So yesterday, while on a quest to a few CD shops, looking for some Secret Chiefs 3 to add to my ever-growing stacks of "bug out" music... I finally decide I have read enough glowing mentions and reviews of The Residents' music, and pick up a copy of Our Tired, Our Poor, Our Huddled Masses to finally hear for myself what the eyeball-heads are all about.....
Digressions:
I've jumped all over in this time since the rampant CD shopping, between this and various other CDs I'd picked up, trying to get at least a taste of everything....the EP, Irony is a Dead Scene, by the Dillinger Escape Plan while they were apparently between lead singers, they had Mike Patton (Mr. Bungle/Faith No More/Fantomas) fill in...this includes a cover of an Aphex Twin song I'm familiar with, Come to Daddy. So appropriate that the only menacing-sounding Aphex Twin song I could name off the top of my head, with its "I will eat your soul" lyrics, would be sung by a man who can inject at least some menace into any kind of style he takes a stab at....pretty entertaining.
There's another Patton collaboration among these new acquisitions, Romances, with a John Kaada, whose work I am unfamiliar with. But some of us will buy without hesitation just about anything he's involved in, out of curiosity at least....The aforementioned Secret Chiefs 3's Second Grand Constitution and Bylaws and Book of Horizons...haven't settled on which of the two is the better just yet. This is the mock Middle Eastern/Indian styled ex-Bungle side project, few songs with vocals. Patton is not involved whatsoever. Also a lot of fun though.
But I digress. I meant to speak of the Reisdents and their glory which I have now only begun to discover. I instinctively chose to pop in the second disc (containing their earlier works, starting with ten tracks from The Commercial Album) of the collection first, and from the first note/chord, I was hooked. It just sounds so alien....I was reminded of a song I had heard once on a college station at some point, lyrics escaping me outright but the strange voice, similar to the one I was hearing from my car stereo, rang clear as day in the back of my mind somewhere.... sure enough, as I listened to the rest of the album, I found it... Blue Rosebuds. A pleasant surprise in that.
Listening to the rest of this double-disc throughout the hours to follow, I found the rest of it as pleasing, and after subjecting a friend to a listening through of that second disc again, and following this with the Secret Chiefs 3, I came to realize how the Residents had opened the doors (or pushed them open further than those before them) for some of the music which has amused me so much....
And that is all.