Untitled

It took Royal Trux two years to spew out the brief, minimal Untitled, which seems about right, given both the sensory overload of its predecessor, 1990’s forbidding Twin Infinitives, and the bad times that the Trux duo of Neil Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema were caught up in. If it’s coherent, it’s because they had no choice but to be focused: recorded on cheap, with little studio time, Untitled is the songs and nothing more, no flourishes, no artfulness. But there are a few Trux classics on here – “Sometimes”, “Hallucination”, and the sublime closing one-two punch of “Blood Flowers” and the haemorrhaging, on-the-edge-of-out-of-control “Sun On The Run.” You can hear their grounding in the blues, and Sticky Fingers/Exile-era Stones in there, somewhere, but like most things to do with Untitled, its presence is unclear, ghostly.