Sweet Sixteen

Few bands make 180-degree turns feel as natural as Royal Trux. If 1995’s Thank You was a perfectly shaped rock album, its follow-up, Sweet Sixteen, blew that completely apart. It’s the sound of wanton and welcome excess — no songs under four minutes; songs overloaded with wild arrangement touches, shaped by some of the Trux’s wildest production whims. But it’s also, perhaps, their best collection of songs. Hiding away in their four-story Virginia farmhouse, with a loose ‘decades trilogy’ album concept to keep things moving along, Sweet Sixteen was their sick love letter to the seventies — like you couldn’t tell. The material here plays heavy with ‘FM radio classic’ structural logic, if not sound, featuring some of Hagerty’s most blasted soloing, songs that play out like misanthropic anti-anthems, and on “Roswell Seeds and Stems,” their most perfect sci-fi/weed-head mash-up. Is it any wonder their label, Virgin, freaked out?