Customer Reviews

Have a Bad Day

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These wonderfully creepy songs also appear as the soundtrack to the award-winnning BAD DAY ON THE MIDWAY interactive cd-rom "game" that The Residents helped create. Going along with the seedy carnival sideshow theme, the music is at first listen just like cheerful machine muzak one might hear as they plunk down a dollar and step into a gallery of oddities. With repeated listenings, the tunes turn on themselves insidiously and end up grinding away in your brain at 3 in the morning. Demonically entertaining, but maybe not for the faint of heart. All in all, top drawer stuff.

..I was dissapointed. Granted, any longtime Residents fan probably loves this album and would get it regardless, but I only have the experience of the CD-ROM from ages ago.

I loved the game music and was pleasantly suprised to find that a soundtrack had been released. I was especially looking forward to being able to hear the brilliant and haunting tracks from the more memorable moments in the game by themselves...

Unfortunately the soundtrack suffers from some poor choices in my opinion. For starters, a lot of tracks which appear in seperate sections of the game are blended into one single track. (Biggest example is in dixie/Ike's track. These are some of the best and most memorable moments in the game, but here they are introduced with Dixie's tone-deaf warbling of 'God's Teardrops' before getting to a short clip of the great track that plays during Ike's flashback sequence. This mismash ruins the power of the song.)

The use of sound clips from the game seems appropriate, but due to it's poor execution, it does not do what is intended. A Residents fan who has not played the game will find the clips confusing, while a fan of the game will wonder why the seemingly most obscure and weak quotes are used, and often at parts of the song where their power is severely diluded. This is even the case of great clips like Ted's pre-murder rant. In the game this is a horrifying moment puctuated by the confusion of the player as he slowly realizes what's happening. on the soundtrack, the quote seems like a tossed in afterthough with the volume turned down.

The biggest dissapointment of all though is "daddy's poems." Players of the game will remember the beautiful track that plays in the background as the player sorts through Dixie's father's poems and ultimately his suicide note. This track, one of the sole reasons I shelled out sixteen bucks for a very short and ultimately forgettable album, is not here. Instead a droning voice quotes the poems in a matter that robs them of all emotional impact. In fact, it sounds like a drunk biker reading T.S. Eliot as a tired dirge plays in the background. The actual suicide note is read whisper quiet, but not for effect... it sounds almost like the singer is embarrassed by what he is saying... and then he continues to quote other poems, losing the finality of the suicide pact.

It's not all bad.. and certainly you'll recognize and love some of the great game music that is here. It may be that I just don't "get" the Residents, but then again the point of the review is that of a person who loved the music in the game and wanted just that. Instead it feels like the Residents tossed in a collage/clip show that just doesn't let the work speak for itself. It tries to be too much and actually becomes far, far too little..

Just try and give this one a pre-buy listen before you shell out. And if anyone knows where I can find the song playing during the poem reading in the game, let me know.

These are the disturbing songs that conjure up all the disturbing images seen, heard, and experienced in the Residents epic CD-Rom Art "Game", Bad Day on the Midway! If you were fortunate enough to obtain and spend hours in that disturbing world, this album makes the experience "portable!"

It will thrust you into that frightening world, and you will experience all the characters dark thoughts and deeds. Much like "Gingerbread Man" by The Residents, it is very dark. Only little Timmy is clean, innocent and remains unscathed as he visits this Midway of Horrors!

The Residents Have a Bad Day

The Residents used to scare me more than they do. Have a Bad Day was the first album I ever heard. At the time I was engrossed in Primus, Pink Floyd, Phish, and sought anything with character or psychedelia. This album instantly gave way to mythical darkness, some thematic vividness; it effortlessly summoned me to listen, and was beyond anything merely psychedelic. It turned out to be a good example of their craft.

In the Residents Historical (www.residents.com), Bad Day is not considered an album, it is a soundtrack to the Bad Day CD-ROM. Not having seen it I remark on purely the music.

Each Residents album is a specific spell. The first thing about Bad Day that grabs me is its quality of sound, balanced somewhere between white noise and cheap musical theatre score. As you travel through the songs, the variance on the atmospheric theme marks its detachment from other albums, artists and rules, and even its meditative coalescence. [A captivated audience, I trust the Residents' intuition from long hours of listening and reflection. Their music has led me to see and listen as one ready for always another moment.]

The album has hypnotic moments summoning a thirsty light. It is done with quite minimal starkness that has no compromise, cleanly conjuring feelings that provoke me to step back and listen to the wide ambience of the moment. It is a break from the more edible forms given thus far and yet sounds continuous. I have not found anyone who shares these moments of sharp wonder, but this music is specific to them. I speak of moments like in I Ain't Seen No Rats, after Otto has gone off to find his rat Oscar, when we are in trance beats altering the theme of the oldie Downtown. When you listen long enough to hear the reverb slowly being added to the percussion, you are probably something like hypnotized. The listener may find similarity in many of the accompaniments to the monologues in Gingerbread Man ('94).

Though no character acknowledges this child Otto, driven to strangulated lonesomeness, crying `I'm busy, don't bother me', the music takes a strange road between the carnivals' triumph and a journey into a gloomy morning sunset.

So you see, this album is especially evocative for myself, and I will play it to encourage mystical strength. But the content is disturbing, dense, often clear. The closest things to main characters are children, unaware of how they've lost their personalities to the traditions consuming them. The carnival is the main environment; the first song introduces them to it. Gruesome laughter that sounds canned creeps in from somewhere as we take for granted the pings and whistles of this place. We hear the overused organ, and a wobbly voice (familiar from another album) gives us a disturbingly obvious proverb. The kids are audibly impressed, and it's implied by the environments' dominance and from their somewhat American impressionability, that they are being heavily influenced. The world we're introduced to is designed to pass quicker than thought, but the motifs like the laughter and the attraction tunes are all revisited in later tracks with different degrees of the bands talent of scoring the experiences of the characters very carefully but simply.

Their music has never stopped at music, it has drawn no line before the visual evocations of it. And they have, with practice, visually represented their musical intentions accurately. A good example is in their self-made videos on the Commercial Album DVD ('04) or Icky Flix DVD ('01) or any of their other self-made digital videos. But more interesting is their music which is focused in such a way that the visual quality is attained without the visuals. It helps that the musicians are invisible, so to appropriately become their sound without interruption.

The stories and character lives alone would be interesting, but are enhanced by so much. Residents leave me considering that music production changes after completion and as it's heard. So to give it a questionable quality or nature is very beneficial to the thinking audience perspective. Music so elusive and thematic should be left open to its audience, and theirs is. We never get a biased view of these artists, who filter everything they show as the work. Or maybe it is entirely biased to their coverings. But at least it's the work we get from them and not the conflicted individuals.

The practical themes of this album can be described as horror, misleading, masks, and there are many. The album title is interesting because it generalizes those explored within. That it is a bad day is accurate. By all the estrangements of American poverty and ignorance that come across one may accept a title pointing towards that. But they wanted to generalize those, humanize them, or symbolize them into a bad day. At first, before I knew the album, I liked the pun of The Residents Have a Bad Day as one sentence, against the separation of telling us to Have a Bad Day. Either way, a bad day is a thing explored far and wide here; whether to hear Daddy's tortured metaphors, to be lost and alone after being ridiculed by Dagmar the Dog Woman, being warned by the Seven Tattoos, or cast into oblivion by the snidy voice in Ugly Liberation (one of my favourites). Buy or Die.