900 The Residents - The Third Reich 'n' Roll (1976)

 900 The Residents - The Third Reich 'n' Roll (1976)


Home-recorded studio album  - Avant Garde




About the Act:

"The Residents are an American art collective best known for their avant-garde music and multimedia works". So says Wikipedia.  A group of high school friends in Shreveport Louisiana started making amateur home recordings in 1965. In 1966 they decided to travel to San Francisco to join the budding hippie movement. However, their truck broke down in San Mateo, California, so they decided to stay there. They named themselves "The Residents" after a rejection slip sent to them by Warner Bros.

Over the years they have made many avant garde art works of varying strangeness, including releasing around 50 albums. Who they are is a secret, they don't give interviews, and at times their work has been deliberately provocative.


About the Album:

This is maybe the second album released by the band, depending on how you count them. It consists of a "mash-up" of snippets of songs popular at the time, re-recorded in unlikely ways.


My History with this Album:

None


Review:

I did not know what to expect as I started to listen. I had not heard of The Residents, and I thought it sounded like the name of another late 90s alt rock band, possibly from Boston. I was wrong. They are weirder than that. Oh yes. My introduction to them above is a huge shortening, but their Wikipedia page is enlightening, entertaining and sometimes confusing.

The best adjective is "experimental". There are two tracks on the album, each of which is a mashup of popular songs rendered more or less unrecognisable by the bizarre delivery and instrumentation, which includes early synth, ethnic instruments, found noise-makers and traditional instruments. Things are often deliberately out of tune, recorded in silly voices and sarcastic delivery, sometimes with very heavy reverb, and the whole thing is designed as an assault on the hearing.

Another adjective is "absurd". If you are at all familiar with Frank Zappa, or Captain Beefheart, you will recognise the absurdist sense of humour at play here. This is that same idea of heavy parody and experimentation taken to further extremes.  This is one of those arty kinds of things where the skill isn't so much in the performance (although there is some, it's not totally the noises of a toddler... almost at times....) but in the breaking of convention and the social satire that creates.

So, at some point in these reviews I try and ask myself whether I enjoyed something. In this case, a bit. It would not be for everybody, in fact probably not for most people. It is at times deliberately annoying, and is definitely deliberately facile. It's perversely fun, though. I think I "get" it, probably as a result of a reasonable exposure to contemporary weird stuff of the same era, in both contemporary classical and the rock field (like early experimental Pink Floyd). I don't think that makes me in any way a more sophisticated connaisseur, and don't insist that if you don't like it your taste is somehow inferior.  And after saying all that, I only genuinely like it a bit.


6/10

 

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/1BKRPboHJcwmxRL7n4lhbA

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLOKmaFlysM

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Reich_%27n_Roll


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