I won't be able to put any of my slaverings up until tomorrow night at the earliest, I'm up seeing my old pal who's no' so good, been trying to give his family a wee bit of respite for a couple of days. Will still stick up the album of the day.

Beardy23 wrote:

old friend of mine claims he was at a Residents gig (in Perth?)
he went for a pint in a near by bar after, and met a group of american guys who were in playing pool
They said they were the bands roadies...

Think the only place The Residents have played in Scotland was Edinburgh, a very long time ago.

Beardy23 wrote:

PatReilly wrote:

Beardy23 wrote:

old friend of mine claims he was at a Residents gig (in Perth?)
he went for a pint in a near by bar after, and met a group of american guys who were in playing pool
They said they were the bands roadies...

Think the only place The Residents have played in Scotland was Edinburgh, a very long time ago.

might have been Edinburgh, early 80's?
 

'83 Beardy23, June 30th. I looked it up.
 

Had the pleasure of drinking before and after PIL gig at the Indigo Hotel Newcastle with Johnny.  Didnt know they were playing at 02 - met him in lift.  Madness - groupies aged 14-19 all around him - he was a gentleman.  Later in darker hours he said "I always hated that part and now they are the same age and im 60 nearly. I blame Brexit"

Intelligent, pleasant and wonderful hero of mine that by pure chance i got to meet and spend hours with.  Unlike many he was more genuine and human than i could have imagined.

That was June (ish) this year.  He even facetimed my son for a laugh.  Who now is a sex pistols fanatic.

DAY 408.
Magazine........................................................................... Real Life   (1978)











Howard Devoto had left the Buzzcocks in the very capable hands of Pete Shelley and Steve Diggle to create his own group, imagine the anticipation felt by anyone who cared about the future of rock music in June 1978, while putting the needle on track 1, side 1 of Real Life.


Will be back late tonight, hopefully get a couple of albums done, but here's a funny thing, on a day I didn't post any ramblings there were over 800 views (that's by far the most ever, in a single day), maybe that's the way forward

Last edited by arabchanter (21/9/2018 9:17 am)

arabchanter wrote:

LocheeFleet wrote:

Had the pleasure of drinking before and after PIL gig at the Indigo Hotel Newcastle with Johnny.  Didnt know they were playing at 02 - met him in lift.  Madness - groupies aged 14-19 all around him - he was a gentleman.  Later in darker hours he said "I always hated that part and now they are the same age and im 60 nearly. I blame Brexit"

Intelligent, pleasant and wonderful hero of mine that by pure chance i got to meet and spend hours with.  Unlike many he was more genuine and human than i could have imagined.

That was June (ish) this year.  He even facetimed my son for a laugh.  Who now is a sex pistols fanatic.

Great story LF, that's a drink up I'd loved to have been part of.
 

he was a total gent - although kept calling me Jock but got the message when i kept calling him sid.  Seriously the whole hotel bar he talked to.  They had to close off entrance for residents only.

DAY 409.
Bruce Springsteen.....................................Darkness On The Edge Of Town   (1978)











Thanks to a legal dispute with former manager Mike Appel, Springsteen had three years to bask in the stellar success of Born To Run, and to contemplate it's follow up. The resulting album, Darkness On The Edge Of Town, is a very different beast to it's predecessor.

DAY 404
The Adverts...............................................Crossing The Red Sea With The Adverts   (1978)












After the last few days, this really was a tonic. "Crossing The Red Sea With The Adverts" is yet another great album, I always thought they never got the recognition they deserved in the press and in general. This album opens up with a blistering salvo that is  "One Chord Wonders" followed by "Bored Teenagers" which means unfortunately if you think you're going to just listen to a couple of tracks, and move on................that aint gonna happen, if you're anything like me it'll be "just another then," and before you know it, 31:04 minutes have passed, and you still have that bemused look on your face and the hairs on your arms standing to attention.


The opening pair are probably my favourites, but as on any great album you could drop the needle anyplace on the vinyl and wont feel let down, this didn't even have the classic "Gary Gilmore's Eyes" on it until the 2002 re-issue which is the track I think is mostly associated with The Adverts, but for me, the album was none the poorer for it.



