The Ughs were conceived as an alter ego for
the Residents to create new material for a project, which was then massively reworked with an added narrative for their
Voice of Midnight album. But the
Ughs material was so heavily reworked that, when
the Residents found the original material again, it sounded almost new, so they decided to release it. Although the genesis of the material was itself a concept, the material here has no narrative or plot line to follow. The album is largely instrumental and although there are plenty of synthesized elements, it's the acoustic instruments that tend to stand out: jaw harp, glockenspiel, harmonica, flute, and recorder. When there are vocals, they are sung in some new/imaginary language (it ain't English, that's for sure), harking back to bits of
Eskimo. Other elements, like the tribal percussion work and a bit of decidedly amateurish saxophone, also seem to look back at
the Residents' early works. The beginning of the album seems to have an industrial/urban feel to it, with grating sounds and the type of shifting, incessant noise background that is unavoidable in big cities. But as the album progresses things become more pastoral, with bird sounds and more acoustic instruments like acoustic guitar and violin. Parts of "The Wondering Jew" are actually quite pretty, and "Charlie Chan" sounds like a Gypsy violin player at a train station. Over 30 years down the road, it seems like
the Residents could never capture the mixture of naïveté, avant-garde abandon, and raw possibility of their earliest work. That may well be true, but they do manage to bring a bit of that back into the mix here, making
The Ughs! unlike anything they've done in the last 15 or 20 years.