Customer Reviews

The Bunny Boy

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This album is a great listen. It is definitely not without it's element of creepiness that comes standard with any Residents' release. Without explaining the storyline let me just say that this album is among their better stuff. It is UNCANNY how perfectly this cd matches up with The Wizard of Oz. Like seriously! I had never done the Dark Side of the Moon thing so A friend asked If I wanted to and much like I suspected (after like 3 songs) it did NOT impress me. However, my friend wanted to hear the Bunny Boy so I suggested we play it alongside Wizard of OZ and Holy Sh** It matched up to the T. It's almost like they timed the album to match up to certain parts. It was hilarious!!! It definitely gives the actions a stranger feel. Also makes me want to sync up other Residents' albums to that movie. Match it up to the 2nd Lion roar and you'll be in business. Trust me if you want a good laugh!! But yeah a good listen as well.

I just purchased this album by The Residents.

As usual with anything put out by The Residents, one cannot just casually listen to it and get all the dark nuances and disturbing messages hidden within it. One must "eat" the album and digest it to truly appreciate the Residents dark, Edgar Allen Poe like art.

For instance, recently I purchased the Residents' Animal Lover from Amazon. Upon first listening to it I was disappointed, that it didn't quite meet my expectations earlier encountered by such Residential classics like "The Commercial Album,' "Duckstab," and "God in 3 Persons." Yet upon repeated listening and digesting the album "Animal Lover," my opinion of it changed drastically!

This is their latest work. (2009) For an ensemble that has been around now for over 35 years, they haven't lost their dark roots or their atonal qualities of mixing sharps and flats in a way that can turn "Ava Maria" into funeral music!

This is a must add to collection of any Residents fan. This live show was amazing!

Buy or die with confidence that this is THE RESIDENTS bringing the goods once again. Great story, great writing, great imagery, great aural experience, but not for the uninitiated. This album is only a part of the whole project which also involves an internet video series and world tour - (Their website, originally edited out by Amazon) has much more info!

This sounds like THE RESIDENTS.

The Bunny Boy can be more than just a new Residents album, if you want. You can go to their website, (residents blog) and watch the continuing video posts of the pitifully forced weirdness of Roger the Bunny Boy, (Homer Flynn) in his SECRET ROOM as he tries to solve the mystery of his brother Harvey's disappearance in Patmos. But, actually being weird, and being what you think others think is weird, are two different things. One is progressively self-indulgent art, and the other is painfully contrived commercialism. Not always, but most of the time there is no question where The Residents stand.
Initially the sound of The Bunny Boy CD was a lot like my favorite Residents album of the decade, Demons Dance Alone (2004), (which continues to stand repeated plays and becomes increasingly more interesting over time), but this disc just doesn't compel me to replay it very often, despite the mystery blog videos. The Bunny Boy album though, has 19 tracks that make me ask 20 questions. Here are two of them: Question zero. If you spent your entire career hiding your identity behind a mask, would you eventually become obsessed with expressing autobiographical sketches of your life as a cry of despair in having had your identity been ignored? Question nine: If you found out that The Residents have a secret room, what would you guess is in it? O.K. now, seriously think about it and have a guess. Your answer would of course depend upon who you think The Residents are, and that kind of depends upon which of their albums you are listening to. For example, at one time you may guess that their secret room has two dead rats carrying baseball bats. Or maybe Elvis' closet full of glittering duds dripping with sweat and blood. Or maybe a diary, revealing in detail, the murderer's motives and his childhood in hell. Or maybe the secret room instead has the missing eyeball head. Did you make a guess? Well I'm sorry but you are wrong. This time it's full of tenderness and care (track 9). But don't pass up The Bunny Boy if you like any of their last few albums.

The Residents' website promised that The Bunny Boy would resemble their classic albums Duck Stab, The Commercial Album, and Demons Dance Alone. Indeed, The Bunny Boy does feature short songs and the Southern-accented male Eyeguy singing lead on most of them (and yes, I know he didn't sing much on Demons). However, The Bunny Boy's songs have very little sonic variety, with candy-coated, sickly-sounding keyboards and constipated beats dominating, and the male Eyeguy sounding a little sickly himself. The album bored me; an uncreative song, no matter how brief, can sound as if it lasts for 394,506 millennia.

When I first began to read the setup for this ablum I became very excited. It was written up to be an album where The Residents return to their roots and was set up as a combination of The Commercial Album + Duck Stab + Demons Dance Alone = The Bunny Boy. There was a time when every album released by The Residents was musically different from the previous. They were odd, funny and confusing all at the same time: And then 9/11 happened. After 9/11 the group became more somber, and even though their album genre has been different for each album since, the music stays the same. Enter the Bunny...

Take any song from Demons Dance Alone, Animal Lover & Tweedles then add different lyrics to them: You now have The Bunny Boy. Nothing has changed except for the plot and the music sounds like that which can be found on one one of their several instrumental cd's which have been released over the last two years. The plot is interesting, as usual, and the lyrics are as bizarre as ever but the question remains, did they go back to their roots? The answer is no. No Commercial Album, although the songs are fairly short. No Duck Stab, the music sounds the same for each song as well as Mr. Skull. Yes Demons Dance Alone, as stated the music comes right from it. This album could have been titled Tweedles Dances With Animals, but it's simply The Bunny Boy.

Why did I give it 3 stars then? They're The Residents and they're still freaking creative when they put their minds to it. I just hope they get out of this rut and show me, and many others, that we're wrong about them. They are the Four Interior Decorators of the Apocalypse afterall...