One's a little bit younger, so she has a picture of the way it should be. Somebody will make her give in someday, but I'm glad she knows it won't be me. It's easy, it's rough, I'm falling sleep, I ain't lifting any weight on a human scheme.

The howling hex... does the term describe Twenty-First-Century U S A? Well, The Howling Hex, all five of the records on which Neil Hagerty has used the moniker, certainly sounds like the work of an artist trying to evoke, perhaps embody, his home-society in music. Serene experimentation: simplest of gestures resulting in a cacophony of structures and sounds. A lone man, and a woman too on occasion, doing what fortunate few are able to do collectively: get beyond the intellectual baggage weighing down the music culture, the entire culture.

No other artist who emerged in and came to define the Indie era has changed so much in the past few years, adapting to the times as if he were always waiting for them, to find peace of mind, finally, in them. Ignored because of a lack of interest in how his recent work fits in with the present array of experimental Rock, Hagerty is not far from where Royal Trux started, on the out-skirts, the nooks-and-crannies, of Indie music, along with the likes of Jandek, Chris Knox, Charalambides, Sun City Girls, Caroliner Rainbow, Cerberus Shoal. Rejected because of his movement away from ironic Rock, Hagerty does not amuse the slumming yuppies; instead he makes soundtracks to those wandering-lost in contemporary America, feeling oddly at home in the heathen-horror, the hick-history, the highway-holiday... the howling-hex, the trick played on us all. I love my own people, and that is defensive. It makes me feel so proud to see such deception.

From the first song on Neil Michael Hagerty and The Howling Hex, the driving inspiration seems to lie at the intersection of melancholy and nostalgia, what Mark Simpson in his book on Morrissey calls melanalgia. Looking back at youth, benignly reflecting upon such naivete and ignorance. Though you are much wiser and content now, you are also angry and confused that in such a position you find yourself with less compatriots, and thus less will to do anything. It feels so hollow, when no-one is on your neck making you regret what you had to do. Only with the foolish belief in the possibility of the world being turned on its head does one seem to escape the inhibiting patterns of daily life; oh, yes... and of course the distinct ability middle-class youth have of being given so much idle time and free money, and yet being possessed with déclassé visions of revolt, helps too. You better stay busy... or they'll catch you dreaming too.

So what to do in and with such a state of mind, with so much knowledge not pointing in a certain direction? offering no pay-off, no vindication. The eclecticism of Neil Michael Hagerty and The Howling Hex, wrapped neatly in its own sloppy way into a classic-form double LP, designed to allow the listener to explore and get lost in, was an initial baby-step away from irony. The three LP-only Howling Hex releases make the definitive leap; they offer no excuses for being all over the map - none is needed, none ever was. As such, they manage to inspire and beguile at once. Drum machines and cheap synthesizers, creating meek and distant rhythms, like karaoke, like a memory of good times we once had listening to music, communing in the sound waves; simple drum patterns presumably played by Hagerty himself looped longer than you ever expect, even after hearing the track several times; guitar solos barely amplified, frail and noodle-like, presenting musicianship as the garbled mesh of broken and half-formed thoughts it often is; the mysterious female singer, with her Country and Western voice ripped from one context, the fake America of fake-Country, and put into another: America in its hex-enduction time; the third LP's first side's eleven brief tracks offering bewildering densities of sound; on several of the same tracks, Hagerty speaking, fragments of stories intoned quickly, monotonously.

Perhaps the crucial difference between Neil Michael Hagerty/Howling Hex and Royal Trux lies with Hagerty's voice. He now occupies center-ground. In Royal Trux, he frequently offered the high-pitch accompaniment to Jennifer Herrema's low guttural growling. As charming and righteous as that topsy-turvy-ness was, Hagerty occupied the role, most of all, of the trained musician providing the groundwork for Herrema's less-inhibited explorations and, second, of the prettier, more-accessible voice making the melodies and Herrema's take on them more acceptable to the fragile ego of the expanding Indie-music audience. Hagerty was only rarely the lone singer on a track (and then tended toward fine but fairly standard songs like "Stop" or "Sunshine and Grease") and only occasionally let out some primal screams of his own. Tending to emphasize his skills as guitarist and putting such extraordinary effort in Royal Trux's reconstructions of Golden-Age Rock, Hagerty self-consciously (as revealed often in interviews) put behind the radicalism of early Royal Trux and of the larger home-recording Indie underground they had been part of. Now, having left Royal Trux behind, he has become an expressive singer, with a subtlety few contemporaries match. On "I'm Your Son," the fragility of the voice makes one wonder if the singer is on the verge of tears, even as he also sounds sleepy, bored, disengaged. A similar ambiguity is heard on "Greasy Saint," where "it's nice to know the things you lost were real," and on "Fat Street," where the narrator wonders what it takes "to forget such a strong, strong lie" and "such a deep, deep dream," before concluding "it's a really good thing that your dreams get ruined."

And so, on All-Night Fox, Hagerty does not yield the center: he shares it with his female-voice counterpart, still nameless. The guitars and the drums (still presumably played by him - manifestations of the complexity of "primitive" skills) are looped time and again to provide welcoming platforms for the vocals, which are for the first time in Hagerty's long career - indeed, in a way so little music is - absolutely the main attraction. Sung with urgency, yet not worrying much about where they are going, they find a certain melody, honing in on it, getting all they can get out it - what more thoughts can I fit into this line? Again, the complexity arising from simple building-blocks is startling: sometimes, the two singers sing the same melody, taking turns; other times, they each have their own, call-and-response-ing; and yet even the repetition of the same melody is complicated by the use of the simplest sound-manipulations: panning and reverb mostly, and in some cases the panning of the reverb (!); which precisely because of their transparency, make the resulting, treated voice like another actor in what are apparently only excerpts from a longer music-as-performance-piece. Sometimes, the switch to a new line gives a track the semblance of a refrain, and when it comes the effect is all the more greater for its rarity. The same is the case when, on one occasion, Hagerty breaks with the tendency toward repetition of instrumental elements, unleashing his guitar to wile its way through all seven minutes of "What, Man? Who Are You?!" the album's peak, followed by two brief tracks which, like the sudden beginnings and ends of every song of the record, as if they all could easily go on longer, only make us wonder what Hagerty has planned for the live version of this music.