Accelerator

After 1997’s Sweet Sixteen, Royal Trux broke loose from Virgin Records and returned home to Drag City, with a sweet financial pay-out and a new album ready to go. Accelerator completes their ‘decades trilogy’ with a weird, plastic glam-metal sheen, but it’s also full of psychedelic drop-outs and surprising tonal events that are closer to some of the freakiest ’70s dub productions. Front-loaded with naggingly catchy pop gems — “I’m Ready,” “Juicy Juicy Juice,” “The Banana Question” — the real magic happens over Accelerator’s second half, with the deep, disorienting phase-outs of “Follow The Winner” and “New Bones,” and the soaring “Stevie.” They used a spectrum analyser, tuned to modern pop, to inform some of the production and arrangement, a wild move for such analogue heads, but one that probably explains Accelerator’s ‘comfortable strangeness.’