Meet the Residents
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Meet the Residents is the debut studio album by the American avant-garde group The Residents, released on April 1, 1974 through Ralph Records.
Music
The music on Meet the Residents is a mixture of several Western genres, including blues, jazz, opera and classical music, performed in an amateurish manner, deliberately or otherwise. The album features much of what came to be the Residents' trademark sound for most of the 1970s, with loud horns, odd time signatures and cartoonish vocals. Fans and critics have compared the music to that of Captain Beefheart and the Mothers of Invention.
The first six tracks on the album segue into each other to form a sort of suite, starting with a skeletal cover of Nancy Sinatra's "These Boots are Made for Walkin'" before transitioning into a medley of piano melodies, Dadaist lyrics and oddly-timed percussion, ending in "Smelly Tongues", one of the group's better known songs.
The rest of the album is composed of longer, more developed compositions (with the exception of the short "Skratz"). Tracks like "Rest Aria" and "Spotted Pinto Bean" are structured in a classical manner, with grand piano backdrops, horns, sound effects and operatic vocals.
Meanwhile, the second side of the album consists of more percussion-based mostly instrumental compositions, particularly the track "N-ER-GEE (Crisis Blues)", the longest track on the album, a suite which at one point notably samples and loops the Human Beinz song "Nobody but Me" and builds increasingly chaotic music around it.
