And how can you tell the difference between syringes and missiles if you've become so pliant,ready to half believe everything and to fix conviction in nothing? - Don DeLillo, 'Underworld'

I remember Neil Hagerty of Royal Trux once observing somewhat ruefully that Western civilization never has known how to really incorporate opiates; they remain after all these centuries anunanswerable challenge to the social. Which is probably one of the reasons why opiates always form a spectre that haunts rock music, if one still accepts the idea of the rock musician as a romantic outsider living in his own social space and time. If there has for some time been a relationship between rock and heroin it also should make for some interesting music when the addictive factor (if only temporarily a la Cocteau) disappears. Yet this ghost town of the mind has in the last 20 years only produced one great rock album, 'Cats and Dogs' by the aforementioned Royal Trux, a sprawling masterpiece of dreamy/nightmarish guitar music, a heartfelt final battle with the almost metaphysical tiredness following the decision to just quit getting high.

Already one can see me pulling an age-old rhetorical trick: holding up a classical example as a comparison with which new albums can never match up. True, but necessary, Royal Trux may have been the greatest rock band of the 90s, both Mercury Rev and Spiritualized were never far behind, in a sense they were the only three rock bands of the decade after My Bloody Valentine vanished. Not only that, but Mercury Rev and Spiritualized as bands have now apparently arrived at the same moment as Royal Trux at the time of 'Cats and Dogs': the fall-out where chaos is left behind. Calming down, quitting drugs, and in the case of Jason Pierce opting for family life is where it's at.