The Residents, the Ghost of Hope (2017) A Review

The Residents, the Ghost of Hope (2017) A Review

By: Ghost Writer

Rock n Roll Animal

I used to have an experimental "rock" band more than 10 years ago, my inspiration for such a project came from bands like the German krautrock unit Faust and the USA Dada deconstructionist act The Residents, its remarkable that although not entirely the original band, Faust us still around and occasionally making great records, on the other side, I can speak the same way about The Residents, honestly since they embraced samplers and multimedia shows they stopped being interesting to me, although I'm still hooked to their early enigmatic and primitive records full of surrealism, I still praise albums like Meet the Residents, a definite classic, the inventive displayed on The Third Reich n Roll, and the supreme weirdness on Fingerprince and Not Available, these were my favorite Residents albums and the ones I still look up to, even though they continued making good albums until the early 80s.

Just like Faust, The Residents never went away and their new records simply became isolated events, unlike Faust, some of The Residents recent recording haven't been as interesting, they are more like a full confusing mess, musically and conceptually, that until the arrival of this year's The Ghost of Hope, a weird (and taking about The Residents weirdness is good) conceptual record about Americana that finally shows some creative spark returning to the enigmatic band, giving them an interesting background to construct a big concept enough to hold their hallucination inducing operas, and that's exactly how The Ghost of Hope works, as a whole strange chapter in the life of this experimental band not afraid of attacking some odd sounding concept, musically synths gave up on some interesting organic arrangements and field like recordings, like on the new wave oriented opener Horrors of the Night, with its welcomed strange detours into Gamelan music meets Kraftwerk robotic structures.

Next comes The Crash at Crush with its western tinged chorus and insisting synths, it's a kind of menacing song and perfectly captures the dark and weird spirit of the band, it brings up perfectly what The Residents are all about from start to finish, also evidenced on the more upbeat and contemporary sounding Shroud of Flames, another triumphant and uplifting piece on this collection featuring some really heavy arrangements, rounded up by another piece of intricate music on closer Killed at the Crossing making this The Ghost of Hope a very powerful addition to The Residents catalog, the band keeping their weirdness at full, not getting run over by technology and bringing on some heavy conceptual stuff in an almost triumphant way, this might not be Meet the Residents or even The Commercial Album, but is a record that deserves to be listened to and enjoyed for its disregard of normal sounding music, artistically speaking, The Residents are still arty anarchists punks at heart.