The last time I saw Royal Trux, they pulled into town in a road-worn van, unloaded a cheesy drum machine and a few guitars and amps and played a set so extreme, some of the alternophiles in the audience wondered aloud if it was even music. The group was the Trux nucleus of ex-Pussy Galore guitarist Neil Hagerty and voice-shredder supreme Jennifer Herrema. Hagerty played basic riffs and squalls of noise. The drum machine chomped like a drunk dancing on cheese. Herrema struck a provocative pose, pulled a black Stetson down over her eyes and blended her musicianly sandpaper scream with Hagerty's own Keith-Richards-on-the-skids vocals. It was rock & roll without the rock or the roll, getting by on sheer attitude and the most basic wellsprings of personal musicality.

That was half the fun of the indie-period Royal Trux: the holler, the howl, the sweet chaos of two talented people deconstructing rock & roll with the vindictive glee of the Lover savaging the unfaithful Beloved. The other half of the fun was hearing rock & roll – ringing power-chord breaks, killer vocal-chorus hooks, rhythmic riffcraft – poke its scraggly head up out of the chaos; those stretches of apparent noise and scree kept turning into indelible songs.

On their major-label debut, Thank You, the Trux re-emerge in yet another guise. Now they're a band, with bassist Dan Brown and drummers Chris Pyle and Robbie Armstrong joining Herrema and Hagerty, with a consummate producer, David Briggs, behind the console. It's inevitable: Spend enough time deconstructing something and sooner or later it's time to build a new structure on the ruins of the old.

Maybe the sound here and there is a bit too clean to suit the music's purposes; maybe the more rambunctious and amelodic songs sound slightly less impressive when they're not awash in the sort of low-fi static and hum endemic to earlier Trux productions like Drag City releases Cats and Dogs and Twin Infinitives. But Thank You's solid strengths and unexpected thrills far outweigh these relative blemishes. On songs ranging from the vacuum-tube hymn "Ray o Vac" to the Situationist ramble of "Map of the City" to the fanciful cybernoir of "The Sewers of Mars" and "(Have You Met) Horror James?" Royal Trux rise far above the anemic run of alternative product now deluging us. Long may they run. (RS 711)

ROBERT PALMER