The Third Reich 'N Roll
by The Residents

From meccalecca TOP 100 COMMENTER 04/12/2013 18:42 | #72676 | TOP COMMENT Vote up your preferred comments and the comments with the most votes will be flagged.

One of the strangest records I've heard in my lifetime. The Residents' second album acts as a collage of popular songs from the 60s, noise, commercials, and god knows what else in the form of one strange avant-garde piece of satire. This is not easy listening. (Edited)

Residents are famous because they are anonymous. As for all avant-garde music, either we love the album or we find it inaudible. The music of the Residents is certainly the strangest I have ever heard. Residents in this album ransack standards to unveil a piece of darkness unpublished. This infra-thin detail is especially present in popular music. It's the one used for propaganda. For their demonstration of great gravity, Residents use American rock'n'roll tubes. These are denatured and yet recognizable. What the destructive parody of Residents reveals (for our biggest melancholy melancholy or not) is the absence of intrinsic nature to the standards used. These can be interpreted according to an unlimited axis ... including Nazi. The hippie hymn "Light My Fire" adopts a fascist stiffness that is really frightening. Third Reich 'n' Roll crashes an abscess. And I can only admire the Residents' insight and their harsh criticism of popular music. And this lucidity is probably preserved because they do not belong to the world of rock. Residents, by their anonymity, can address the most delicate criticisms to hold without retaking or falling into demagogy.

9/10
 
Best track: There are only 2 tracks... lol
(Edited)

Perhaps The Residents most immediately recognizable album is an LP that serves as something of an alternate universe listening to pop radio, where the band members re-arrange and re-vocalize certain parts of dozens of popular hits. The Third Reich 'n Roll is usually viewed as a deconstruction of the mid-20th century pop idiom by a crowd of art rockers who were at best irreverent and at worst incredibly nasty to the music they chose to lampoon. Though the arrangements are of course humorous and stray widely from the snippets of hot radio hits that you could hear on, say, that Phil Spector compilation I can't be assed to identify at present, I think that such a reading really misses a lot of what's going on here. The Residents don't seek to make ugly the beautiful, but to rather provide, like the best jazz music before it, a re-articulation of the idiom for different sensibilities, a recontextualization based not on resentment but of love. The Residents, for all their otherness, were always tied deeply to the core tenets of pop and rock music of their time while constantly looking to expand it out at a million miles an hour in every direction. This is the best example of that and my favorite album of theirs.

A challenging but ultimately satisfying album. Not for the pretty music crowd. (Edited)

They showed how any Nazism is ugly ?? (Edited)