With the Royal Trux once again in his rearview mirror, Neil Hagerty returns to his own group. In place of the genre mashups of 2013’s Best Of, he’s back to making satisfyingly ragged rock’n’roll.
For a band who often looked like they had just rolled in from recording Exile on Main Street, Royal Trux were far too abstruse to be genuinely retro. But recent noises from Neil Hagerty—former/current/who knows? Royal Truck and now head honcho of the Howling Hex —have suggested a certain wistfulness in his dotage. “Rock and roll is what’s missing in bands these days that take a generic approach to playing that’s almost machine-like,” he harrumphed to Rolling Stone, indulging the kind of ruefully nostalgic statement that Liam Gallagher would tape to the studio mood board. The new Howling Hex album, Hagerty said, would be 100% real—a record, he promised elsewhere, that “people want to listen to without throwing it out the window.”
To an extent, Hagerty keeps this promise on Knuckleball Express, the first Howling Hex album since Royal Trux’s ill-fated, occasionally wonderful reunion. Black Crowes fans will certainly find less to defenestrate than on 2013’s not-actually-a-best-of The Best of the Howling Hex, which was awash in polka rhythms, fuzz, and bizarre cowpunk lurch. “Lies,” the most immediate yet least satisfying track on Knuckleball Express, is a slice of heads-down Southern boogie, frenetic enough to raise a knowing smile without greatly troubling the cortex, while “Words” oozes with the leery strut of an acceptable Jagger outtake.
Elsewhere, Knuckleball Express has enough of Royal Trux’s obstinate weirdness and willful rough edges to distinguish it from the retro blues of the barroom band. Hagerty’s guitar may be turned up as loud as you would expect of a man who has recently escaped an unhappy musical partnership, but there’s something deliciously unrefined about his playing, all jagged lines, rusty nails, and hangover shuffle. The drums have a similarly imperfect edge, their classic rock clip punctuated with a few too many lolloping tom rolls for comfort, while many songs shun the traditional verse/chorus structure in favor of bolting intros to riffs and solos to verses. “Heavy Curtains” sounds—brilliantly—like three unrelated songs welded together in a musical cut and shut.
At its best, Knuckleball Express channels its awkwardness into songs that are thrilling in their instability. “Mr. Chicken” trembles on the edge of collapse before the unexpectedly well-mannered vocals of Kristine Shafer nudge the song into Belle and Sebastian-meets-Pussy Galore territory. “Cowboy Motors" throws a harpsichord into the mix for no particular reason, like a cruel parody of 1960s baroque pop, while “North Aquarian” introduces a drunken-sounding face-off between drummer and electronic squiggles—hardly Beatrice Dillon in its audacity, but modish enough to remind you that Knuckleball Express was recorded this millennium.
This waywardness is important. The tensions that drove Royal Trux, like many bands before them, were the same impulses that eventually unraveled the group. The risk for Knuckleball Express was that Hagerty, safely ensconced in Colorado with no tempestuous bandmate to spark off, might have succumbed to the easy musical life. Certainly, there are moments here—like “City in the Country,” where he hymns the “sweet Rocky Mountain waves”—that suggest a certain mellowing. But Hagerty remains as wily and weird as ever. Full of charm, panache, and eccentric raw power, Knuckleball Express makes good on his promise to make something real.
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