1992

OUR FINEST FLOWERS

Album

Gone Again The Sour Song Six Amber Things Mr. Lonely Perfect Goat Blue Tongues Jungle Bunny I'm Dreaming of a White Sailor Or Maybe a Marine Kick a Picnic Dead Wood Baby Sister Forty-Four No More He Also Serves Ship of Fools Be Kind to U-WEB Footed Friends

HISTORICAL CONTEXT*

The Residents put a lot of thought into their 20th Anniversary celebration in 1992. They began rough work on one concept album called Monkey on My Back, but abandoned it after Uncle Willie naively leaked the story to U-WEB.

On their second try, the Residents began to list their "greatest hits" when one of them threw up on the list; in trying to piece the soiled list back together, the group were inspired. They took tiny, disparate elements of disparate songs, and spliced those elements together into new songs—"their own personal Frankenstein monster."

The title Our Finest Flowers came from the lyrics of "Blue Rosebuds," from Duck Stab/Buster & Glen. Elements of that song appear on this album, as part of the track "Blue Tongues."

REVIEW

RATING: 9

If you're anything like me, the following will happen to you with Our Finest Flowers:

1. You'll decide, since you know the Residents' catalog so well, that it will be fun and easy to figure out what elements of Flowers come from what songs.
    
2. You'll buy the CD, play it five times in one night, and still only get the most obvious references.
    
3. You'll research the album and discover that no one else has gotten much farther than you have.
    
4. You'll study each song obsessively, minutely comparing it with older Residents songs, and get hysterical over small breakthroughs. When you find pieces of "Jailhouse Rock" and "Cry for the Fire" in "The Sour Song," you'll feel like dancing in the streets and calling the newspapers.
    
5. The second you determine you'ce completely exhausted one Flowers track, you'll find at least three musical elements in that track that you haven't accounted for.
    
6. Repeat steps 4 and 5, then go to step 7.
    
7. Repeat step 6.
    
8. You'll Admit defeat and put the fucking CD away for a while to avoid having to check yourself in for observation.

Obviously, this thing is incredibly intricate. It's a lot of fun, but unbelievably frustrating too. Yet you can't deny the genius of Our Finest Flowers: very little is even recognizable, which is why every connection you make seems like such a victory.

What's truly amazing is how well these new tracks stand on their own. "The Sour Song" is easily one of the Residents' best, with "Dead Wood" not far behind—the latter magnificently transforms the dejected bounce of "Mahogany Wood" (from Title in Limbo) into a howl of despair. There's much more. The doom-laden "Forty-Four No More;" the mysterious "He Also Serves;" the breathtaking climax of "Ship of Fools"—all wonderful tracks BEFORE you talk about the structure.

It always comes back to that question, though, and you'll never completely solve the puzzle. What you can piece together is really impressive: wait till you figure out that the piano in "Gone Again" is the bass line at the beginning of "Edweena!"

Oh, was that out loud?

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