THE TUNES OF TWO CITIES (1982)

Otherworldly jazz/swing and heavy metal. Like Mark of the Mole, missing something important. The second part of the Mole trilogy moves away from the main narrative to examine the crucial subject of difference between two cultures. This is achieved by examining the music of each.

The Mole music is solemn and gloomy, where the music of the Chubs often sounds like futuristic New Orleans jazz. This was the first album anywhere to feature an Emulator, a fairly expensive forerunner of the now common Akai type samplers. I think the Chub tracks work very well because of the real brass mixed in, but the Mole tracks are a fairly obvious example of how people used to use sampling keyboards. To be fair this was cutting edge stuff (as always) plus The Residents were limited in that the Emulators were only able to store a very short sound. After the incredible sonic trickery the band had produced using a simple 8-track recording machine, the clinical sound of "Tunes" was a surprise and signalled a radical new direction but that's them all over so what can you say. If they hadn't started out on that route as early as they did then maybe the world would never have gotten great CD-ROM's like Freak Show.