September 2002 • Rockbites Alternative Daily
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The Residents return with theatrical gelignite 4 September 2002
Celebrating 30 years bedeviling pop culture from its outskirts while poking at its envelope, San Francisco’s mysterious The Residents yesterday released their first new album since 1998’s Wormwood—that LP an impiously objective examination of themes from the Christian Bible. The new set, Demons Dance Alone, out on Minneapolis indie East Side Digital, takes on confusion, uncertainty, and incompleteness as themes inspired by the events of last September 11th. For the most part, DDA is very easy on the ears but disturbing to the mind, with beautiful melodies and textures and widescreen production supporting creepy lyrics and lovely but ambiguously demented vocals—male, female, and child’s. Comprising 28 tracks (six of which are neither numbered nor titled), the disc feels very theatrical, starting off with a slowly swelling electronic orchestra and a hard-bitten southern narrator introducing a character called 'Tongue,' referenced in the liner notes in various odd ways and the protagonist of many songs that follow, such as Honey Bear, a prayer with lines like “Tell me I can be your cubby/Tell me I am your chocolate eclair/Tell me you are somewhere above me/Tell me, tell me, and I won’t be scared.” The songs on this disc are slice-of-dream/nightmare-life story fragments, most of them breathtakingly pretty and eminently hummable. They’ve sectioned the piece into two main parts, Tongue (the first 27 tracks) and Demons Dance Alone (the denouement). Tongue, in turn, comprises subparts Loss, Denial, and Three Metaphors, each with several songs. Now, strangeness is all relative. Early Residents material (especially from the early ’70s) took off from existing pop culture, then in such great flux. Demons Dance Alone, however, is self-contained. Each song provides its own context of relative normalcy within which The Residents perform their mind-fuck magic with zaps of atonal guitar, intermittent and crazy mixtures of instrumental colors, and sanity-challenged lyrics sung sincerely to Broadway-worthy tunes. Ralph America and Ralph Europe, two of the labels handling the release, offer a hand-numbered, limited edition of Demons Dance Alone that includes a bonus CD of non-album tracks plus early versions of a few tracks on the standard release. It also includes a hard bound book with lyrics, color artwork, and an essay. Again demonstrating how to define new rules rather than depend on someone else’s to break, The Residents’ Demons Dance Alone tongues its way to five bites out of five. Rockbites ratings 5: life changing, 4: stunning, 3: captivating, 2: amusing, 1: annoying. The Residents | East Side Digital | | Ralph America | | Euro Ralph | | CD from Amazon US | | top of page | |
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