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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Animal music!, October 17, 2005
After 35 years of a career with better and worse moments, The Residents are one of the few musical groups which can keep surprising their audiences, even if the main core of their audiences is formed by those, like me, who are listening to the group for several decades. Always swimming against the tide, they are one of the few bands -maybe with Zappa and some others- in constant criticism of the western culture, and more exactly, of the north american way of thinking: from their first albums, musically distorted and conceptually agressive ("The third reich & roll") to the latest ("Wormwood", centered on the most dark and cruel stories from the bible), passing through their 70's and 80's covers of other musicians from John Philip Sousa to Elvis Presley, The Residents have been a group very different from the rest. Their albums focused on a single concept, their few performances with an extensive use of theatrical resorts, their unkown identities, the use of the fan clubs as a way of distribute their music and paraphernalia, their incredible lp and cd covers, those 3 cdrom "games", way beyond everything ever made to play with on computers... maybe The Residents are not the best group on earth but they are quite different... and very interesting.
"Animal Lover" is, as far as today, their last cd. One of the things that I have always found on cd format is that they are too long. On the lp format, with 40-45 min. recordings, there was space enough for a concept album to be developed. In the rare cases when more playing time was needed, the double lp was perfect. But cd's offer 80 minutes of music, and no group would keep the 40 minutes length, because all the reviews would say "too short". Thus, most musicians fill their cd's with more music than needed. "Animal Lover" would have been a complete masterpiece if you didn't find some of the tracks as superfluous. Most of them are pure gold: dense, sad, sinister, perfectly recorded, telling disturbing stories. A few of them are less focused, less understandable, less attractive, lower level.
The wonderful package that the disk comes with -when did you buy your last cd with a 52 page booklet, original illustrations, careful design and a free second cd with remixes?- explains a little the plot: Every song has a short introductory tale about an animal -chicken, bat, dog, cat, monkey, etc- on the main role. Then, the song itself tells the same story from a totally different point of view, that of the human on the same tale. We know then the story of the mouse who lives at the hospital where the girl goes to see her dying father; the cat who loves the son of its master, and misses his voice after he returns from war and never say a word; the ant living on a garden where a man is so obsessed by his tulips that he forgets everything else in life. Strange stories indeed, strange music too. Not for everybody, but give it a try, and maybe you'll be caught.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Best surprising sound since "Intermission.", August 24, 2005
As I recall, back in the early eighties when I first heard my first Residents album,I sat listening to "The mark of the mole" with my eyes wide and my mouth dropped to the floor. It was obvious that these highly creative artists had tapped into the same netherdepths that I had always assumed existed, but could never convince others of its reality. It seemed that someone else had experienced the same oddball childhood fantasies.
All subsequent albums left the same mark. Though the quality of the work waned and waxed, all their ideas of musical simplicity involving the use of childlike tunes with an edge of insanity remained absorbing.
"Animal Lover" after a few listenings comes across as one of the great ones. The haunting and mesmerizing tunes roll out like vivid feverish dreams. This CD is extremely well conceived. I must say also that it is one of the strangest, even for the Residents, I have ever heard. Has anyone else figured out what the old woman and the chicken song is about? I have, and its not pretty!
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Have fun with this one, April 7, 2005
Reviews, fans, and press releases offer a bajillion "explanations" of what's going on here. I can't help but feel like this album was expertly designed to seem like a complicated concept, while in reality it's just a bunch of totally sweet tunes ("sweet," of course, can include a vast range of music by my definition, and does in this case). I think the Residents have made another Duck Stab/DDA-type record here. That is, no real concept, but an album of great rock music that makes one feel like people in the 1940s would have felt listening to Jimmi Hendrix. This is covered in a bunch of "wrapping" - the artwork, promo t-shirts, suspiciously revealing press releases, stories with dubious connections to the music, an unbearable delay for its release, etc. - for us to peel away. This peeling-away process adds to the coolness of the album, because it's fun and has successfully befuddled even the most devout of Residents fans.
The music is what you would expect from a new Residents release: logically structured beautiful music, but stuff that might not grab you right away because it doesn't sound like anything you've ever heard. (I figure that actually trying to describe this stuff would only make it less clear for the reader.)
So, from my little reviewing corner, I say just pop it in, crank it up, listen, and enjoy... and try to keep the hype in the background.
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by The Residents 
