MEET THE RESIDENTS (+BONUS)

Reportedly raised in Shreveport, Louisiana but demented in San Francisco, the Residents have been pop subversives since this ragtag group of avanteer artists started making music in the late 60s/early 70s. Still going strong more than sixty albums and 45 years later, the quartet remains an enigma with the true individual identities of the members a long running mystery, though Hardy Fox had recently come forward as the group's primary composer and producer. But that hadn't kept them from performing captivating live shows, where they would typically don tuxedos topped by eyeball helmets. That the ever-esoteric Residents attained a significant cult status and remained productive over four and a half decades is a far cry from the forty copies sold in the first year of the 1974 release of its debut LP, Meet The Residents, the first salvo in a multi-platform anti-pop musical crusade that's had few if any parallels. Precociously lo-fi in the early days, the Residents lacked the musical proficiency of their outsider peers such as Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention or Captain Beefheart's Magic Band, but made up the deficit with going — arguably — even further outside established norms for music with a mixture of wit, innovative ideas and pure fearlessness. The ambitions of this ragtag collective were pretty lofty from the get-go; many of the tracks for Meet the Residents were formulated during downtime while they were making a movie, since shelved. The mono recorded Meet the Residents is weird in a uniquely weird way: it's pastiche that's connected by some repeating figure or beat, and muddled to the point the it's sometimes hard to discern the instruments played aside from a slightly out of tune barroom piano (a prominent feature on their earliest releases). Resembling organically cultivated musique concrète, the music didn't veer from baroque pop to avant-garde jazz; instead styles along the entire array were casually thrown together to form a rough blend that seemed best suited as a soundtrack for a low budget horror film. It starts out contorting a Nancy Sinatra hit ("Boots") and later trades in short but connected tunes for longer forms but most of the time, formal track intervals don't mark when one act of this demented musical play ends and another one begins. Meet the Residents eventually did get noticed by music critics and adventurous listeners, and that initial pressing ran out. But before printing up a second batch, they edited down the tracks and remastered them in a new studio that was a little less primitive than the one they started with. This 1977 stereo version is consequentially a little less primitive (or at least, seems that way) but that's all relative: none of the blunt impact of hearing something so left field is diminished. (http://somethingelsereviews.com)