The added bonus was of course Gaye Advert the bass player, what a rip!  There was something about her that just oozed sex, but sheended up working for Social Services for Hammersmith & Fulham council, who woud've thunk?








Putting these bits together, this album will be going in my vinyl collection, and being honest it shouldn't show any signs of an inferiority complex sitting next to the Pistols or The Clash, T.V. Smith, Gaye Advert, Howard Pickup and Laurie Driver are there on mucho deserved merit.




Bits & Bobs;


 It's advisable to take the usual PR puff that accompanies the release of any album with an industrial sized pinch of salt, unless it's calling The Adverts debut album 'one of the greatest punk albums of all time'. For once the PR people are, if anything, guilty of under-estimating how good this album is. I know that to many of you reading this it's little more than a relic from an earlier age and I'm little more than the musical equivalent of Tony Robinson and his time team excavating long buried treasures.


 I understand how irrelevant an album that was released 33 years must seem to most of the readers of The 405. It's the equivalent of a punk in 1978 reading a review of a Perry Como re-release. But believe me this album is still as relevant today as it was 40 years ago. It's so fresh it could have been recorded yesterday. The Britain of 1978 was economically weak with plummeting living standards and rampant youth unemployment. Sound familiar? The re-release of Crossing The Red Sea With The Adverts is a timely reminder that we've been here before. But if you're expecting a hyper political, snot flecked, angry tirade against injustice and hypocrisy, think again. This is not a barricade storming crie de cour, it's intelligent, witty and self deprecating, which sets it apart from most of it's snotty, angry contemporaries.


 'One Chord Wonders' is a storming mass of noise that celebrates the band's musical limitations and the general public's response to punk with lyrics so pithy you'd swear they'd been recently wrapped round a citrus fruit. 'Bored Teenagers' is throwaway punk so archetypical that tongues have surely been introduced to cheeks along the way. 'Safety In Numbers' is a critique of the bandwagon jumpers that infest, and ultimately destroy, any scene. 'On The Roof' starts deceptively slowly before exploding into ear splitting life, while the angular rhythms of Newsboys were post punk before punk had even passed it's first flush of youth.



They existed in such a small window of time. They did all the regular punk rock stuff. They did Top of the Pops and Old Grey Whistle Test. They had chart success early on. Their members felt overshadowed by one popular member. You know – the usual rundown of early punk rock hangups.



 What they produced is far from usual, though. That’s the sad part. Their first album, Crossing The Red Sea with The Adverts, is nothing short of a bold scream above the clamoring of a saturated punk market. To me, they could have transcended the normal bullshit that plagued their contemporaries. They were interesting enough to surpass the nonsense. They were smart and dark. They hit chords that give me chills and flash me red hot simultaneously. Not a surprise they were able to tour with, and rival, The Damned and The Jam live – if only for short-lived time.



 T.V. Smith, the band’s singer, is haunting. His lyrics captivate and seem more serious than the usual “I’m gonna be myself” type of attitude. In fact, the lyrics are introspective and deep, covering an array of common subjects but in a wholly fresh and clever way.  He had a way of singing that when I hear it, I can relate to his anger. Smith doesn’t hide his British accent. Instead, he uses it to convey a personable cockiness, making a perfect vehicle for his pointed skepticism.


 Their simple songs play out like short, gloomy melodramas. Little, ghoulish pop nuggets from a raw and uncomfortable cave packed with cheeky British teen angst. On the darker songs like “On The Roof” and “On Wheels,” they crystallized their own sound. The music is driving with a lot of traditional rock strumming and beats provided by Howard Pickup and Laurie Driver, but then they hit you with these clever proto-goth licks that strike so hard. They take you up levels at a time, getting more intense, and bring you down like the cable was snipped on your elevator. They foreshadow bands like The Gun Club that combined punk, goth and twangy, country- fried spazz surf. They come through in black and white with splashes of red. They captured an interesting dichotomy of a bleak world with innocence hanging on by a thread.


 The bass playing gives those proto-goth parts so much depth, while driving the punk elements right up your fucking nose. The bassist Gaye Advert was considered to be the “first female punk star.” To me, she was one of the most solid and truly badass punk musicians of the era. She embodied the DIY ethic with a genuine air and let it be about the music.


