herrema stay true to their ethos after 30-plus years offers its own satisfactions. Consider the comeback complete.

If you listen to White Stuff and hear good time rock ’n’ roll then perhaps it’s time to check into the rock ’n’ roll nursing home. On the other hand if you hear avant garde brinksmanship, check your ears. It’s both, it’s neither. Does it matter? Does anything? Yes and no.

If, after an absence of 19 years, you are happy to engage with a band who are reprising much of their musical and lyrical themes whilst also dipping their toes into unexplored (and poorly realised) terrain, then no doubt there is much within White Stuff which will tick all of the appropriate boxes. But, oh man, that Kool Keith track.

Hagerty’s guitar playing remains as unkempt as ever, but, touchingly, the duo’s vocals play tag throughout, augmenting one another’s frazzled joint vision as though no time had passed.

Influential they sure were, for better or worse, but right now, as heroically, monumentally crazed and unconventional they may be, Royal Trux are more a curio than compelling.

White Stuff is a welcome return even if it is uneven.