The Residents: C/D;S&D

I'm scared to buy a Residents CD, because I'm afraid I'd fall into buying them all -- and there are, like, what... 173 albums or something?

That said, I'd say the new "Icky Flix" DVD (if you have a DVD player) is the best place to start, because it is an assemblance of their "greatest hits" to some degree. Plus the videos are insane.

Otherwise, "Third Reich 'n Roll", "Hell", "Eskimo" have all gotten high praise from the Residents fanatics I've consorted with...

Oh, and see them live if you can... (and can afford it... their shows tend to be a lil' pricey). You don't have to know their material to enjoy the live shows. You just have to tolerate a multimedia headfuck that accurately simulates bad dreams on bad acid.

The only album of theirs I own is "The Residents' Commercial Album". It's wonderful, and arguably the best distillation of their 'pop' side. I also have their debut ("Meet the Residents", was it?) and "Third Reich" on a tape somewhere. Both are okay, especially the former. I've never heard Eskimo (or Diskomo, for that matter) but would love to.

One other Residents-related sound recording you MUST search is a cassette tape starring Penn Gillette (this was way before Penn and Teller really took off). Basically he was locked in a windowless room for an extended period by the band (who's music he was totally unaware of hitherto), given one by one their entire back catalogue to listen to, and invited to make an audio diary of the experience. It's a classic!

When the Residents started on their composers series and the Mole trilogy, things started getting seriously dodgy, so I gave up on them. But I've read interesting pieces about their more recent projects, especially the ones involving other media than (just) music. Are there any decent critiques on the net of this later stuff that people could point me to? (i.e. not something by a bemused outsider banging on about eyeballs-for-heads)

Most of their output up to Commercial Album is worth hearing, tho 3rd RnR is one joke stretched over 2 sides of a record, thus a trifle wearing. Everything I've heard post-CA is pretty awful. It's like "we can afford all this technology now, see what we can do with it!" thus destroying all their string-&sealing-wax creativity (cf: Laurie Anderson).

That said, I don't listen to my Residents albums that much anymore, but I'm glad to have them around. Pretty much anything they did before the unfortunate "Mole trilogy" (beginning of the prolonged and dispiriting end) is worth hearing in my book.

the parodies of "george & james" i found grating after one listen. Both the "composer series" and the "mole series" seemed to be pushing the same musical plonking idea too far, and then they got into digital synths, which just sounded boring.

i think it's a pity that Snakefinger died. I saw them live once (13th anniversary tour), and while the Residents sounded sequenced (as has been mentioned), they were funny/ridiculous as a stage show, but Snakefinger stole the show with his witty-gritty guitar noises.

Not Available
The Commercial Album
Third Reich 'n' Roll

The following two are almost as good:

Duckstab/ Buster and Glen
Meet the Residents

I confess to being one of those idiots who owns most of what they have done, but the last album I bought was "Freak Show", which is a while ago now. "Hello Skinny" is the best music video I've ever seen.

I'm not sure they were trying to purposely parody Gershwin/James Brown, because they actually have a sincere reverence for them. I guess anything they cover is going to sound pretty strange. But anyway, I saw a show on their latest tour, for Demons Dance Alone, and surprisingly, the lead Resident had a poignant story about meeting James Brown as a child. Apparently, Brown and his entourage needed help with directions after a show, and the Resident guy and his friends helped them out, and when Brown thanked them, it was one of the most treasured moments of his life - but to Brown, it probably was just like any other day. It was an oddly personal moment in the show, which is ironic since of course we (supposedly) don't know who the Resident is or what his face looks like. Then some idiot in the audience shouted out "James Brown stole the eyeball!".

listening to "3rd r&r" made me realise that i was only just old enough to know some of those songs, but i found all the versions of songs i knew very funny, particularly "light my fire" and "sympathy for 'hey jude'", and i found the "eskimo" soundscapes inevitably comical, even if i wasn't strictly meant to. For me, my first "fake ethnic" album.

and forgot to mention, i've found the slightly out-of-tune analog attack of DS/B&Gs "Birthay Boy" perfect for anonymous answering machine birthday messages

It is terrible. They've carved up the original Warner Brothers Album tapes into horrible 4/4 loops, which they drop piecemeal & meaninglessly on top of some of the most tasteless drum loops imaginable. Like a drum library CDROM from 1999. Bad bad progressive house. It's a real disappointment. Two or three tracks are nearly okay, but it's so frustrating to have them put this out instead of the original tapes.