 They were self-proclaimed “one chord wonders.” Even going as far as naming the first song on their debut album that – but anyone that knows shit about 77’ Punk knows that they were more than that. Much more. Though they broke up because of in-fighting and a lack of funds, they seemed to me a contrast to Pistols. They didn’t have the publicity and the shenanigans, they were about the music. Actual artists.



The Adverts pulled the masterstroke of releasing a debut album that executed on the potential suggested by their early singles. Directly influenced by the immediate first wave, TV Smith assembled a rampaging set of strikingly simple, and strikingly effective songs for Crossing the Red Seas with the Adverts.




In fact, tracks like “Bored Teenagers” and “New Church” were even more simple than the first Sex Pistols, Damned, and Clash tunes, and just as fast, if not faster. Smith seemed determined to whittle songs down into their most Spartan form and then jack them up with powerful strikes and the energy of a young man… and he did just that.




Perhaps in contrast to the Clash and Pistols, the Adverts focused on hyper-personal issues. Jones and Strummer would often use youthful detachment as a way to describe bigger economic issues, and Rotten started at the very top by smacking around the queen herself, but Smith and crew keep their perspective very ground level. “Bored Teenagers” served as a mandate and short explanation of why the band was so jumpy. Meanwhile, “On the Roof” detailed the sort of loneliness and wanting that only young people have. The record was at once youthful and wizened. these guys were young, but they were smart enough to have a perspective that whittled the experience of young Brits down to three, two, or even one chord.




Mention needs to also be given to Gaye Advert on bass. The British punk scene did have some standout female musicians- the Slits, Raincoats, and X-Ray Spex all come to mind. Still, Gaye Advert was notable both for her amazing musicianship – the driving slam of the Adverts owes a huge debt to her rumbling, but sprinting bass- but also for making herself known and respected in the male dominated scene. That’s no easy task now and certainly it wasn’t easy then, either.




After this release, the adverts would evolve to a more post-punk sound. Still, Red Sea perhaps like no other record before it, found a band focusing on the established ideals of punk, fashioning those tools to their sharpest points possible, and striking with sheer force.


 "We were lucky. There probably couldn't have been a better time and place to form a band than in late 1976 in London. People were sick of the bloated self-indulgent prog rockers and trite cliché-ridden pop that was filling the charts, and wanted something that related to their lives. For many kids who thought there was something missing, the answer was simple - go out and form a band. That's how the Adverts came about. Probably at no other time would we have found anywhere to play and get noticed - but at the beginning on 1977 we started playing regularly at the newly-opened Roxy club and found a steady audience similarly disenchanted with the way things were. We were all beginners, we couldn't play very well, but it didn't matter - in fact it was better that way. For a couple of years at the start of the UK punk rock scene, music was driven by what people wanted to hear instead of what the music business forced on them, and for this short time the Adverts were able to play hundreds of gigs and produce two albums". – Tim Smith, 2004.
One of the best bands of the 70s, The Adverts were real punks, inspired by the Sex pistols and the Clash but not merely aping them. They oozed charisma and their lineup was a peculiar blend of the ultra-talented and the completely talentless. That in itself was something fresh and new: you couldn't imagine Steve Howe or Robert Fripp tolerating an bassist with no sense of rhythm or a drummer who couldn't keep a beat, but that was just one of the ways punk differed from prog. Fuck the old church, indeed.





Part 1 (1976-1978)


 Devon-born vocalist T.V. Smith was already a veteran when he formed The Adverts in late '76 with girlfriend Gaye. His previous outfit Sleaze had split 12 months earlier, but was known on the West Country gig circuit and even recorded an LP comprising five long songs, one of which ('Listen Don't Think') was re-worked for The Adverts as 'New Boys'. 50 copies of the Sleaze LP were pressed, all in plain white sleeves, and none were available publicly. Have fun tracking down a copy!


 After Sleaze split, Smith and Gaye bassist moved to London and joined up with fellow novices Howard Pickup on guitar and Laurie Driver on drums.


