Eskimo [Import]

I admit it. When this album came out all those years ago, I wanted to like it as much as I knew it deserved, but I couldn't. It was just too freaking weird, and if it was too weird for a Residents fan like myself, you know it had to be FAR OUT.

I absolutely loved the beautiful cover art, but the "music"? On previous releases, The Residents had made legends of themselves by deconstructing, demolishing, warping and reconstructing "rock" music into all sorts of weird mutations. But underneath all the strangeness, one could still feel the familiar beat of rock music.

With "Eskimo", they just completely left rock music behind. Not just rock, but all Western music, and all African-derived music forms. They also left English behind, and created their own gutteral language, which was supposed to sound like Inuit (I guess). They pushed the envelope so far that they burst through it and found themselves in an aural universe completely their own. Sui generis. It was a fantastic achievement. Brave and daring and bursting with hubris. "Eskimo" was (is) so OUT THERE, that you didn't know if you were being taken for a ride...maybe it was all just a joke? Another prank by these merry jesters?

I tried to like it. I listened to it repeatedly. My poor little brain just did not know what to do with these sweeping vistas of arctic sounds, chanting, strange tongues, pounding drums, clapping and occasional oases of "music" (like the last four minutes of "The Festival of Death".

It was not rock. It was not jazz, nor blues, nor western classical music. It wasn't anything like the African, Indian and Asian traditional musics that I'd heard. A lot of it didn't even sound like it was from our planet...

Years and decades have passed, and to my great surprise, I recently gave "Eskimo" another listen and was blown away. It finally makes sense to me. I guess all these years of exposing myself to music from around the world has stretched my ears enough that I can appreciate what the Residents created. I still don't know what it is, but I like it. And I recognize it as a crowning achievement in the art of sound.

Possibly one of the best albums ever put together, Eskimo is The Residents crowning achievement. Operating on several levels, the album is a collection of six eskimo tales told in the Residents inimitable style - a combination of the ridiculous and the sublime. Whilst being deadly serious on one level, it operates with hilarity on another.

Being lucky enough to possess recordings of actual Eskimo tribes from Hudson Bay (folkways recordings), I can report that the Residents did their homework and have produced sounds which are astonishingly ethnographically accurate. Eskimo chant rhythyms and forms are blended with other-wordly synthesised sounds to take you onto the ice. If you close your eyes you could almost be there in the stories - there is a moment of touching and exquisite beauty as the eskimos dance for the end of winter and the first light as the sun rises for the first time in six months and, with a little imagination, you can be there as they rejoice at its emergence.

Beautifully presented in the vinyl gatefold cover, the stories are written out and it adds to the experience if you read as you listen and contemplate. Musically it is great - very residential and a bit 'out there' but there are some passages that are genuinely brilliant and very trippy.

Not a casual, easy listen - but then the Residents are probably not for the casual listener. If you see this, you must snap it up! Simply a must-have.

This record was unlike any record in pop culture when it was released in the mid-seventies. The closest genre I can affiliate it with is ambient, but this one with scare you not sooth you! If you don't know anything about The Residents, I would NOT suggest starting with this one, but you will end up getting it in the end. The following decade, the San Francisco Bay band got noted for their theatrical performances, largely driven by the underground success of this record. One does not merely listen to this record. It draws you deep to places you have never been and may not want to ever visit ! This is music so-to-speak to make to shiver and think. Artistically astounding! Great spin and not for dancing!