The 1980 Listening Post - The Residents - Commercial Album

 The Residents - Commercial Album

#421

by Paul Zickler

October 1980

The Residents 

Commercial Album

Genre: Avant Garde (aka Weird Music)

Allen’s Rating: 5 out of 5

Paul’s Rating: 4.5

Highlights:

Amber

Picnic Boy

Moisture

Fingertips

Secrets

The Residents are one of the many artists I first learned about from the great Dr. Demento Show. They were the eyeball head dudes, mysterious and anonymous. The Commercial Album was featured by the Doctor, since it consists of 40 one-minute songs. I wish I had been more adventurous at 15 and actually bought records like this, but instead I had to wait for eMusic, and later Spotify, to provide cheap access to unlimited “weird music.”

Make no mistake, The Residents play weird music. Even now, I sometimes have to wear headphones or keep the volume low to avoid bugging my wife or scaring the dog. I mean, it’s not Sun Ra or Pharoah Sanders or Captain Beefheart weird, but it’s weird enough to keep the uninitiated away. Or so I thought until I joined a Residents Facebook group and realized these guys have TONS of fans. I also read that Eskimo was shortlisted for a Grammy nomination, and MTV had Commercial Album videos in regular rotation in their early years. So maybe it’s not as weird as I thought?

The liner notes famously suggest playing each song three times to simulate a regular pop song, and that actually does work with some of these tunes. “Amber,” “Picnic Boy,” “Moisture,” and “Fingertips” all have one verse and one chorus and flow together pretty well, although “flow” isn’t a word I’d typically use for Residents songs. While the album title is clearly ironic, a few tracks almost qualify as commercial, including the instrumentals “When We Were Young,” “La La,” and “Japanese Watercolor,” although I can’t imagine a radio format that would embrace one-minute instrumentals. There are also some that are creepy enough to be memorable, like “Secrets,” which ends abruptly in mid-sentence, enhancing its scariness, “Nice Old Man,” which interrupts a jaunty little synth melody with jarring bell noises, and “The Talk of Creatures,” which has a mostly one-note guitar figure pulsing under an eerie vocal and feels longer than a minute because you kinda wish it would end and stop freaking you out so much.

The thing with one-minute songs is that they’re easily forgettable. According to iTunes, I’d listened to every song three to six times before writing this review, but I still have no familiarity with the majority of them. And since they’re so short, I couldn’t tell you what they’re “about,” beyond the titles. However, there’s an overall feel to the entire release that works for me. Most of it is challenging and intriguing, which is what I ask of my avant garde music. If you enjoy that slightly off kilter vibe found in the best weird music, The Residents pretty much always deliver.

https://open.spotify.com/album/6VEns9PXETPgZdZXMAZzvg?si=s9AjxNsWRBmq1Rl4gD5UPw