 Three gigs later, including one at the Roxy where they were spotted by Brian James of The Damned, they secured their deal with Stiff, toured with The Damned and issued the sloppy classic One Chord Wonders(1977). Sadly, Stiff's marketing ideas were as old school as the major's, and they insisted on the (great, admittedly) cover being a big picture of Gaye. The band were disgusted, and decamped to Anchor (a subsidiary of ABC) and then Bright, a succession of unsuitable labels. From here they issued a brace of essential records, including the chart hit Gary Gilmore's Eyes (1977) and the brilliant Crossing The Red Sea With The Adverts (1978). Any suggestion that Smith's lyrics didn't capture the mood of the time can be rectified by reading the words to that cracking debut single, issued in April:

 ONE CHORD WONDERS

 I wonder what we'll play for you tonight
Something heavy or something light
Something to set your soul alight
I wonder how we'll answer when you say
"We don't like you - go away,
"Come back when you've learnt to play"

 I wonder what we'll do when things go wrong
When we're half-way through
our favourite song
We look up and the audience has gone
Will we feel a little bit obscure
Think "we're not needed here,
"We must be new wave
- they'll like us next year"

 The Wonders don't care
- we don't give a damn


 In June they had their first brush with the charts via a slot onThe Roxy London WC2 (Jan to April '77) compilation with the brilliant 'Bored Teenagers':


 BORED TEENAGERS


 We're talking into corners.
Finding ways to fill the vacuum.
And though our mouths are dry.
We talk in hope to hit on something new.
Tied to the railway track.
It's one way to revive but no way to relax.

 We're just bored teenagers.
Looking for love,
Or should I say emotional rages.
Bored teenagers.
Seeing ourselves as strangers.

 We talk about the whys and wherefores.
Do we really care at all?
Talk about the frailty of words.
Is rarely meaningful.
When we're sitting watching the 'planes.
Burn up through the night like meteorites.

 We're just bored teenagers.
Looking for love,
Or should I say emotional rages.
Bored teenagers.
Seeing ourselves as strangers.Bored teenagers.     Their second brush with the charts was in August when they released their best-known 45, 'Gary Gilmore's Eyes', recorded in Worthing with producer Larry Wallis and a crate of beer. An appearance on 'Top of the Pops' and The Sun newspaper (Gaye featuring in a tasteful article about "Those saucy pop girls who are tearing up the pop chart") helped the single into the Top 40, peaking at No. 18.    However, by the time of October's Safety In Numbers single, the outburst of punk that had spawned the carefree, liberated abandon of 'One Chord Wonders' was turning to dissatisfaction, and Smith was now questioning where punk was heading:   The first phase of the band's life ended with the No time to Be 21 (1978) single (popular enough to propel them into the Top 40 a second time) and, in February 1978, the extraordinary, classic 'Crossing The Red Sea With The Adverts' album.  
Part 2 (1978-1979)
Phase 2 began badly with Driver driving off, reportedly in a strop after Gaye slated him in an interview for prima donna behaviour, also accusing him of not being able to get his shit together and forcing multiple takes of songs. He was replaced briefly by John Towe. Then, after new drummer Rod Latter joined that April, they were left without a label when Bright Records went bust. Although not inactive (they continued to gig and Smith began working with Richard Strange during the final days of Doctors of Madness), for those long months between the release of 'Crossing...' and them signing a new deal with RCA around September it seemed like the band was dead.


 After this long delay (seven or eight months was an eternity in Punk Time), the band bounced back in late 1978 with and a slightly different, more "produced" sound with the excellent Television's Over 45, the last occasion on which, sonically speaking, they resembled a standard punk band. As Smith wryly commented, "Statistics show that this first post-'Crossing...' single sold less than one copy". He's wrong though, and it's one of their easiest singles to find in second hand record shops (remember them?). (The B-Side 'Back from the Dead' was one of the Strange/Smith songwriting collaborations.)  Cast of Thousands (1979), released seventeen months after the debut LP, spelled the end of the group. Poorly received by arsehole critics who had given up on punk (except Garry Bushell, who would have given it a drubbing anyway for not being "street" enough), the LP featured a band completely uninterested in simply re-recording the first album. Worse news for punks: it (and the preceding single) was produced by none other than Tom Newman, the man who produced Tubular Bells and he even roped Maggie Riley in to do some backing vocals. And if that wasn't enough, new fifth member, keyboardist Tim Cross, was currently in Mike Oldfield's band. Well, cunts, I actually happen to love Tubular Bells and there's nothing about this LP I would change, apart from the horrible front cover.   The band struggled on for a few more months, even recording a Peel session (their third) in November with two new members, but before the decade was out the band was a thing of the past. Smith followed the Adverts with T.V. Smiths Explorers; Gaye went into retirement.



