It would take an encyclopaedia to cover the breadth of The Residents’ genius so I’d heartily recommend the link above (outlining the story behind the album) and a foray into the documentary Theory of Obscurity. You’ll find everything you need there. However, if you have no clue and no time to watch all of the above, try to imagine a movie where a cop tries to stop an elaborate bank robbery, only to find that their very attempt to thwart the villain was actually a part of the bad guy’s plan all along. If the hero hadn’t tried to stop the robbery, then the robbery would have been impossible. The Residents are like that, except you are the cop and you’re onto the villain’s duplicitous plan- but then you wonder if knowing the real plan is a part of the plan too…and so on to infinity and insanity.
With the death of founding member Hardy Fox last year (yes, that’s his real name and not a pseudonym he came up with for the band), I did wonder where they’d go. What followed is one of those stories where you don’t know where to begin, but I’ll try: Alvin “Dyin’ Dog” Snow was an albino bluesman who from Louisiana who worked with Residents collaborator Roland Sheehan in the band Dyin’ Dog and the Mongrels back in 1974. After his dog, his adopted carer and Howlin’ Wolf all died within a short period of time, Snow disappeared and was never heard of again. Upon the 2018 rediscovery the long-lost demo versions of the Mongrels’ songs, the Residents acted upon a decades old desire to do a blues album. The original demoes were released as The Residents Present Alvin Snow, AKA Dyin’ Dog on Psychofon as set of 7” records in 2019. In 2020 Cherry Red released a collection of the demoes, The Residents’ own reinterpretations of them and six new songs inspired by Dyin’ Dog’s work, all with the help of the legendary Captain Beefheart/Frank Black/PJ Harvey collaborator Eric Drew Feldman. (Try to read all of that without John Peel’s voice in your head).
Except that’s probably not what happened. What Residents afficionados would speculate to have happened is that the Residents invented Alvin Snow (complete with biography), recorded an album as him, then reinterpreted those songs and then wrote six new ones in the style of someone else, who in fact is actually them. If you are currently thinking that it all seems a bit too elaborate, then you don’t know the Residents. If you’re going “we know! It’s obvious! It’s exactly what they’d do!” then you do know them. My biggest question here is not whether Dyin’ Dog ever existed, but whether I want him to. Who shot Liberty Valance? becomes Who Recorded the Dyin’ Dog Demoes? Because I can’t print the legend until I know which one it is, and I don’t even know if I want to know.
As far as the music goes, the original demo versions serve up some delicious Tom Waits style clang-boom-and-steam blues with such brilliant consistency and cohesion that it is potentially the best piece of method acting the world has seen, or the sole recording of a man who could have stomped his way to stardom. It’s worth listening this source material before heading over to the first disc to hear the Residents own versions (if that’s what’s happening, oh God I’m so confused). It converts the Beefhearted Howlin’ Wolfery of Alvin Snow into a mixture of early-industrial electronica (Bury My Bone), a song made out of the “BWAAAAAAAH” noise always used in horror movie trailers (Die! Die! Die!) and the nightmarish corners of a ragtime, doowap and nursery rhymes all at once (Hungry Hound, Pass for White, I Know). Mama Don’t Go even manages to be strangely moving, despite the fact that it meanders into “Depeche Mode sung by a gas station owner” territory. The remaining originals inspired by Dog’s songs coil around the fence posts of disused fairgrounds and creep out of children’s toys like spectres that just take delight in your discomfort. This is their genius: even if it’s the same band doing each part of the two CD set, they manage to convincingly portray a whole other band, as well as themselves covering that band, and then their own band writing songs inspired by the other band, and make each one of them noticeably different.
If you take a quick look at their Wikipedia page, you’ll notice the warning that the entry has insufficiently separated fact from fiction (as of August 2020). This sums up not only their whole career, but also this album. Like reading about Andy Kaufman, it’s impossible to know where reality ends and some strange reconstruction begins. It’s an album with a production story which is neither black nor white, about a man (real or fictional) who is neither black nor white, and the only thing we can do is take it all in and make of it what we can. There’s always the worry that a band like The Residents will have a mythology that’s more interesting than the music, but when the apocrypha is cast aside the listener is left with something that stands on its own. Social media buzzes with interest at which ex a given popstar wrote their latest album about, or whether a verse in their latest single is a comeback to something someone said on Twitter two years ago. And yet The Residents upped the ante of intrigue almost 50 years ago and no one noticed. Keep it up, whoever you guys are…
- Review by Angri Peters
- Out now on Cherry Red Records
- Band website
- Band facebook
Disc 1: Metal, Meat & Bone
- Bury My Bone
- Hungry Hound
- Die! Die! Die!
- River Runs Dry
- The Dog’s Dream
- I Know
- Pass for White
- Tell Me
- Mama Don’t Go
- Dead Weight
- Cold as a Corpse
- Blood Stains
- Cut to the Quick
- She Called Me Doggy
- Evil Hides
- Midnight Man
Disc 2: Dyin’ Dog Demoes
- Bury my Bone
- Hungry Hound
- Die! Die! Die!
- River Runs Dry
- The Dog’s Dream
- I Know
- Pass for White
- Tell Me
- Mama Don’t Go
- Dead Weight
