RTX – “Western Exterminator” 2007
Posted by (un)relaxeddad on April 14, 2007
“Western Exterminator” is a fun kind of record and functions rather like that icky American oil that glides straight through your gut without leaving an ounce of fat behind. But in a good way. All the noise and shallowness of the best 80’s LA metal and it’s, like, Jennifer Herrera so if you’re a die-hard trendster, it’s big hair rock that it’s OK to like! RTX is, of course, Royal Trux sans most the vowels and Neil Hegarty (off Hexxing and Howling in the other corner). 
Appropriate, really, since Herrera’s singing seldom bothers with anything as easy as intelligible syllables, being swathed for most of the record in layers of relentless, barbed-wire harmoniser and phasing. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Opening title-track “Western Xterminator” is a red herring, unwinding in a sinuous groove of acoustic guitar, Sanatana-like sustain and bongos. Well, maybe tabla, but this is the eighties we’re re-living here. “Balls to Pass” (whose?) is where things hit a particularly greasy groove that never lets up over the next forty minutes. This song could be almost-cool-for-ten-mintes Faster Pussycat (remember “Don’t Touch That Dial, That’s My Favourite Record”?). “Black Bananas” is Riot”or Sammy Hagar when he did his old stuff from Montrose. “Dude Love” is prime early Guns’n’Roses. (I should mention that her guitar player utterly ‘kicks ass’, as the saying goes). “Wo-Wo Din” takes on Anthrax and early grind. And so on. It’s a lightening trawl through the highlights of a genre probably best experienced at second hand in the hands of expert plagiarists, bearing in mind that this is plagiarism a la Kathy Acker. “Knightmare and Mane” is probably a big lighters-aloft ballad, though the vocals are so exceptionally tortured that it could be her shopping list.
You get the idea. Big, dumb, ferocious fun and a fixture on my iPod for weeks. It finishes with “Rat Will Kill”, a crushing four-square plod and framing a riff that the present shambles masquerading as the Crue would kill for, disapating into a lengthy cruise off into the sunset with more blissed-out Santana-isms. Marvellous.
Experience the world’s worst band website ever or the marginally better RTX myspace page. Or even buy Western Xterminator
KG said
The Stooges
The Weirdness (Virgin)
By Justin Farrar
Published: March 29, 2007
The Weirdness ain’t punk-classic like Fun House, but let’s be fair — nothing the recently reunited Stooges can do will ever match their early-’70s peak. This band does rock, however. Ax-man Ron Asheton is not only a funky-ass rhythm freak but the dude’s piercing feedback screech on “Greedy Awful People” and “She Took My Money” should be studied by every retro-garage hack making the scene. As for the 59-year-old Iggy, well, Pop’s monotone death poetry works in spite of itself — like it always has. Just check out these chestnuts: “My idea of fun is killing everyone” and “My dick is turning into a tree. ” Awesome. The biggest problem here is Steve Albini’s just-the-facts production, an approach that works only when the band he’s recording possesses a unique live sound (In Utero-era Nirvana, Burning Witch). But at this stage in their careers, the Stooges can no longer deliver blitzed-out warfare like “I Got a Right.” So in order to transform what’s essentially a darned good collection of noisy bar rock into something truly great, they should’ve picked a producer willing to trick out these recordings, like RTX’s Jennifer Herrema or Andrew W.K., both of whom are avant cock-rock magicians. Still, The Weirdness shits all over 90 percent of all young-guy rock out there.