 The band's meteoric rise to the highest branches of the punk tree and their equally meteoric plunge back into obscurity is the story of punk personified, a bewildering blur of accelerated time and good luck. Within weeks of forming they gigged at the punk Mecca the Roxy and were promptly offered a one-off deal with the one of country's hippest label's Stiff. Three singles and an album later they were perceived as washed up, struggled on for a year or so and phuttered out in a quagmire of musical, critical and label indifference. Like the Pistols they crashed and burned, leaving a beautiful corpse behind, but their brief life demonstrated a band with flair, passion, adventure and imagination. Fortunately, they have not sullied their rep with unseemly reformations.
s and they think, here it comes, its gonna be headbanging time. But maybe it wasn't ."  Tim Smith.  New Wave News 1977. 


New Wave News 1977. 
 

DAY 406.
The Residents.............................................Duck Stab/Buster And Glen   (1978)











Well that was an experience, not necessarily a bad one (I didn't hate it Pat,) I liked it (maybe liked is too strong a word,) maybe it's more put up with it, being only 34 minutes it was bearable and in parts quite acceptable to my old lugs.


Opener "Constantinople" was alright as was "Laughing Song" which had shades of Devo, or should it be Devo has shades of The Residents in their music? and if you had to push me for a favourite "Weight-Lifting Lulu" was quite a novel and catchy little ditty.


Anyways, this album was just a tad too offbeat and avant garde for this listener, but if you like your music to be a bit off kilter then look no further, this could just be your thing (and can also double as a floor clearer at parties, at lousing out time)


This album wont be going into my vinyl collection.





Bits & Bobs;

Even a hard-core pop-rock junkie can occasionally feel the urge for some bracingly ugly music: in the late sixties, that need was best met by Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention; in the late seventies, it was a group of anonymous wise asses named the Residents. Through a series of albums which simultaneously built upon and deconstructed Top Forty tropes (Meet the Residents, The Third Reich 'n' Roll, Fingerprince), this band of faceless conceptualists produced an amazing catalog of comically abrasive anti-pop pop: music designed to get on the nerves of even those who thought that punk was the pinnacle of musical rebelliousness.


 Of the early Residents' releases, perhaps their best-known – and most accessible – was 1978's Duck Stab. Recently reissued by Mute Records in a handsomely designed hardbound booklet/CD, Stab first was released as a seven-song EP, which quickly was coupled with a second EP (Buster & Glen) into long-playing format. This gives the full disc a sort of Magical Mystery Tour feel – with two blocs of music jostling against each other. The disc's opening track "Constantinople" even gets reiterated with the chaotic seventh blues jazz cut "Elvis and His Boss," providing a sense of closure to the first batch of songs even if, lyrically, the listener doesn't really have a clue as to what it's really all about.


 With the exception of one instrumental ("Booker Tease," which blends a soulful bass line with shrieking horn work), the two sets of music follow a similar strategy: hooky tune work subverted by out-of-tune instrumentation – some of which sounds like the background arrangement from some old warped '78 – dadaesque poetry and cartoonish vocals which manage to make Captain Beefheart sound mainstream. In "Blue Rosebuds," for instance, a damaged singer's sappy love song is interrupted by a high-pitched voice declaiming absurdest put downs ("Infection is your finest flower mildewed in the midst"), while "Sinister Exaggerator" undercuts its effectively ominous guitar stabs (courtesy of guest fingerman Snakefinger) with a barking background chorus that sounds like something the Manimals on the island of Dr. Moreau might've chanted. Good ambient music for those who've used the soundtrack to Eraserhead to put 'em to sleep at nights: the "In Heaven" song could've easily been non-sung by a Resident in one of his little girl voices.


