(Pop Rock, Experimental Rock) Black Bananas - Electric Brick Wall - 2014, MP3, 320 kbps

In 2011, Drag City announced that RTX, the band Jennifer Herrema founded after legendary art-noise rockers Royal Trux disbanded, would continue performing under the name Black Bananas (the title of a song off the band's album Western Xterminator). Along with Herrema, the lineup remained stable, continuing to feature Jaimo Welch, Brian McKinley, Kurt Midness, and Nadav Eisenman; their first album as Black Bananas, Rad Times Xpress IV, arrived in early 2012. The group returned two years later with Electric Brick Wall, another noisy combination of glam metal, funk and more.

The 1990s alt-rock boom produced a lot of rock stars who weren’t very good at being rock stars: too glum, too suspicious of the mainstream audience they found themselves playing to, or both at the same time. Few of them really seemed to really relish the role, and the ones who stand out most, looking back from two decades later, were women: Kim Gordon, Courtney Love, and Royal Trux frontwoman Jennifer Herrema.
While their contemporaries were imploding the classic rock golden-god mythos through a truculent refusal to follow the rulebook, Herrema and Royal Trux's Neil Hagerty, were accomplishing something similar by emulating its sickest qualities. Falling half-accidentally into a pile of the major label cash that was flying around, Herrema and Hagerty put that money into drugs and druggy records that achieved the same kind of squalid junkie transcendence as Exile on Main Street, with far less romanticism. Their carton-a-day croaks and fucked-up frames represented "heroin chic" taken to its scabrous logical conclusion, and they reveled in its repulsiveness to an extent that terminally disconcerted much of the audience that their often achingly beautiful records deserved. The whole project sounded filthy and, somehow, glorious.
Unlike a good deal of her contemporaries, Herrema’s continued evolving as an artist since the '90s. After her partnership with Hagerty dissolved following 2000's Pound for Pound, which explored Southern rock and the coke-addled disco side of the late-'70s Stones, she formed and fronted RTX, which added a scuzzy streak of hair metal into the mix. With her latest group, Black Bananas, she’s dragged that whole pile of classic rock influences into the present day. The group’s first album, 2012’s Rad Times Xpress IV, was a weird mishmash of stoner grooves, flamboyant hair metal, and the seedier side of the contemporary club scene, the results sounding like someone dragged 1984-era David Lee Roth into at a basement DJ night and filled him full of cough syrup. It was a mess, but like most messes Herrema’s involved in, it was compelling.
Electric Brick Wall is a far more coherent synthesis of those disparate influences, and possibly her strongest record since the Trux’s peak. The album's female-fronted pileup of overblown drum machines and retro guitar riffage shares surface similarities with Sleigh Bells, but instead of that band's shimmering, pixellated gleam, Black Bananas give off a debauched, grimy aura. When they evoke the Sunset Strip in the '80s it’s not the fictionalized version served up by the Motley Crüe wannabes of the time but the seedy real-life version, with rumbling rap beats mixed in for kicks.
At other points, the group ditches its retro references and shoots for an almost purely contemporary sound, which Herrema’s seldom attempted previously. “Give It to Me” is a slick (by her standards) take on dance floor electro-pop, while “Physical Emotions” is their take on straight-up radio R&B, complete with Auto-Tune; even with the requisite amount of distortion that they slather on it, it still has a modern sheen that even listeners attuned to Herrema’s wild stylistic impulses won’t see coming. After years spent ransacking the past, she’s turned her sights on the here and now, and it’s as fucked-up and fascinating as anything she’s ever done.