Customer Reviews

Third Reich N Roll

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4 star:		(9)
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2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Brilliant on a number of levels.
As an adolescent in a salmon-colored/mica-concrete c.1980 Florida fortress, had an arsenal of Empty-the-House-Albums. Put one on the stereo, & suddenly dear mom felt an irresistible urge to go out & buy groceries--asap.
Funhouse, Dead Kennedys, White Light/White Heat, 1st Cramps album, Siouxie's The Scream; sure, these were all effective to varying degrees--but for sheer speed of response time, Third Reich n Roll was unsurpassed in its ability to trigger parental errands. 5 mins, tops, she'd be hunting for the car keys. A twist of the volume dial, & shortly thereafter the house would reverberate with this amazing Pop-blender-from Hell. Guess it's time to add Reich n Roll to my Mid-Life Crisis Music Collection. Haven't seen or heard the album for over 20 years, but it stays w/you.
Funny to find out what *doesn't* weather the test of time: no enduring nostalgia for James White & "Contort Yourself"; Sex Pistols now sound fake & silly, a punk version of Spice Girls (ok, like Spice Girls who spit a lot). But who can't love the Residents' unforgettable "Hey Jude/Sympathy for the Devil"? Pity it's near the end of the record; poor Mom was rolling thru the aisles of Publix by that point & missed the experience...

"The Third Reich And Roll" is a nightmarish trip through the pop music of the 60's. Although there seem to be two songs on the album, these two songs actually meander from one pop song cover to the next. The fact that they're all rolled together gives you a sense that they don't mean anything individually, they just contribute to the whole of pop. And that's not even saying anything about the texture of the music. It sounds alternately like pop with all of the life sucked out of it, nightmarish versions of pop songs being covered by Satan and his band of demons, or a couple of drunks in a basement playing what they remember of "In A Gadda Da Vida." It all beautifully serves its purpose: to tarnish the image of the music we hear on the radio. By the end of the album, pop is left in a stinking heap of bubblegum, synthesizers, and dog food.

It starts with a Chubby Checker's german version of "Let's Twist Again." I'll admit, maybe the Residents went to far with all of the Nazi imagery on the cover and inlay. Maybe comparing pop music to the third reich is taking it too far. Who knows what they were thinking. It still works. By the time they start chanting the "Na nah-nah-nah-na"s from "Land of 1000 Dances" you know you're in for something special. Their cover of "Double Shot of My Baby's Love" ends with what sounds like World War II era footage of a plane plummeting to the ground. "Hey Little Girl" sounds absolutely evil and sinister. "Papa's Got A Brand New Bag" is sung in German and the only element of the original left over is the occasional trumpet blast. The trumpet blast sounds like it's getting swallowed by a machine so that it turns into the guitars of "Talk Talk."

While the first side has a lot of the toy instruments we heard on "Meet The Residents," by side two, you can already hear the Residents giving up their old instruments in favor of synthesizers. One of the best moments on the album is when the man from "96 Tears" tells Lesley Gore from "It's My Party" that it is her party and that she should cry if she wants to. My favorite cover might be the absolutely whimsical take on "Light My Fire" by The Doors. It's about time someone dethroned that song. Some of the best parts of the album come when The Residents play the music so seriously and with such emphasis and sing the words like they actually mean something.

The Residents are awesome; this album is hilarious. They recorded their own musical tracks on top of top 20 hits, then took away the actual pop hit music, so what you're left with is just the bubblegum madness they re4corded over the hits. They also made a statement about the lack of individual worth of all these greatest hits by throwing them together into 2 long collages that are 2 epic "songs" made up of so many smaller ones without individual mention anywhere on this album that just kind of turn into one another without wsarning. This is my favorite Residents cd.

The Residents present us with one of the most influencial albums ever recorded. By that i mean it will effect the way you listen the 'golden oldies' that seem to cheer up your day (but ultimately leave you feeling unsatisfied). The Residents present a combination of 60's 'pop songs' that have been bent out of proportion, and probably more than they deserve. They turn the cheese dial to max and spew forth an album of distorted vocal styles and schitzophrenic mellodies, despite the lyrics and arrangements being seemingly the same. They attempt to show people that if you take away the 'cutesy-poo' voices, and the clear, boppy sounds of the music, it's left with nothing. The Residents attack music that has no heart, and no purpose, and do a damn fine job at it. I think this album would have made quite a few musicians think twice about their work, and hopefully it made them give it more soul.