'Warner Brothers Album', is apparently a 40 minute edited tape with 39 songs on it, edited from long group jams. I haven't heard that, but have a cassette dub of a 60 minute master reel that obviously contains elements that ended up on it, their versions of 'strawberry fields forever', 'maggie's farm', 2 versions of 'i hear you got religion', 3 versions of 'oh mommy oh daddy can't you see that it's true', etc. It's one mic in a room catching them playing, no overdubs, then spliced together onto a master reel. And while the vocals are maniacal, the young singing resident in full force, what's interesting is how normal they sound; they're just a bunch of maniacs in san mateo in 1970 'freaking out'. It also puts the myth to the idea that they can't play their instruments; they're not 'tight', but the guy on guitar can play quite well. Clearly, they had two options; to tighten up further, or 'unlearn' their instruments and figure out how to play them in new ways. 'Warner Brothers Album' is for fanatics only, but there are a lot of Residents fanatics out there, and it's wonderful to hear the roots of the band. At least as valuable as hearing the Beatles Hamburg tapes. Even the 'Get Back' sessions.

'Baby Sex' is a different matter altogether. It is a masterpiece, as good as any of the released studio albums and it's kind of upsetting to me that they haven't released an intact edition of it yet. Sections of it have been released on various limited edition fan club CDs through the 90's (the two Liver discs, the Snakefinger tribute and the 'History Mystery' disc of 'Huddled Masses'.) 'Hallowed Be Thy Ween'.

Douglas says above that the Residents work are very inconsistent, but I don't think that's true at all; I think they were absolutely solid from 1972-1981, every album, every ep, every single. In 1981 two core members left, leaving only the singing resident and the composing resident, and a lot of new MIDI hardware and sampling synthesizers; from 1981 onward, the discography grows spotty and the album concepts obviously come before the production of the actual music, the music is manufactured to order as an afterthought.

I have heard just about all the later stuff. I still like parts of 'Tunes of Two Cities', the Sousa side of 'Stars n Hank Forever', and a few tracks from 'Our Finest Flowers'. The 2 CD set 'Live at the Fillmore' documents the 1997 25th anniversary concerts, and has superior live versions of things from 'freak show' and 'gingerbread man', and ends with their fairly incredible cover of 'We Are The World'. The 'Liver' series has some great 70's tracks.

The absolute best best thing they've done since 1981 was their tribute to Snakefinger, 'Snakey Wake'.

oh, also any recording of the '13th Anniversary' show has good sections; generous helpings of Snakefinger. and the James Brown side of 'George and James' sounds _incredible_ when you play it at 45 rpm.

also, wanted to make it clear that I'm not the person responsible for filesharing the WB album; I received the tapes with the promise not to copy them and I've complied. But I'm personally very happy they've turned up online.

I saw them in I guess about 1990 on the King And Eye tour, which was one of the coolest things I've ever seen. I liked that album, too, but haven't heard it in about a decade. The Residents are a group I respect a lot, but hardly ever want to actually listen to for pleasure.

also, their 90's CD ROMS set a very high, very strange standard for early interactive media.

Man, those CD-ROMs blew my mind (well, Freak Show and Bad Day on the Midway; Gingerbread Man isn't as interesting). The story of Ted in Midway - making artificial moths out of detritus, wanting to destroy ugliness in the world, then eventually hanging himself because he concludes that he is part of the ugliness - I mean, good lord. Wow. (This is a game?). And the "Harry the Head" story and the Human Mole story in Freak Show...amazing. A disembodied head on the floor, painting angels on a woman's skirt with a paintbrush in his mouth - I like that.

milton wrote: from 1981 onward, the discography grows spotty and the album concepts obviously come before the production of the actual music, the music is manufactured to order as an afterthought.

