Talkin Tough Singing Tougher

y to hear (and, in the press photo, see) McKinley as a big Trux fan, and he seems to possess a similar preternatural gift as Hagerty for both coming up with awesome riffs and lengthy guitar runs that don't seem to ever want to end.

If “sincerity” has been the watchword in the indie world for the past few years, it's most often applied to singer-songwriters and U2/Springsteen homage-ists. The type of sincerity Herrema and RTX traffic in often gets overlooked or derided by many, but their whole-hearted embrace of big riffs, unfettered guitar wonkery and crowd-pleasing choruses is as sincere as any other music being made in rock ‘n' roll right now, sheared of any Darkness-style irony or kitsch.

After the subdued, atypical opening of “Western Xterminaotr,” RaTX launches into the gritty Big Muff glam of “Balls to Pass.” “Restoration Sleep” reads like a mutated “I Love Rock n' Roll” stadium stomper, complete with an “It feels good” call-and-response chorus, all the while evoking Appetite for Destruction-era G ‘n' R. “Nightmare and Mane” seems like a stab at a power ballad, but the indecipherable, fucked-up vocals guarantee you'll never hear it on most radios.

Because Herrema lives outside L.A. now (“About 25 miles south,” she says.

“It's all wetlands and beaches.”) and because the new record wouldn't sound that out of place blaring from a club on the Sunset Strip in the '80s, I wonder if she ever checks out the L.A. rock clubs.

“No, man, that stuff's retarded,” she says. “It's a parody. At least the couple of things I've seen. I don't go out very often, but I went once to the Whiskey [a Go Go]. It was free alcohol night. It really did seem like tribute bands rather than taking a love of that music and making something new with it.”

She also has reservations about a lot of what flies under the indie-rock banner these days, even for bands on her longtime label Drag City (a Royal Trux 7-inch bears the DC1 catalog number). Like Trux, labelmates such as Pavement and Palace Brothers were vanguard trend-setters in the '90s, but Herrema seems to hardly recognize that the label now.

“Drag City — that's my home,” she says. “I can do what I want there. But I don't know what the hell half this shit he puts out now is. It's good for some people, I guess, but indie is now this fake hippie/folk scene.”

Even though Herrema has borrowed extensively from late '60s and early '70s psychedelic and hard rock bands in both Trux and RTX, she doesn't see her music related to the ever-growing crop of bands who draw from the same well.

“There are some good bands, but I call bullshit on most of it,” she says. “A lot of these bands are like tribute bands, like at the Whiskey. Even that psych stuff. I have those influences like anyone else, but for me, it's about making it new and putting it all together in a new way.”

Herrema has had unparalleled luck (or prescience) in choosing guitarists for collaborators, but she is instrumental in the development of the music and makes it clear RTX is most definitely her band.

“I have a melody and write some kind of words to it to exemplify the melody line,” she explains of her songwriting process. “Then I show the guys a riff, describe the vibe. We put a song together step by step… I play guitar, but I'm really shitty. But I play well enough to show them what I want.”

Herrema will most likely go down in rock history for her 14-pack-a-day, bruised, totally rock ‘n' roll voice, a powerful and intimidating instrument that doesn't have much of a precedent in other female rock vocalists (maybe some Thalia Zedek in there), taking more from the masculine/androgynous canon of cock-rockers. In certain Trux tracks, Hagerty and Herrema would trade or double vocals, and until you got your bearings, it was often difficult to tell who was who in the mix.

She's been at it for so long, though, you have to wonder how she keeps that ravaged voice from being shot altogether.

“It's been shot from the get-go,” she says. “It can get pretty rough. When we tour with two guitars, I tend to push a lot louder. I like everything loud. It gets totally tore up sometimes, but it's like a guitar ¬— if you break strings you just keep playing.”

Herrema has frequently used effects