 Many of the songs that make up the second half of the disc (a.k.a. the Buster & Glen EP) toy with the themes of disconnected families ("Birthday Boy," "Lizard Lady") and body dysmorphia that the group would return to in their groundbreaking Freak Show CD-Rom. "Weight Lifting Lulu" features a narrator who's simultaneously appalled and aroused by his girlfriend's physique ("I hated your body but needed your touch."), while "Hello Skinny" describes a noodle-thin entrepreneur who sells a used copy of a Hello Dolly record to a truck driver – climaxing in a tuneless rendition of that musical's show stopping chorus. The whole shmear concludes with "The Electrocutioner," a warped little ditty sung by Ruby of the long-departed Rick & Ruby comedy troupe, a group with ties to Peewee Herman's old live comedy shows.


 Depending on your tolerance for willful weirdness, you've either stopped listening to Duck Stab long before the Buster & Glen bits or immediately hit "replay" when you get to the end. To test their admirers' perspicacity, the group would follow this release with Eskimo, a totally tuneless aural collage filled with wind sounds, barks and grunts which purports to tell a tale of life in the frozen North. I still don't know what to make of that puppy – also recently reissued by Mute – but I'll happily cop to loudly singin' along with Stab's "Constantinople."



The Residents are considered one of the worlds most unusual musical groups. Having influences and influencing such artists as Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart, one can only imagine what The Residents sound like. I'll tell you right now; the music is not easily accessable at all. When you listen to this album, you may think it is the worst thing you have ever heard, or you may just find it weird. You may however also think that this album is revolutionary and completely amazing, like I do.




The Residents, best known for their unusual musical style and also known for donning huge eyeball masks. The Residents have never revealed their identity, because they believe that music should not be about who they are, their race or gender, and that it should be just about music. And that's exactly what this is. Duck Stab is a revolutionary release. I wouldn't recommend this to any fan of music, but for music fans with open mines or fans of other experimental and avant garde artists, like Frank Zappa or Captain Beefheart.




1. Constaninople (2:23)



The opening track is very weird indeed. There is a distortion guitar playing static, high pitched notes while a keyboard or synth play a random accending scale very quickly. The bass plays single notes. The singing is very Nasal (think Les Claypool with a nose-block). I guarantee that this track will take more an just a few listens to get into, give it 7, maybe 11" The synth sounds like trumpets towards the end. The song is a tad short, but it is still a great song.




2. Sinister Exaggerator (3:28)




Very, very creepy song. Very. The bass is single sliding down notes but the guitar is tremolo picked notes, what are rather minor and dissonant to each other. The 'interlude' during the tremolo guitar is also very evil as it it just dissonant chords going up and down a scale doubled by a synth. The singing is where it becomes VERY creepy. The vocal style is nasal but it is over dubbed with many voices which are higher and lower pitched, but you can't make out the words of these over vocalists, so it just sounds like wails or screams. Primus cover this piece on their album, Misc Debris, by the way.




3. The Booker Tease (1:04)



This song is amazing, despite its length. It sounds like a small jazz club sounding piece. There is a guitar, bass drums and horns and also sax. Nice little interlude song.





4 Blue Rosebuds (3:07)



This opens with the most unusual guitar line that I have yet to figure out. The imagery given off reminds me of a water fall. The singer is singing about love, and everything is quiet serene and happy, until the main part of the song. The song goes evil, as Residents do, and there is the most unusual high pitched voice entering, then after that bit, the songs returns to the main deep vocals singer though he sounds more sad singing this verse. This song is very hard to get into, simple because of the middle section, but after a few listens, you'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll enjoy.




5. Laughing Song (2:12)




Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! That is what the first vocals to enter say. The music is very difficult to describe, it sounds like some fucked up violin or fiddle or something. Prior to the verse, while the laugh is occuring, synth descends the scale too. The singing reminds me of Primus a lot (since this album is a great influence to Primus, I should say Primus sound like this, not this sounds like Primus, chances are you'll have heard Primus though). The vocals are very 'catchy'.. I want to say.. well, addictive anyway. The lyrics are pretty nonsense, but I can somehow imaging a pirate singing them. Me and my messed up head ay" Yeah, its a great song.