Yes...and this is a HUGE philosophical shift, for the band. Their lyrical songwriting got better and better, but their music became a lower priority. The epitome of this is God in Three Persons, the lyrics of which are so meticulously written...but the music is probably the dullest and most uninspired of any Residents album. They had forgotten the "Theory of Phonetic Organization":

http://www.rzweb.net/collab/n-senada.html#phonetic

Quote: According to this theory the musician should put the sounds first, building the music up from them rather than developing the music then working down to the sounds that make it up.

You can easily imagine how this theory was used to make music in the earlier days, like "Smelly Tongues" or Eskimo.

You're missing a real return to form with Wormwood and Demons Dance Alone then - best stuff they've done (that I've heard) since The Commercial Album (except possibly God In Three Persons).

Is that fact - because I think the singing Resident IS the composing Resident and that, musically, The Residents is now a one man band. In fact, I think what you have in The Residents now is the musical Resident and the design/multimedia Resident. I could be wrong of course.

I can't be positive, but I'm pretty sure, both from reliable conversation and listening to the records. Listen to 'Stars and Hank' for the clearest example, it's basically a split solo album, each getting a full side.

put on WB:RMX again last night. it's not quite as terrible as I initially thought, it's just that the drum loops are so repellent I couldn't hear through them, there are some interesting things going on if you give it time. still, fans only.

from http://www.jahsonic.com/PierreSchaeffer.html

He also described the composer of musique concrete as one who"...Takes his point of departure the objets sonore, the sound objects, which are the equivalent of visual images, and which therefore alter the procedures of musical composition completely...The Concrete experiment in music consists of building sonorous objects, not with the play of numbers and seconds of the metronome, but with pieces of time torn from the cosmos." (3)

Those '70s albums seem to take apparently seperate 'tracks' within songs and use them as layers, and by then blurring them, twisting them, deftly tweaking the whole nervous system going right up and especially right down the octaves with those beautifully warm tones, these are masterful displays of synth playing, both virtuosity and creativity.

that those 'songs' can have very sharp noises and very curvy noises co-existing with so much else often going on in the mix, i say the residents were quite a way ahead of Kraftwerk (who spring to mind as aprox. peers). The Kraftwerk work rate just doesn't compare to the Residents. So many deft tweakings per song ! Such precision with bass width and sequencing. ! Humour ! Cultural critique ! One of the earliest 'indie' labels !

my point: Stereolab can get as much timbral twist, but they can't wrench as much humour or perversely human/ alien width-of-purpose out of the same machines.
That New Order became the poster people for the post-analog MIDI sound really evidences how retarded synth music became with the new polyphonic toys of the '80s. The wretched 'chorus' effect -- i first saw one on a synth on the Juno 6 and listening to that synth it really sounded like it sucked. Reverb and chorus and the implicit overtone rich chorus-like impact of polyphony itself, as used by Van Halen and New Order (two very similar sounding bands), these early '80s 'digital synth' moments, they have a tenth of the warmth and none of that continual musical rates-of-change sound that make the '70s residents records _the_ synth pop records for the technologies of the times, and still charming and unique (antique as any '60s psych band is saying nothing).

How ironic that people buy analog synths on eBay today precisely to try and regain that level of control the residents always had, and that the '80s and '90s were blighted by digital synths, with all the noises pretty much sounding the same, all the while the digital synths seen as 'progress'.
(or more importantly, except for a couple of brian eno records, there are no other '70s 'art pop' records containing the sheer sonic detail and invention of the residents artful displays of synth virtuosity and inspiration)

and if you can think of other music with as much timbral artfulness per-beat,
tell me about it please :
(here will do)

somehow the residents got their records distributed. i suppose they were any early college radio favourite. if it is satire or parody, it's not as if that feels predominant or forced. it's nice to think of the residents existing out of CA in the US since the times of Nixon, and managing to annoy him. sound effects are a guilty pleasure, but i do find them danceable. the faster material is earlier in their career. i like that some of them have been around doing that in one form or another for this length of time. like some running gag. i think critics sometimes find it easier to beat up on things that are meant to be funny, but there is still generally goodwill for the residents, even if fans sometimes feel a little let down. i think there's enough fun stuff to happily outweigh their bad stuff.

