Residents - Mark of the Mole (1981)

My first proper gig - large venue, no-one from school in the band - was the Residents' Mole Show at Birmingham Town Hall, so it's probably peculiar that it should have taken me nearly forty years to get this given how much I enjoyed the aforementioned Mole Show. Partially it was just how it worked out, Mark of the Mole hardly being the sort of record I could find at my local WHSmith, and when I stumbled across a copy at some better stocked place it was usually just after I'd spunked away all my pocket money on yet another live Throbbing Gristle album. Intermission somehow made it to our local record shop during the six months of the place managing to stay open, so I bought that, and it was great, and then the next thing I actually found was George and James, which wasn't very good at all and which pretty much killed my curiosity regarding new Residents material. I liked the old stuff, the weirdly discordant tunes plucked out on bits of wire stretched across the back of a chair, the music which didn't really fit anywhere, which sounded like it was recorded on another planet. It seemed as though they had lost something since they bought their Emulators, and the charm of endless wacky cover versions had begun to wear thin. Oh yes - it's Shakin' All Over sung by Herman Munster with the guitar riff on something which sounds like a cow playing the tuba - ha ha…

Better late than never, I guess. It took me a couple of plays to hear past my expectation of the formulaic weirdness of the Residents as wacky covers band, but I got there, and I realise Mole was probably the best Residents album since maybe Fingerprince. It sounds played rather than programmed, and played by Residents rather than wacky entertainers giggling inside their giant eyeballs. The music develops organically, without too much suggestion of anything happening just for the sake of being fucking weird. It's that same alien folk music which first caught my attention and it tells a story, and the tragedy of the Moles driven from their homes survives the surrealism of its telling. I liked both Eskimo and The Commercial Album, but I never really played either that much. For all of their qualities, I always felt they were laying it on just a little thicker than I liked, whatever it was; but Mark of the Mole is perfect.

Mark of the Mole was the first part of a trilogy which was never completed, and online sources seem to suggest that this was due to disillusionment with the expense of the Mole Show and how the undertaking didn't really turn out as the lads had hoped. I always understood that the Moles were actually the Residents struggling to get by in our society, but I didn't realise that part of this reflected on the apparently poor critical reception which greeted the previous two records; and I guess this was, if anything, what went wrong with the Residents. They wanted a hit single, or wider acclaim, or the stuff you're probably not going to get much of a sniff at when your album sounds like it was recorded on Mars. I guess maybe that's why there was a time during which they seemed to be turning into a surrealist comedy turn, something to match the sales of Weird Al Yankovic; and I guess that's why I've heard more recent stuff, and it's all right but I still feel the spark has gone. I still feel like they stopped exploring and became a tribute act recreating material in the style of their former selves, but maybe - and hopefully - I'm wrong. I guess I'll just have to track down The Tunes of Two Cities and see how it all panned out.