The Residents – ‘Eskimo Folk Tales’ (Cherry Red)
There’s a particular kind of cultural archaeology that only The Residents ever seem to attempt. Other groups revisit their past, but the eyeballs dig into it like they’re prising open a frozen shoreline, looking for whatever odd relic might still be twitching under the ice. The Residents Meet The Thing. Their new 10″ EP, ‘Eskimo Folk Tales’, feels exactly like that kind of excavation, a return to the world they built on ‘Eskimo’ but approached from a different angle.
The story goes that in the 1970s, while they were shaping ‘Eskimo’, their mentor N. Senada handed them a bundle of handwritten Inuit folk tales. They didn’t use them at the time, partly because they already had more than enough material, partly because the group’s instincts were pulling them elsewhere. Those tales sat untouched for decades, gathering dust, waiting for someone to remember they existed. Now they’ve become the spine of a new live show and the basis for this EP, a set of six pieces that treat Senada’s notes as both source material and provocation.
What’s striking is how naturally these stories slot into the Residents’ universe. ‘The Barren Woman and the Worm’ opens the record with a kind of icy fable, the sort of tale that feels older than language, yet somehow perfectly suited to their way of working. The glacial chill remains, but the madness of the ages conquers all. ‘The Old Woman and the Skull’ follows with a creeping sense of inevitability, a reminder that transformation in these stories is never metaphorical. It’s literal, physical, and unsettling, and has more than a little Tom Waits percussion and tortured mewing. ‘A Tale of Two Tupilaqs’ is the most elaborate of the Side One pieces, a miniature epic of jealousy, monsters, and blurred outlines in the snow, told with the same strange clarity that made ‘Eskimo’ feel like a transmission from somewhere you couldn’t quite place.
Side Two (this release is 10″ vinyl only) leans further into the grotesque and the playful. ‘The Fool Who Made Friends with a Stone’ reads like a cautionary tale told by someone who doesn’t believe in caution, full of drums, stench, and a giant head rising out of the fire. ‘The Skeleton at the Bottom of the Sea’ is the most mythic of the set, a story of suitors, polar bears, cracks in the ice, and the slow realisation that death isn’t an ending but a shift in form. The bonus track, ‘The Arctic Fox’, ties the whole thing together, a final nod to the landscape that shaped these tales and the imagination that revived them.
What you get here isn’t a lost chapter of ‘Eskimo’, though it’s interesting that it’s one of the band’s most immediately engaging albums that has offered itself forward, decades in the future. It’s a modern interpretation of material that could have sat alongside it in some alternate timeline. This material comes across like something they’ve carried for decades, revived now with an appropriate cold clarity, the past rising up inside the new work without being tidied or softened. These recordings feel lived‑in, like they’ve been carried around for years, waiting for the right moment to be told, yet have a surprisingly speedy, even aggressive momentum – this is far from chin-stroking contemplation.
Fifty years on, the group’s fascination with the Arctic, with ritual, with the way stories mutate as they’re passed down, hasn’t dimmed. If anything, it’s sharpened. ‘Eskimo Folk Tales’ is a reminder that their world is still expanding, still capable of surprising you, still rooted in that peculiar blend of humour, folklore, and sonic invention that only they seem able to pull off.
Daz Lawrence
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