Here are my thoughts from three years ago on Animal Lover by the Residents. If you haven't heard this one, just pretend that IT'S their new album and go listen to it. Also, "RzWeb" is now defunct, the excellent fan-created, Cryptic Corp.-inflated resource website for the Residents. Residents.com is alright now, and has more content than you might imagine, but RzWeb was a delightful cross-referencable encylclopedia of the band. RIP!

It is easy to spend hours, perhaps days, at RzWeb, if you're interested, revelling in the gleeful 33-year-old myth of their story, pretending it's all true, knowing only some of it is, being pretty sure what isn't. Feel free to do so, and the story from someone who has might start like: there they go again, confounding folks after over three decades of confoundment by putting out another impossibly different record. Another version could begin: grizzled old artists and obscure, seasoned professionals combine forces (likely somewhere in the Bay Area) to create a thoughtful, morbid electronic concept album using synthesizers, some rock instruments, vocal filters, gamelan, a violin or two... In both versions, the subtext of the story is the same: some people got together and made an amazing recording. The Residents' Animal Lover is, so far, the best record of 2005, and it will not be acknowledged as such by anyone you know.

A bit of Residents backstory just might work in favor of this brief article, anyway. Demons Dance Alone was one of the best albums of 2002, and this was even more unlikely than Animal Lover's success. Despite the refreshing half-triumph of Wormwood (great live set, spotty accompanying studio album), their '90s (and 2/3 of their '80s, not entirely in chronological order) consisted of mere curiosities and occasional missteps, as opposed to the glorious and bold experiments that marked their entire first decade as Nixon's favorite anonymous collective. Demons Dance Alone was accompanied by a press campaign claiming that the Residents are dead, and this is the debut album by "the people on the bus"-- in other words, the Residents' tour bus, the one that was driving them around Europe when a few thousand extra people died at more or less the same time in New York City. It was by far the most personal music the group had ever made, self-referential, sad, about humans, darkly humorous in the way they've always been but with a slightly gruesome twist. Accessible fables with dark morals. The melodies took a turn for the haunting and serene, but the variety of tracks was the most unpredictable it's been in some time: maudlin serenades coming up against bent art-pop that wouldn't fit in any time period but this one. For the first time, the new-music/rock ensemble from the Wormwood show really fused with the MIDI/loop orchestra they'd been cultivating since God in 3 Persons in 1988, and as surprising as the success was, it's unsurprising why it worked.

Listen to that album later. Animal Lover is the first post-1981 Residents record that I would recommend to new listeners about as excitedly as Fingerprince or Duck Stab (and, everyone kill me now, "Constantinople" notwithstanding, it's better than Duck Stab). "On the Way to Oklahoma" is an opening track that dropped my jaw. I do not want to describe it, because I had no idea what was going to drop my jaw until I eventually closed my mouth, and even if no one else has a reaction even remotely as awesome, it's a neat sound to be surprised by. What this track has in store that the rest also deliver, aside from more of that morbid disposition that carried Demons Dance Alone (with a twist that I will explain), is an absolutely stunning musical and sonic backdrop the likes of which they've never even tried before. The compositional maturity (dare I name Kurt Weill? probably not, but that might give you an idea), the mix's unusual approach to depth of field, and the arrangements, incorporating the kitchen sink and constantly appropriately morphing from one thing to the next-- ... Oh, it's all here, everything an avant-pop fan could ever want, with the added bonus of excellent musicianship throughout. (Not something a Residents fan always looks for, but it's a beautiful thing when it's called for, and it is highly called for here.)

The theatricality of the presentation-- something that the Residents have always held in spades-- is worth discussing. The cast of voices, with several different performers showing up now and then, appear both filtered and unfiltered. The voice treatments run the gamut, with nearly any post-Eno (or, in Another Day on Earth's case, post-Eno-Eno) [sorry, not sure what I was talking about with that - ed.] vocal filter that you can dream up being used in both subtle and unsubtle ways. The result is creepy, alarming, sometimes goofy-- all told, inhuman, but not robotic, creating a contrast for the untouched vocal performances. They're as dramatically inflected as ever, and they work the way a good dramatic actor works, conveying the emotion of the stories by always hitting the right note with the right dynamic touch. What they're all singing about this time is the primal side of mankind-- its conflicts with animals, its own animal nature, and the Bergman-esque sadness, love, and self-destructive impulses that arise.

The Residents' best work has always had a quality that is "beyond me." This is why I am reluctant to go into too much detail, for fear of my inadequacy at representing it appropriately. I'll sum it up here. Animal Lover, like so many of those art-fuck works of excellence that they made in the last 3rd of the 20th century, is "beyond me," and it thrills me. What was once visceral is visceral again. They're not art-fuck champions anymore, though; what they are now is really, really unlike anything else. When the gamelan comes in, it dares not dabble in world music; when Nolan Cook's electric guitar does whatever it can do so expertly, it still doesn't even touch rock music; when an electronic beat shows up, I can't picture, just as I can't for any other instance, anything but the Residents. "Ten fucking stars," to quote Steve Albini on a record he loved to pieces, and I'd maybe even just slim it down to "awesome," if it truly meant what it's supposed to mean anymore, because I really am in awe of what the Residents are as much as what they have been.