THE RESIDENTS
BRAND NEW ALBUM RELEASE
ANIMAL LOVER - OUT 14th FEBRUARY 2005

"Dogs love their friends and bite their enemies, quite unlike people, who are incapable of pure love and always have to mix love and hate in their object-relations." - Sigmund Freud

The Residents have announced details of a brand new album, their first for Mute, to be released on Valentine's Day 2005. "Animal Lover" follows the 25th Anniversary re-release of the Commercial Album in the Autumn of 2004.

When Charles Darwin first proposed in the late 1800's that homo sapiens had evolved from and were in fact a species of animal, many humans were horrified. Humans had an unusual need to feel superior, something their fellow animal associates had never quite understood. When Sigmund Freud, a few years later, destroyed the accepted opposition between sanity and madness by locating "normality" on a sliding scale, the poor humans were even more shocked. Taking a step beyond Darwin, Freud believed that the human was an animal in conflict, and informing the human of that very simple concept seemed to only increase the conflict.

In The Residents' "Animal Lover", the creatures who don't really mind if they are animals take an existential look at the upright animal whose normality is sliding toward the wrong end of the spectrum. The human beasts live in a world of primal darkness, their heads forever stuck in the ground like frightened ostriches living in a constant murky dream state.

In creating this picture book of animal tales, The Residents wanted to include a soundtrack that related directly to "animal love." The result is an imaginative CD whose rhythm tracks are based entirely on animal noise mating patterns generated primarily by cicadas and frogs. Also the actual sounds of mating whales and humans were used for longer tonal passages. They weren't mating with each other, by the way.

So the world is filled with tubular entities. Food goes in one end and shit comes out the other. Sperm goes in and babies come out. It's all we've got. That and love.

Animal Lover is released on Mute on 14th February 2005.

The Residents Bog

Of course if the collection had been compiled more recently and included material from Demons Dance Alone and Wormwood (and also didn't fail to include anything from the God In Three Persons album, which is a strangely indefensible omission too imho) it might help to remedy the impression of the material gradually deteriorating in quality as you move backwards though time.

I love the Concentrates on Our Huddled Masses (especially the one for Reich). The editing in some places is so dense that they almost qualify as new pieces. In any case the 4 CD version is worth $60 for the 15 minute excerpt from Baby Sex alone.

That said, I think they're awful--I mean I have respect for anyone trying to do anti-music, and they succeed. But I don't mean it as a compliment; it's not only anti-music but anti-anti-music. I find them very, very puerile, and their later stuff seems infused with some sort of melancholia I don't think they earn at all. My buddy here listens to a lot of stuff I don't like, many things I do, and he's always draggin' out the Residents or the Firesign Theater (not the classic '60s stuff but their later shit, which is just actively unfunny). And I feel the same way about the Residents--they're not funny, their videos are totally geeky (except for the very early short ones), they're a total one-joke band. That whole thing with the eyeballs is just totally lame, they should've stopped that shit years ago. I think they're from Shreveport or somewhere--well, I say Louisiana's pop combo John Fred and His Playboy Band were both more avant-garde and certainly more listenable.

However, I kinda like "Eskimo," in a way; but none of it is anything I listen to for pleasure

The Residents' Triple Trouble is having its New York premiere tonight at MoMA at 6:30 pm:
https://www.moma.org/calendar/events/8565

It's the only screening they're holding, then beginning tomorrow it'll stream online for all MoMA members.

every time I listen to Residents stuff I'm struck by how ahead of its time it is. maybe not musically, like I know Devo were doing similar things around then, but in some other ways. like their graphic design - I cannot believe that Eskimo is from 1978, that album cover looks so much like something you'd see hanging up in the shop in like, 2002. they have 70s albums where it sounds like they're imitating Simpsons characters. even the concepts of stuff like Third Reich and Roll & The Commercial Album seem to me like internet-era projects. a lot of their videos remind me of like, Cool 3D World stuff. pretty remarkable really

More about Triple Trouble:

https://mcusercontent.com/d4b46e5c4250d808643c6623a/images/9dbec8d4-343a-2ea2-c5ce-aafadb822a0b.jpg

Virtual Box Office Premiere: The Resident's Triple Trouble
We are proud to announce the exclusive virtual box office premiere of The Resident's new feature film tonight at MIDNIGHT ET on Night Flight's The Movie Store. In Triple Trouble, directed by Homer Flynn, dive deep into the psyche of Randall "Junior" Rose (Dustin York) who is convinced that a fungus is a threat to humanity.
The film premiered theatrically earlier this month at the MoMA and arrives on Night Flight's The Movie Store for purchase and rental one week before anywhere else.

