The Residents
Meet The Residents

Without a shadow of a doubt, that cover can only remain indelibly imprinted in memory, without a shadow of a doubt those four famous faces you would never have been able to imagine them so horribly parodied, and without a shadow of a doubt you won't fully understand this album even on the thousandth listen... then what's the point of listening to something whose meaning is deliberately kept hidden? But more generally, what's the point of talking if you already know that no one will be able to understand you?

Already what's the point... the meaning, this need for "meaning" of "purpose" that makes every human activity complete, what is it ultimately? "A cowardly deception!" a philosopher who lost his mind over a century ago might answer you. "Something we gladly do without!" the Residents might answer you, and then correct themselves "something from which we exclude canonicity, there is a definitive meaning only of lost things, but since nothing is truly lost, here's that the tragedy belongs to art, but not to life, of life the only certain thing is the incessant mutability" and the art and the communicativity inherent to it? "Generally, art provides models, art communicates great concepts and great virtues, art communicates while life disintegrates..." and if art itself started to disintegrate? "Well, we would have a new meaning to attribute to the term "realism"...".

But who are these Residents? The Residents are the greatest interpreters of the theory of obscurity, formulated by the infamous Nicolas Senada, and as such, they have always rejected the mainstream and visibility to the point of never having shown their own faces, making obscurity the foundation of their lyrics (sometimes cryptic, sometimes entirely non-sensical), their singing (almost always distorted or overdubbed) of their musical proposal that, spanning a vast range of genres, remains beyond any possible classification. Deconstructionism, perhaps, broadly? Yes yes, deconstructionism is certainly the most appropriate when referring to "Meet the Residents," where everything, from the desecrating cover to the "go home America" frayed by a voice altered by alcohol fumes, has a "demolition" intent, the rejection of an aesthetic, of a why... what reason can be assigned to the six initial tracks (actually one single track) where the most disparate genres enter and exit from always different doors...

"Rest Aria" might seem like the track where a classical matrix (Chopin?) is most immediately detectable, but here everything is so cold and funereal, and then that little trumpet... a vortex and then a distant landscape, that sick, perverse voice that mumbles images borrowed from some suburban brothel... skratz, skratz... "Spotted Pinto Bean" seems like a parody of a musical, complete with a chorus and solemn voices, and with a piano that, decontextualized, could even move you... "Infant Tango" begins with an aggressive guitar only to get lost in a disconnected floating of wind instruments and here the melody disappears entirely (if it ever existed), the touches of normality in the intro of "Seasoned Greetings" dissolve into an obsessive interlude that preludes the total chaos of "Crisis Blues", totally obscene, totally incomprehensible, references to rock 'n' roll that mutate into tribal declamations, overdubbed noises, the usual disorienting winds and a flute that recites a Boy Scout march, a demented voice crescendoing up to the litany of the closing "go home America".

What to say? A cerebral, very difficult, fragmentary album full of ideas, a mix of expertise and deliberate amateurishness, which nonetheless lacks the stature of the absolute masterpiece, a title that belongs to the subsequent "Not Available" where, besides astonishing, they manage to move.