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The ResidentsAnimal Lover Cryptic Corporation/Mute/EMI Here's how reviews are supposed to work: using references to the artist's previous work you discern their progression/regression, often in relation to that of their contemporaries, pulling out two or three titles from the current release to illustrate your understanding. And none of this helps with The Residents. Existing in some intractable netherworld between pop tunes and pure avant garde The Residents sound like nothing but The Residents. Improvements in technology have added texture and tightness to their productions without doing a thing to smooth over the trademark eerie lullaby quality on show in tracks such as My Window. An ambient overture like Mr Bees Bumble can be programmed towards a trash pop take on Phillip Glass repetition but none of this helps explain what The Residents are doing. By the time a group like REM got around to printing a lyric sheet they'd lost any elliptical poetry they ever possessed. With 'Animal Lover' The Residents include a picture book with a little animal story preceding each lyric and it does nothing to make them less befuddling. The bleak mini-opera What Have My Chickens Done Now? features accounts in song from the old woman and the hen-pecking five sisters, but in the storybook we also hear how it all went down from the chickens' point of view. The chirpy vocoder vocals on Two Lips certainly fit for a tale of marital disintegration as witnessed by a nearby ant, but is the song a critique on the emptiness of consumerism or is the whole enterprise like the revenge of the home-schooled, inventing an idiosyncratic imaginary social culture from which outsiders are excluded? Such concerns aside, this only accounts for 'Animal Lover'. There's another disc in here (aptly labelled '?!') which appears to be The Residents equivalent of a remix disc, taking elements of the songs on 'Animal Lover' and weirding them up a bit. Like the sleeve pic says "Same old Residents".  |
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