The Residents are including a FREE DOWNLOAD of two unreleased versions of classic tracks from the Residents' Duck Stab!/Buster & Glen opus with every purchase or rental of Triple Trouble, only on The Movie Store.
"The Residents continue to raise the bar by taking chances and pioneering new skills." — Kelly Park

What is this, "The Last of the Residents" or something? Looking forward to those dance numbers with the clickers making music with their sonar noises.

I see Fingerprince is getting a 2xLP + 7" reissue, if the price is right I might get it. its one of the most "cursed" albums I can think of

How do you mean?

well for one there are these promo images

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/meettheresidents/images/2/21/Fingerprincepromo.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20170130074653

https://i.redd.it/z9d75qdshvw61.jpg

for two idk what it is exactly but I think it actually accomplishes the goal of sounding very off without necessarily trying to. its not just using prickly series of notes its layering a bunch of them on top of each other

furthermore it has the Marge Simpson voice in it which in itself is kinda freaky for a 70s album

wtf I love this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CF2o5RDkq9A

God In Three Persons is not an amazing album overall but "Kiss Of Flesh" is incredible. Love a few others like "Hard And Tenderly"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcRq_c9r4iw
Disappointed they are using AI art, even with all their abilities (sad to see how many people who have plenty abilities still use it). New album is all about the Judas Priest subliminal messages trial and backstory! I didn't realize the members are still keeping up the secret identity thing despite everyone knowing who they are now.

all due respect to kurt schwitterz but this band has sucked since 1981, when half the members left

Can anyone explain that Gnesa thing?

Is there a big divide among fans over the different eras? I'm still a relative newbie but I love their stuff long after 1981

no, just me I think.

I find them actively annoying post-split. And I just had a blast listening to Duck Stab/B&G like a week or two ago! YMMV etc

Can anyone explain that Gnesa thing?

― Robert Adam Gilmour, Tuesday, March 18, 2025 3:36 PM (six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

no, it is inexplicable

but if you're wondering why I posted it in this thread it's because I'm pretty sure the melody is "Constantinople" which is a hell of a tune to lift for a pop song

and it does have a weirdly circus/carnival sound to it

divide-among-fans-wise i dislike everything they did before 1981, after 1981 and also during 1981

lol <3

I will say, given the way their aesthetic has been looked since, 2001, I totally think the Residents are maybe the only band where it's OK to use AI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hr-I6-gxecg

I agree with that, The Residents can get away with stuff that other groups can't. part because they've been counterculture for so long and part because their stuff has always been so garishly ugly. the "uncanny valley" aesthetic has been part of their visual presentation since like...Not Available

It makes more aesthetic sense for them than a lot of bands, but how are the environmental and theft concerns any different?

As much as I hate seeing the stuff, the artistic concerns are a distant third reason to object

There is definitely a pre-1981 and post-1981 divide but I don't think it had very much to do with Jay Clem and John Kennedy leaving.

Kennedy was really just a money man I believe, I don't think he contributed anything artistically.

Jay Clem maybe did, he was the main actor in Vileness Fats and I think his vocals are present on some recordings but I'm not sure if he was a musician and I'm not aware of him doing anything after the Residents - though I could be wrong about that.

Fox musically and Flynn vocally and visually were always dominant creative elements in the Residents though they had lots of collaborators over the years.

I've always connected their musical decline to the switch to digital technology and just, you know, standard getting older and getting less interesting.

Didn't realise the Cherry Red editions would be on such low print runs. Would have bought them sooner.

Demons Dance Alone is amazing, and the bonus tracks.

Wish they included the dvd though. Kind of a perplexing omission but I've seen people say that about other reissues.

My gateway:Our Tired, Our Poor, Our Huddled Masses---goes backwards thru time, and just gets better and better.

Apparently there's gonna be a live performance of Eskimo. That seems like an unappealing prospect to me, but ymmv.

