The Residents - 'The Commercial Album' CD/DVD / 'Animal Lover' (Mute)
1/5
By: Tim Dellow
The importance of The Residents on popular music cannot be underestimated. If Devo re-wrote 'Satisfaction' for the post-punk generation, The Residents made bitter buttf**k love to it, before excreting its discharge in a splattering mess. If this description sounds putrid and offensive, just download the song.
Inventing the Eyeball personas early into their career, The Residents redefined the nature of a rock group, anonymous individuals who you couldn't tell apart, sexless, race-less, ego-less bug-eyed monsters from Mars.
Fully understanding that the punk scene that gave them life wasn't about three-chord conformity, but a total self(less) expression, The Residents added to their legend by recording 'Not Available', an album that initially was limited to one copy which was locked in a safe, then spending four years recording their music concréte masterpiece 'Eskimo'.
Which brings us to the first subject of this review: 'The Commercial Album'. A mirroring of the Top 40, 60-second-long pop-songs (based on the length of your average 70's advert) = more figures than math-rock. But it works.
Regardless of the length of these songs when recorded, the band sped or slowed them down to the tight 60-second rule, and imposed a further verse and a chorus rule. In the hands of most bands, you'd be bored by track three. But most bands could never write about 'the only really perfect love is the one that gets away', or the 'Easter Woman' who 'came today and took away my wife, took her through the open doorway into the afterlife.' But for the ambitious group this wasn't enough. Using the new technology of video, the group created some of the first ever abstract art music videos, adding a splash of colour to early MTV's oft exclusively white rockist tendencies.
Now, twenty-five years later, they've teamed up with a bunch of loons to create a DVD featuring 52 videos to accompany this twisted top-40. The menu is devised in the style of that 80s TV show 'Knightmare' ('go left, go right, talk to the goblin, eat the cake NO! NO! NOT THE POISONED ONE!!!'), and sees the ball-heads direct you around a virtual art gallery of twisted visions, CG and Claymation madness, and to be frank, a smattering of pure shit. But it's an experience, and more disturbing stoner viewing than season eight of 'Family Guy'. Or whatever.
But The Residents aren't about to trade on past glories. Their new album, first for Mute, and contender for the worst album cover of all time, is called 'Animal Lover'. Seemingly based on degeneration theory, The Residents built an album out of the backing tracks of Cicadas, Whales and Humans mating. The link? We're all animals. Duh.
So while we shouldn't elevate ourselves above our fellow creatures, The Residents focus on excretion, mating and death, in a supposed post-Freudian utopia of acceptance. That may hold for the opening 'On the Way to Oklahoma' in which our hero turns into a cat, falls in love with a tiger and pisses up against a tree (surely a dog's habit?) backed by a stumbling trumpet-drum march, limping through the sun with a dick in your hand. Or mouth. Or anus. But despite the crudity, which continues through 'Olive & Gray' where castration is rife, or 'What Have My Chickens Done Now', which speaks for itself, the critical theory approach to their work seems to suggest a level of humanity, of memory, which almost certainly separates us from our furry friends.
By track six, the beautiful 'Inner Space', the vocoder-distorted vocals we have come to expect from these transgressives has melted away to a poignant contemplation on the singer's father. And not a horse-fixated castration complex, but a poignant study on the imminent loss of a mentor, and speculation about the afterlife; 'I see someone who's sick...I was his only friend,' the vocal line shifting backwards into the mix, afraid, fragile and human.
Dress it up how you will. Beneath the mask, there is a personality, which has been hidden beneath 30 years of theory and impersonal art. But I recognise you. And you exist.
'Commercial Album' CD = 4/5, 'Commercial Album' DVD = 3/5, 'Animal Lover' = 3/5
Artists in this article: The Residents
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