Cherry Red / MVD Audio / New Ralph Too When we last left our heroes in the early 1980s, they had just staggered bloodied but unbowed from the triumphant disaster that was The Mole Show, an interlinked series of albums and associated live tours that detailed the epic and deranged saga of the conflict between two opposing peoples, the Moles and the Chubbs. It would therefore make sense, would it not, to […]
The Residents
8 posts
Cherry Red / MVD Entertainment / New Ralph Too In Early Modern English – the transitional phase of the English language from the Middle English of the late fifteenth century to the Modern English of the mid to late seventeenth century – the mole was known as the “mouldywarp”. Could there be any more Resident-like a term for anything than a mouldywarp? Indeed, there could not; moles were made for The Residents […]
Cherry Red / MVD Audio / New Ralph Too It’s been nine months since my last foray into the deep Residential past and, subsequently, I have been sitting quietly, listening intently for the call of the Eskimo. It seems to make perfect sense that it has only now sounded forth with the onset of winter. Sadly, however, for all devotees of the band, that lonely lacuna has recently been punctuated […]
Cherry Red / MVD Audio / New Ralph Too Ah, where was I? Oh yeah, Residents re-issues. Normally, I make a point of not reviewing the same artist more than once for this august organ. Mostly this is driven less by any terribly noble or high-minded critical rationale than by a blind fear of thoughtlessly repeating myself and being found out for just endlessly recycling the same half-dozen tired ideas.
Cherry Red / MVD Audio / New Ralph Too Twenty minutes into the future. Allow me a short digression: He’s the toast of the town (lightly buttered). He’s the non-fattening sugar substitute in your tea. He’s a bon vivant, a gaucho amigo, a goomba, a mensch, and the fifth musketeer. He’s the apple of your eye and aren’t you glad he’s here? Direct from a wax and shine at the […]
18 May 2013 A rare London appearance from The Residents, stopping off at The Barbican on their Wonder of Weird 40th anniversary tour. The show is presented as a kind of unreliable ‘history of our band’, and begins with a short film, a collection of excerpts from old (and formidably strange) videos and live performances. This does a fine job of encapsulating their appeal and setting the scene, […]
Label: Ralph (America)/EuroRalph (Europe) Format: DVD, CD (soundtrack only) There have been plenty of strange and powerful musicians and groups out there for many a long year. Captain Beefheart, Coil, Wesley Willis, Ken Nordine and so forth, each extending the realms of taste and disrupting the boundaries of what exactly constitues music and art . Then there are The Residents. Through thirty years of wilful obscurity and cutting-edge […]
Wormwood Live The Forum, London 19th July 1999 When The Residents put on a show, it’s something very special to see indeed; like Jesus Christ Superstar (surely one of the defining moments of pomp-pop-opera, and whose theme provides the opening fanfare as the curtain goes up on the monocular ones) taken beyond the realms of kitsch to a theatricality which defies satire and emerges resplendent as total genius […]