People weren't lying about the brickwalling on the first bunch of Preserved editions. I listened to Duckstab/Buster & Glen and it was a lot. I'll need to listen to Meet The Residents again and see if it's as bad because I don't remember it well or maybe it's a newer fixed edition? I'll be wary of buying the early releases in the series but God In Three Persons and Demons Dance Alone sounded good to me.

https://www.discogs.com/label/1406488-The-Residents-pREServed

That seems like an unappealing prospect to me

Bring along snowshoes

People weren't lying about the brickwalling on the first bunch of Preserved editions.

It is inexcusable, I assume the band forced Scott Colburn to master them this way against his advice, b/c I know he knows what he's doing.

I just stuck with the first CD releases. I didn't like the EQ applied to the later remasters, though the packaging was really nice.

The recent remasters or earlier ones?
I have a 2004 Euro Ralph version of Not Available, can't see any notes about remastering but it had been remastered before this time.

A review from mr.datsun

I wrote to Homer Flynn about the mastering quality. He thought it sounded good, but said he would pass my thoughts on to the production team. It's a crying shame – this CD has been years coming and they mucked it up. Having said that, the 20-odd extras on here are essential for this period in their history. Well-recorded and a great insight into their development. I'm so glad to have them.

There's a lot of blaming Cherry Red for track choices but I'm guessing it is the band making all these choices.

All of them, even the earlier remasters.

LiamDavies's avatar
LiamDavies Feb 25, 2018
the first listen i had was in the car, and thought nothing of it because everything sounds the same in the car. but after playing this on my hi-fi . i'm so fucking pissed off

all those extras , great art work. great packaging but the sound quality is just unbearable . almost unlistenable so tinny and harsh. ive also pre ordered duck stab and fingerprince, but if its the same deal, i'm asking for money back.

the effort gone into getting these tracks from wherever they dwelled in residents world has been completely ruined by the shittiest mastering i have ever heard in my life.

I blame Homer, 100%

same jackass who thinks NFTs are cool

He also was a dick about a recently former member having a side gig as an instacart driver

Like “this guy obviously is stupid because he works as a pizza delivery guy “

Meet the Residents has been reissued quietly since in a much quieter mastering, for those unread to get all Steve Hoffman around here (the first issue is a proper earbleeder)

I think that might be the one I have, I hope they keep doing that with the other brickwalled remasters

xpost link?

...so wait a second, "heroes and villains" is supposedly at the end of "swastikas on parade"? i have to admit i can't at all pick out any of the 25,450 melodies that were part of "heroes and villains" in the mix

I guess the lead synth part kind of emulates "The Heroes, the Heroes, the Heroes and Villains" chant?

Thanks for alerting me that this is now available on my streaming service.

Has anyone seen Double Lunar Dogs by Joan Jonas?

It's one of the most out there pieces of video art I've ever seen and the Residents contribute to the...sound effects?

I haven't much enjoyed any of the dozen or so albums I've listened to from them, but the weird ass sounds they make work really well with the atmosphere of Double Lunar Dogs. That shit split my gourd. Definitely takes you to another (very unsettling) plane. Hard to find the words for, but I'd strongly recommend watching it.

https://archive.org/details/joan-jonas-1984-double-lunar-dogs

Demons Dance Alone is so gorgeous, the outtakes on the first disc of the most recent reissue make it even better, amazing that they had that quality of stuff left off, I think they should have left everything on, I think it could have worked. A great 70something minutes, just amazing. I love the Banjo Kazooie saxophones on "Caring".

There's a few instrumentals left off this edition unfortunately ("Happy Thanksgiving" and "Black Cats", not masterpieces but would have been nice to have them on one of the discs).

Really annoying that Molly Harvey had to leave for family reasons, seems like she really didn't want to leave, she's one of the best things about this era.

https://www.artsatl.org/qa-molly-harvey-talks-about-time-with-experimental-rockers-the-residents-and-remembers-hardy-fox/

I think if anything, as Fox got older — and this is just my own projection being a performer — and began contemplating his own mortality, realized that there is a certain element that goes missing when you’re anonymous: the ability to interact with whose lives you’ve touched. I don’t remember if it was Wormwood or if it was Icky Flix or which tour it was, but he greeted every single person at the door that he could. He didn’t have a sign and at this point it was all sort of still unknown, but so many people had really lovely conversations with him, and that’s a beautiful thing that he was able to do that.