The Residents – Icky Flix

This album is a compilation of The Residents works over the last three decades. It’s actually a soundtrack to the DVD. The original intent was simply to put all their videos (the first one, perhaps the first music video ever, was released in 1972). Instead, The Residents decided to shoot all new footage and incorporate that with the old.

The first time you put on a Residents CD, you’re in for quite a surprise. The music is, well, weird. Very weird. Yet also hilarious at times.

I wouldn’t even attempt to categorize this music anywhere outside of Burlesque (not because it sounds like what might have been played in a burlesque show, but because of its overall qualities). Impossible also to know who these guys are as they don’t give their names and they wear costumes (eyeball heads for three and a cranium for the other) giving no hint as to who they might be.

Either they are very well-known musical geniuses, or these guys have escaped an insane asylum, I couldn’t begin to say which. As I still have no idea as to whether or not I liked this album it’s either the best album I’ve ever heard, or the worse. But just for the overall strangeness of it, it should be in everyone’s CD library.