DAILY FIX: The Black Bananas, “It’s Cool”

Before there was the Black Bananas, there was Royal Trux, a 90s-era noise-rock act formed when Neil Hagerty, fresh off a half-decade stint playing guitar in Pussy Galore with Jon Spencer (he of the Blues Explosion), met up with Jennifer Herrema, a homeless teenager and aspiring rock singer. Fueled by a constant drug intake, the two created some of the most freaked-out, fucked-up rock n’ roll ever to be released by a major label before acrimoniously dissolving their partnership in the wake of 2000’s Pound For Pound. Herrema continued on without Hagerty, shortening her band’s name to RTX for a while–which upset some people, as Royal Trux had often used this same abbreviation for their name–before finally clarifying the difference between the new band and her previous group by changing the current band’s name to Black Bananas.

Before there was the Black Bananas, there was Royal Trux, a 90s-era noise-rock act formed when Neil Hagerty, fresh off a half-decade stint playing guitar in Pussy Galore with Jon Spencer (he of the Blues Explosion), met up with Jennifer Herrema, a homeless teenager and aspiring rock singer. Fueled by a constant drug intake, the two created some of the most freaked-out, fucked-up rock n’ roll ever to be released by a major label before acrimoniously dissolving their partnership in the wake of 2000’s Pound For Pound. Herrema continued on without Hagerty, shortening her band’s name to RTX for a while–which upset some people, as Royal Trux had often used this same abbreviation for their name–before finally clarifying the difference between the new band and her previous group by changing the current band’s name to Black Bananas. However, on their first album under this new name, Black Bananas have retained some link to the past by titling the album Rad Times Xpress IV (Drag City), a reference to the fact that this would have been the fourth RTX album. Regardless of all the band politics, though, what’s important about this new album is that Herrema and co. have delivered a slab of raw, psychedelic noise that stands on par with the best of their prior efforts and even with a good many of Royal Trux’s greatest moments. That assertion is proven by the latest single, “It’s Cool,” featuring Herrema’s woozy vocal delivery and some classic acid-dosed freakout guitar soloing overtop of a rock-solid retro-stoner rock groove. The song is an appropriate soundtrack to an afternoon spent reclining on the couch, watching TV in a daze. And the video for “It’s Cool” is exactly the sort of thing that you’d want to watch under those circumstances. Back before the internet, when VHS was king, crazy videotape comps that your stoner friends put together for you of random stuff they taped off TV were the closest thing we had to youtube, and that sort of underground tape-trading culture was reflected in the sorts of videos that underground rock bands were making in the late 80s and early 90s. The video for “It’s Cool” reminds me of Sonic Youth’s “Teenage Riot,” or even Beck’s “Loser,” soemthing that was in heavy rotation for quite a while two decades ago. And combined with the sound of Black Bananas, it creates an excellent aesthetic that makes this video a thorough treat to watch.