This album is indeed a work of genius. It still is a great listen even without the bonus tracks. However, the bonus tracks are the greatest splicing together/deconstructing Sargeant Pepper and a dead on hilarious cover of Satisfaction that not only predates Devo's version but is far superior to it. Heck at the time satyrizing the Beatles was risky business. I remember reading one mainstream review of the Beatles saying, "Not liking them is like not liking the sun". The Residents already had legal trouble with their first album cover mocking the cover art on "Meet the Beatles". I guess they decided to forgo the bonus tracks, thus leaving listeners a little less sonically enriched. I understand the issue of piracy but tape loops (remember this was way before samplers) commenting on a work (or in this case the whole myth of sixties rock)are the aural equivalent of collage work and should be left alone.

As a young lad in the 60's, I had a big AM radio in my bedroom. When I was supposed to be sleeping, I'd turn on the radio, watch the warm orange glow of it's tubes seep through the vents and tune in to WLS, a high-powered Chicago station many miles from my Pennsylvania home. WLS played all of those great top 40 hits, from motown to cheesy bubblegum.

Fifteen years later, I spotted this Residents LP at the local record store. Based solely on the cover art (Dick Clark in nazi regalia clutching a carrot while miniature cartoon gay Hitlers danced in the clouds), I bought it. With shock and delight I listened as the Residents completely trashed and distorted those beloved top 40 hits from my childhood.

The Third Reich 'N Roll is the most twisted rendition of 'cover tunes' that you'll ever hear. Highly recommended, although it's not for everyone. Most people will not understand it or like it.

A lot of people in 1976 merely talked about rock and roll radio being taken over by a kind of programming tyranny, but only the Residents were brash enough to slam the idea up in plain sight. That they used two suites of dashes and crashes from some of the 1960s most incandescent hits to do it was probably jarring enough; that they had the temerity to caricature Dick Clark visibly as a storm troop was probably even more audacious (however much it had become a truism among some of the rock avant garde), especially since they launched the whole shebang with a clip from Chubby Checker's German translation of "The Twist." They also slashed away at the nimrod contingencies who liked to harp on the long-brandished accusations that rock was trafficking in subliminal messagemongering...hell, the Residents DELIBERATELY put subliminal messages into this one. As you might imagine, not everyone got the joke or the message; I remember there actually having been a few mild protests over the band's deployment of the Nazi references. But considering what today's radio programming is like in a lot of ways, just maybe the Residents in their insane way were as far ahead of the curve as their most die-hard devotees had it. For the sheer pleasure of hearing what sounds like an inside-out reading of the signature riff of Iron Butterfly's "Possession" beneath a vocal of inspired psychedelic parodying midway through one of the suites, that alone would have made it worth the price.

I will spend no time discussing why you shouldn't be offended by the title or the images. I will spend no time talking about the concept of the recording. I will say that serious Residents fans should have this recording. The reason is that all of the early, hard to find, and largely undocumented sounds of the Residents are captured here in one form or another. This CD does not contain any of the music from early unreleased tapes such as "Baby Sex" (you need to get your hands on the long out of print UWEB titles or "History Mystery" from "Our Tired, Our Poor, Our Huddled Masses" for that). But the sounds on 3rd R&R are the gelling of the "Kamakazi Lady / Eloise / Sandman" style. The closest readily available Residents work to the early unreleased material.

In a perverse way, this is genius. Take 60s pop, mangle it and string it together in the most atonal manner and this is what you get. One one level, it's absolute dreck of the most unlistenable sort. On another level, it's a crafty inversion of the happy-go-lucky sounds of a bygone era. Somehow, despite the warbled and grizzled vocals, the vacous production and the frustrating repetition, there's a humourous spark that drives the entire album. I mean, for crying out loud, look at the titles on these uber-long tracks.

In the end, you do have to concede to the fact that the album itself is a great work of disjointed pastiche. A tad challenging, yes, but it's got a wealth of laughs that totally make it worth your while.

The Residents by some accounts believed that rock and roll had been corrupted by big money - that it was precluding real artistic statement or rebellion, that it was opiate for the masses. Hence this album where they ridicule the form and tie it to notions of facism.

The music consists of snippets of old rock songs, sung and played in ludicrous, ironic style. It's pretty funny.