Shows

RTX, plus The Suzukis Thu 27th November 2008 Cargo, Rivington Street EC2

Win a pair of guestlist spots for the show: email mail at Localism.org.uk with the answer to the question: which band is RTX currently supporting on their UK tour?

Man o Man.

We've got a show for you.

Beyond the real deal is the unreal deal, and therein waits the band RTX, which is Jennifer Herrema — once of Royal Trux — she with the pelts and furs attached at all times (in case she needs a friend, she says), and four unflagging shredmen, whose fingers tap out the sort of ultra-speed telemetry patterns that used to beam down from Soyuz capsules in the 60s, and whose dedication to purpose is so crushing and total and intense that those who might blow smoke in their direction will have it returned as fresh-pressed diamonds.

The shock squad is Kurt Midness, Jaimo Welch, Brian McKinley and Nadav Eisenman, and this is what they do: tuff-stuff metal of the kind they used to make good cars from, long-hair vision-questing that put Randy Holden in an opera house with a private Stonehenge of Marshall stacks, instrumental acrobatics-by-increment that punish knuckles and dissolve paragraphs of rote scholastic memories and howl the wolfman
howl of legally untouchable rock ‘n’ roll that used to beam in from Mexico until the final shoot-out at the station. If hair metal had to wait this long to get its Hasil Adkins or its Ornette Coleman well, why not? The curing process, as we say in the shacks where the skins hang on racks. It takes some time for things to stiffen up.

They are based loosely now around Southern California home of Disneyland, site of a 1942 Army Air Force dogfight with a massive UFO, thirty minutes on this freeway or that to the Sunset Strip or South Central and mass coma ward for a long list of bands who could have used more transistors in their heads and less in their equipment. They don’t surf much; they do like tacos. First record was 2005 ’s Transmaniacon, after the MC that scared Sandy Pearlman off Sunset? Second in 2007 was RaTX, originally named Western Xterminator after the kind California concern that keeps wild and life as far apart as one operative with a jumpsuit and a poison canister can manage, but renamed after lawyerish emanations from an organization that should really take the name-checks where it can get it.

And now the third, J.J. Got Live RaTX, with ripping art flushed from the same headspace where one seethes after bustment for underage smoking by assistant vice principals and with the band in triumphant silhouette behind fog and foil. Roky on Enigma don’t slander! and Hanoi Rocks and maybe some backwoods catcall equally meaningful to both Guns ‘n’ Roses and the Germs for ten songs including a cover of the Barbarians (as covered by the Dogs, possibly the only South ern California rock band to inspire belief as deep as this) that hangs new hooks all over a cute little classic. On tour, they had bands demanding apologies by about day four. At home, they are as sweet as pie. As a band,
they draw their force from the last real source visionary esotericism and hard heavy rock like what used to provoke congressional hearings. They aren’t the last of this-or-that, as the press likes to say; as far as can be discerned, they are the first of something else.

— Chris Ziegler 

In support the first London show for The Suzukis - a band you'll be hearing an awful lot more about.