6. Bach Is Dead (1:11)





Another almost ditty like piece. Very basic, a squeak, with a slightly more complex bass line than the Residents would usually have. The lyrics until the is "Bach is dead", but I love when the proper vocals enter, as the harmony s just fantastic. The song ends to quickly. I think that the squeaky noise represent a cart being pushed and this is a traveling song.





7. Elvis And His Boss



Stars with tinkle bells and light bass, when I first heard this song, I didn't know what to expect, but it jumps right into what I now call the greatest rock'n'roll song I've ever heard. The clean guitar sounds totally out of key, but it somehow works. The synth is very loud, but it somehow works. The bass is very funky/rock 'n rolly. The singing sounds just like a rock and roll band, so this is probably the most accessable song on the album, besides The Booker Tease. Structure in this song is quite loose, which just adds to the effect of the song.




Overall, this album is completely revolutionary, and was very unique in its day and age.



Since their formation in 1969, The Residents have gained worldwide recognition as one of the premier acts in popular avant-garde music and art. Their discography is extensive, to say the least, including over 40 studio LPs alone. This particular EP, released in 1978, was rereleased the same year with seven additional songs as Duck Stab/Buster & Glen, the collective’s fourth studio LP. For these purposes, I’ll be reviewing Duck Stab! as it appeared on side one of Duck Stab/Buster & Glen, in a different track order than on the original EP. 


 Constantinople: Automatically, Duck Stab! is a showcase of dissonant, unsettling melodies. This opener establishes the quirky, oftentimes straight-up weird ambience which is so often emulated by The Residents. The track is a surreal look at death which catches the listener off guard with its almost poppy refrain. 


 Sinister Exaggerator: This, a more sonically dark experience, makes use of The Residents’ famous unyielding oddness, since borrowed by multiple contemporary acts, most notably Primus. Instrumentally, this three and a half minute piece, the longest on the EP, sounds like the soundtrack to some vintage horror film. 


 The Booker Tease: This track is short, or more appropriately, concise, clocking in at just over a minute. That said, it’s catchy and satisfying; perhaps the most so of any Residents track I’ve heard. To keep with the cinematic theme, The Booker Tease sounds like the kind of thing you’d hear playing during the opening title sequence of a surprisingly dark black comedy.


 Blue Rosebuds: An incredible highlight, this track is the moment on Duck Stab! where I feel The Residents took themselves the most seriously from a musicianship standpoint. It’s dark, enticing, and above all, mentally stimulating. 


 Laughing Song: If Sinister Exaggerator isn’t the track to remind you what a Residents fan Les Claypool is and was, this track certainly will be. The first verse sounds almost like something the bassist might have stolen directly out of The Residents’ mouths. Otherwise, this is notable for its compelling, sometimes pleasingly abrasive sound. 


 Bach Is Dead: While I feel that this track pales in comparison to the other, more sonically interesting tracks on the EP, it’s just as weird and stunningly experimental as anything else you might hear from The Residents.


 Elvis And His Boss: The Residents save their most corrosive strangeness for the EP’s closer, a rhythmic, noisy, compulsive thriller. Granted, it’s a track with a lot to pay attention to, but all of its seemingly sporadic elements intermingle with surprising beauty. 


 Overall, Duck Stab! is an absolutely essential listen for any fan of avant-garde music, and a proven oddity for the ages. 

Evening - great print out Chanter!! Please dont feel pressure to post and take care x

arabchanter wrote:

LocheeFleet wrote:

800 views! - well you deserve them for this!  Must be a load of folk wanting to comment but maybe a bit apprehensive?  I reckon they just love your reviews.  You should publish a book at the end!

Thanks for you kind words LF,

Started to print off just for my own benefit a while back, this is only up to DAY 153 (another 848 days to go|) so obviously not wanting to devastate any more rain forests I called it a day, gonna try and store it on a hard drive ..............if I ever find some spare time.

Once it's finished I would like to kick back read it at my leisure, and maybe retain some of the shit we've all written' to my memory, instead of rushing it most every day.

A/C I think you should keep printing it off.
 

LocheeFleet wrote:

Not sure its relevant but im probably one of the few women on this board - so ive no issue giving you a wee hug and a kiss chanter xxo

Right back at ya LF, XXX

And received with many thanks!