MEET THE RESIDENTS
Album
| Boots |
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The Residents' first full-length LP was, like Santa Dog, self-financed self-recorded, self-produced, and self-released on their Ralph Records label. It had a total of 1050 printed copies; in its first year of release, forty of those copies sold.
The cover of Meet the Residents was, of course, a defacing of the Meet the Beatles cover art, and Capitol Records took legal action (although one Beatle reportedly loved it enough to keep a framed copy). The Residents replaced it with a cover featuring crawfish (and "Ringo Starfish"), but eventually restored the original.
The Residents' current official fan club take their name from the title of the track "Smelly Tongues."
RATING: 9
If Santa Dog is the sound of creative vision plus limited ability, then Meet the Residents is creative vision plus rapidly-developing ability. Meet the Residents is, certainly, even weirder than its predecessor, but now it's got some skill behind it. Pretty compositions, arrangements, and performances abound—not melodies, really, but great music. In fact, the best stuff is just noodling: there's a suite that stretches through "Numb Erone," "Guylum Bardot," and "Breath and Length"—maybe further—and it essentially consists of piano vamps, modern-classical-sounding horns, and harmony vocals from the Singing Lawnchairs. "Rest Aria" is almost a concerto (with only a minimum of melody), and "Spotted Pinto Bean" is pretty close to ballet.
Of course, all of this sounds like it was recorded in the bathroom, and that's the best part. All of the textures sound—for lack of a better word—smeared with heavy echo, reverb, and the most awful acoustics you can imagine. And you thought Lou Barlow invented lo-fi! This actually adds to things like the tinny piano in "Smelly Tongues," or the horns in "Skratz," with barely decipherable vocals reciting something about "Skratz, skratz, skratz—dirty fingernails."
If you haven't guessed, none of this is to be taken seriously: we have the closer, "N-er-gee (Crisis Blues)," to remind us. Even though it ends with an antiwar chant, and even though you may want to take the pretty, primitive Meet the Residents seriously, you'll never make it past the singing Resident's intoning, "Nobody but me. Haw-haw-haw-haw-haw!" before singing along with the Human Beinz' "Nobody But Me" on very scratchy vinyl.
Is it all a joke? A big put-on? Who knows. This I will say: it might be the first Residents album, but I honestly wouldn't buy it first. It's different (i.e., weirder) than the rest of the catalogue, and even so, you'll have to know your way around the Residents before you tackle this way-out-there thing. But man, it's great, and belongs in a Residents fan's collection. Maybe every collection.