By: Jeff Hassay

With a title like “JJ’s Got Live RaTX” (no, it’s not a live album and the
last word is pronounced “rats”) you have to 1) be batshit crazy 2) have
some laser-focused vision (including a sense of humor and an obsession with the Pied Piper) or 3) have giant metallic balls. RTX have all three. Following the trajectory of their previous two albums but tweaking it into a scorching perfection RTX can now comfortably step outside of the shadow cast by Jennifer Herrema’s previous band the Royal Trux.

“JJ” sounds like a god of thunder clad in some Paleolithic monster’s furry
pelt standing in Angus Young’s boots on a mountain of sunlit doom, spewing hexes in a vocoded typhoon. It’s thick. It has swirls of pristine sound (honed and unleashed by producer Nadav Eisenman) that are a new type of head music; one that borrows equally from Suzi Quatro, GN’R, Phil Spector and a hair-metal band that teleported here from the distant future where cock-rock plays all day in spaceships and guitar solos don’t ever loose steam. It’s more relaxed and live-sounding than RTX’s two previous outings. It feels like a band getting it right and knowing it--or that moment when some muscle builder flexes precisely as the steroids kick in.

Starting with a pulsating synth orgy, “You Should Shut Up” opens into a
mix of riff and hook; imagine Neil Young’s Trans band (but pissed off)
tearing through ELO’s “Don’t Bring Me Down.” Guitarists Jaimo Welch and Brian McKinley play with distortion like cats play with yarn. It bounces
around, changes direction, stops, lingers. Drums swell. Bass humps your ear. Vocals come back in waves.

The band let up the fury for the album’s highlight “Cheap Wine Time” which comes off like a Rolling Stone’s ballad circa the 1970s. Like all
successful ballads, “Wine” keeps the tempo slow, the groove hip-shaking and the hook/ chorus simple and catchy. Herrema coos “can you freeze time when you see me there” in a way your mother might have sung when you were 4, sticking it in your brain forever. It works like a jingle, convincing you that cheap wine is somehow exactly what is missing from your dissatisfied life.

At some point the world is going to catch on to RTX and every third kid
sucking up a slurpee outside of every 7-11 will don an RTX shirt and faded jeans. I still think that “Speed To Roam” from their first album is a
massive hit waiting to be re-discovered and played at all sporting events
in all lands. Until then and until they play the halftime show at the
Super Bowl in 2020 (give or take a year and a dozen gold records) they
will hopefully keep to the path that they are on and continue forging into
thick, dark places yet uncharted.