With any longstanding musical career, fans tend to favor one particular era of a band or performer’s back catalog—the years that provide your go-to albums—and this is usually at around the point where you came in. Early Fall? Brix-era Fall? Post Brix-Fall? We all have a preference. Will you only ever bother with the gloomy first four Cure albums, or do you prefer their poppier late 80s/early 90s albums after they broke through in America? Sixties Zappa or Joe’s Garage? When faced with a choice of thirty albums to choose from the same source, we almost always tend to stick with our top two or three favorites, the cream of the crop. Who wants to listen to the 29th best Rolling Stones album, the 22nd best Kinks record or god forbid middling Jandek?

The Residents are a group whose fans have strong opinions about when the band was at their best. After all they’ve put out over a hundred releases. For me, it’s the run of albums that goes from 1977’s Fingerprince to 1980’s Commercial Album. I recently expressed this to a friend of mine who opined that once the Residents reoriented what they were doing in service to their live performances and starting incorporating MIDI into everything, that there was a noticeable drop-off in musical quality. I think this hits the nail pretty squarely on the head.

The album that is, to me at least, the very apex of the Residents singular art form, is their 1979 album Eskimo. Although quite different to everything that preceded it and all that came after, too, Eskimo is an album that stands tall among the classic post-punk albums released that year (Metal Box, Cut, Fear of Music, Unknown Pleasures, Secondhand Daylight, 154) and one that stands apart from all of them as well. It’s also when their famous eyeball costumes debuted. There is literally nothing else like it. Not by the Residents, not by anyone. Eskimo is the Residents’ avant-garde ambient poetic masterpiece.

If you’ve never heard it before, Eskimo is a purported (it’s totally fake) ethnomusicological “documentary” study of the lives of the indigenous peoples of the Arctic Circle, as if it’s assembled from phony field recordings. Each track is paired to a loose narrative in the liner notes which is “acted out” sonically with sound effects, howling winds, nonsensical chanting, grunts, whistles, homemade instruments, seal and walrus sounds. What you hear on the album is the product of the Residents working in the studio alongside of Henry Cow’s Chris Cutler on percussion, former Mother of Invention Don Preston on synthesizers, and Snakefinger on guitar. It’s not exactly “music” but it’s close enough.

In the context of the Residents’ ongoing Cherry Red pREServation series, Eskimo was recently re-released along with bonus tracks like the “Diskomo” single, the 20-minute long “Eskimo Acappella Suite,” the Residents’ songs from the classic Ralph Records compilation Subterranean Modern as well as unreleased demo recordings from the Eskimo period and later related rehearsal and live recordings from the 80s. It’s excellent and obviously comprehensive.

But what comes next seems almost unprecedented for musicians who have so seldom offered any insight whatsoever into their creative process. Eskimo Deconstructed (available only on vinyl) is a two LP set that basically provides Eskimo‘s component parts in a manner that allows the listener to discern exactly what went into the making of this oddball concept album. In other words all of the layers of Eskimo, the chanting—listen for “Coca-Cola adds life,” “Don’t squeeze the Charmin,” “Are we not men? We are DEVO,” “You asked for it, you got it” (a mid-70s Toyota tagline) and “You deserve a break today” (from a McDonald’s campaign)—the tape manipulations, conversations in gibberish, the ship’s mast creaking in the wind, splashing water, crying babies and other sound effects are laid out like an autopsy. There’s even a CD of synthetic wind sounds that, being a fan of Don Preston’s Filters, Oscillators & Envelopes 1967-82 album, I’m going to guess is Preston making an hour’s worth of howling wind noises on a Minimoog to serve as a sound bed for the work. He’s so adept at achieving this sound that for some time it’s impossible to tell if it’s an analog synthesizer or someone holding up a microphone in a particularly vicious snowstorm. Cutler’s and Snakefinger’s key contributions, laid bare as such, can also be appreciated for what they brought to the party.

You might be thinking that this sounds academic—just the raw tracks of something—but trust me it’s absolutely wonderful stuff and a delight to listen to all the through (as I have done dozens of times since I got it.) Eskimo, that most inscrutable of creations, is now available to sort of walk around in like a museum exhibit. If you’re a fan of the original album (and if you are not you should be, it’s stunning) I’d rate this unusual release an immediately-if-not-sooner “must hear.” For everyone else, maybe not so much.
 

“The Walrus Hunt”