Daily Music Reviews (Summer Challenge)

[rayword45]

Day 49: Commercial Album by The Residents (Album Choice: Victor Van Ed)

And into the avant-garde we go. This here is an art collective who make experimental works in several different types of multimedia. They usually dress like it's Halloween with eyeball helmets and formal clothing, and their music is either deconstruction of modern Western music or more experimental collage crap. This album is the former, consisting of 40 one-minute tracks based around commercial pop music, hence the title (or, according to other sources, ad jingles). Since it's recommended to loop a track 3 times to make it sound like a proper 3-minute pop song, I'm going to do that twice for random tracks. See how it works.

The experiment must have dated terribly because in 1980 this may have been pop but now it sounds like especially weird New Wave, or the brown sound Ween albums with a bit of prog. I'm probably a complete idiot for expecting it to sound similar to today's radio music but seriously, in what country does this sound like 70s pop music? It's too psychedelic, too abstract, and above all too cracked-out to be pop music. It's also kinda hard to choose the best song when they're all 60 seconds, you don't get time to focus. But as a whole the songs are typically noisy, often atonal and laced with synthesizers. I chose to loop Give It To Someone Else and... It still doesn't sound like pop music. I did notice just how effed up the lyrics are though, before I was just assuming these lyrics were effed up. And around 30 tracks in I want to fix my comparison. Don't compare this to Ween, compare this to The Beatles if they did bath salts. I've officially decided against looping a second track, I think I've gotten as good of an idea of looped tracks as I can with one listen.

And after 40 minutes... What the hell was that? Either I need to give this a second listen or just conclude that I don't get it for the day. And I have no time so we're going for the latter today. This is the weirdest pop music I've ever heard. Most tracks are skeletal with an emphasis on synthy weirdness. Others are noisy. Not feedback and guitar clang noisy, but just bizarre noisy. This kind of album definitely fits the way these guys dress. If I had more time I'd give this album more time as I love experimental shit but I don't. So I conclude with "It's fucking weird".