MEET THE RESIDENTS
UNCLE WILLIE'S HIGHLY OPINIONATED GUIDE TO THE RESIDENTS
The first unusual thing about Meet The Residents—even
before you get the record on the turntable—is that you
never meet The Residents: The artists haven’t signed their
names to their debut album. There are no faces either, only
a nutty distortion of the Beatles. Which isn’t as evasive
as you might think, because Meet The Residents takes the
vocal and instrumental innovations of the Beatles—and
Captain Beefheart—and rockets them out into deep space.
Listening to the White Album or Trout Mask Replica, you’re
never sure what you’re going to hear from one cut to the
next; with Meet The Residents, you can’t predict what
you’ll be hearing from one moment to the next.
Forget about predictions—you can’t always be sure what it
is you’re actually hearing. A lot of this music is utterly
inexplicable, as in “How are they making that sound?” You
can’t even grasp the “well-it’s-a-synthesizer” straw,
because this low-budget, 1973 recording was plainly done by
hand: It’s basically voices, piano, and winds; some guitar,
bass, drums; occasionally, brass and violin; and lotsa
percussion (undoubtedly including all sorts of household
items and toys and debris and who knows what else.) There
are some distortion effects through mic and instrumental
preparations, but it’s The Residents’ use of tape, the
tracks they’ve razored and overdubbed and remixed and
re-speeded, which makes their sound so uniquely bizarro.
And all these bizarrely unique tracks are served up
dripping with a deliberate eccentricity and a playfully
grotesque sense of humor. Listening to this music, you can
feel The Residents staring straight out at you, their teeth
bared in the kind of fixed grin that’s ordinarily
symptomatic of clinical dementia.
By the time the needle has lifted, Meet the Residents seems
to have been everything: really bitchin’, funny as hell,
abrasive, druggy, exotically lush and dreamy, relentlessly
surprising, amateurish, highly sophisticated, incoherent,
visionary, and even vaguely insulting. The album can leave
you feeling put on, put down, and put through a wringer. Of
course, my feeling is that anybody who’s worked so hard to
put out music as novel and stimulating as this is actually
putting you on a pedestal.
The Residents of Meet The Residents clearly have no
orthodox musical chops whatsoever. And you’re forced to
deal with that right up front: In the album’s opener, Nancy
Sinatra’s “Boots,” they rub your nose in painfully
unprofessional singing and a tinny, buzzing piano. Putting
their worst foot forward is more than a point of honor with
them—it’s the point of their music. They don’t cover up
deficiencies, they build songs around them. Meet The
Residents had to step off with a psychotic rendition of
“Boots”: This music is gonna walk all over you.
- Cole Gagne
