Another one from me.
I didn't fall in love with this album straight away. For a long time, it was my least favourite album by The Residents. What first appealed to me was the very structure of the band - here was a band making music they wanted for 40 damn years, and nobody knows who they are. On their Wikipedia page, the members are still listed as being "unknown". I mean, there's a pretty good idea, but there's nothing certain. They were weird right from the beginning. You can't even picture in your head the sorts of people who would make this sort of music. That's probably why they remain anonymous. It was peppered with samples, altered instruments and sounds that you would be otherwise convinced were impossible to make in the 1960s and 1970s. It drifts between annoyingly rhythmic clomping, avant garde piano noodling, synth horns and sleazy guitar, classical singing, Christmas carols, hick singing, female opera vocals, bizarre cover tunes and cute little keyboard melodies... crap, that's just the start. The first six tracks blend into one, so you can't tell how many songs have actually passed and when one actually ends.
My first experience with this album was when I first saw the cover art. It of course parodies the album by The Beatles. I say "parodies", it may be more of a mocking. Apparently George Harrison liked the cover so much he bought a few copies. I was about 18 I think when I first heard it, and the version I had was in such bad shape it didn't even sound like an album. It turns out that's exactly how it's supposed to sound. It's admittedly lo-fi, but that's the goal I suppose. Either that or they didn't have many other options but to record their first full album on a potato. At first I wasn't impressed, and it just sounded like my drunk uncle singing over a bunch of teenagers who had never listened to music and had never picked up an instrument. About halfway through though, something dawned on me - this album was made before the band had any kind of budget or production skills whatsoever. Any sound heard on here was made by a real instrument, and that took me a lot to get over considering the vast, rich collage of sound that is actually going on here.
Three years on, it's grown on me to the point I consider it a firm favourite.
