Label: Ralph Records – RZ-8152
Format: Vinyl, LP, Album / Country: US / Released: 1981
Style:
Experimental
Recorded
by Ralph Records/444 Grove Street/San Francisco, CA 94102
Manufactured
By – Ralph Records
Copyright
(c) – Cryptic Corporation
Published
By – Pale Pachyderm Publishing
Mastered
By – Leo Kulka / At – Sonic Arts
Pressed
By – KM Records Inc. – KM-6911
Matrix
/ Runout (Runout A-side, etching): RZ 8152 A Re1
Matrix
/ Runout (Runout B-side, etching): RZ 8152 B Re1 KM-6911-B re1
A
- Hole-Workers At The Mercies Of Nature .....................................................
19:10
1 - Voices Of The Air
The Ultimate Disaster
2 - Won't You Keep Us Working?
3 - First Warning
4 - Back To Normality?
5 - The Sky Falls!
6 - Why Are We Crying
7 - The Tunnels Are Filling
8 - It Never Stops
Migration
9 - March To The Sea
10 - The Observer
11 - Hole-Workers' New Hymn
B
- Hole-Workers Vs Man And Machine
........................................................... 21:50
Another Land
1 - Rumors
2 -
Arrival
3 - Deployment
4 - Saturation
The New Machine
5 - Idea
6 - Construction
7 - Failure / Reconstruction
8 - Success
Final Confrontation
9 - Driving The Moles Away
10 - Don't Tread On Me
11 - The Short War
12 - Resolution?
Written-By,
Performer – The Residents
This
isn’t really an album you can just pick up and listen to a song at a time out
of context without being really familiar with the album to begin with, but it
is very interesting and worth listening to and paying attention.
For
all my effluence about The Commercial Album, it was a bit of a flop. In
response, The Residents decided they were going to do something “apocalyptic.”
So, they created an album about an apocalypse, a disaster of biblical
proportions. Inspired by tales of the Great Depression, they created the first
album in what would become The Mole Trilogy: Mark of the Mole. A return to the
storytelling, conceptual work of Not Available and Eskimo, Mark of the Mole
tells the story of the Moles, a primitive people who toil in deep underground
holes. One day, the sky falls and a massive storm floods their holes, forcing
them to wander across a cruel, unforgiving land to the land of the lazy,
decadent Chubs. There, the Moles are used as cheap labor until a Chub scientist
comes up with a labor-saving machine. Out of work, the Chubs and the Moles end
up breaking out in brutal, indecisive war.
Heady
stuff. Deep stuff. We’re a long way from the twisted pop of Duck Stab! and
Commercial Album. Mark of the Mole is a dark, oppressive album, of brutal,
moody music. Unlike its antecedents Eskimo and “Six Things to a Cycle,” there’s
not a whole lot of humor here. The cameo by Penn Jillette, of Penn & Teller
fame, delivering a weather forecast at the start of the record might raise a chuckle
just out of recognition. Instead, there’s a lot of lushly harsh synthesized
tones that, much like Not Available provide as much to the story as the lyrics.
There’s still some “strange voices,” but they’re restrained and applied to
compelling—if anonymous—characters, and serve to drive the plot home. The music
is hauntingly beautiful at time, such as the sad synthesized strings in the
finale of “Another Land.”
Mark
of the Mole is among the Residents' most successful, emotionally potent,
gimmick-free offerings. By this time, the Residents had completely embraced
keyboards/synthesizers as a key instrument, but instead of using them for goofy
bloops and bleeps (as they did on the couple of albums prior to this), they use
them to create a dark purple sky of doom and despair.
Here
the Residents embark on their most ambitious project to date. A sprawling story
about to races of people and the clash of cultures that happens when they are
driven together through natural forces. The result is not only a near-perfect
sonic depiction of the concept's subject matter (the plight of the Moles and
their eventual migration to the land of the Chubs, where they are persecuted),
but also a musically engaging affair that works on its own even without the concept.
This album represents the beginnings of the Residents' experiments with
electronics. (Review
by Richard J. Anderson)
Note:
Again,
though, The Residents punctured the pretentiousness of the project on the Mole
Show Tour, wherein Penn Jillette, as a narrator, explained the plot for what
would likely be confused audiences (The Mole Show: Live in Holland). Said
narration often consisted of joking commentary on the story and performance,
but this was all part of the act. There’s enough audio/visual documentation of
these shows to explain for the curious, but the album that it started the whole
project, retains its power even in the context of The Residents later works in
the vein, including the other album in the Mole Trilogy 'The Tunes Of Two
Cities'…
See
also:
http://www.gio80.com/mark-of-the-mole/
If
you find it, buy this album!
