Oh, dear...
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Artist:
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Album:Tweedles! [10/31]
The new Residents album is frankly quite poor. I'm sad about it, but I won't cry for long; I can't expect all their gambits to pay off. It is, however, probably their worst major release since The King & Eye (an Elvis Presley cover album from the late '80s)... Why doesn't it work? Animal Lover (released in 2005, and still my pick for the best album of that year) steps lightly, paints with deep 'n' dark shades, and delivers a heavy blow. Its theatricality - campy though it may have been (slightly campy though the Residents have always been) - was tasteful and simple. Tweedles, by contrast, amps up the camp and stomps around in big pink floppy shoes (the album is about a clown, sort of) - a good thing for some people, but bad for the nu-Residents. Sometimes their tone gets the best of them. The thing is sloppy and unfocused; the cheesy electronics don't work in its favor; good ideas (like the very-occasional live instrumentation from the Romanian film orchestra) quickly give way to bad ones (nearly everything else); and worst of all, the vocals! Carla Fabrizio is my least favorite female vocalist the group has had (at least I think so when I'm listening to her), and Mr. Singing Resident is Mr. Talking Resident, in that amateur-theater-monologues manner that might be the worst thing the group ever indulges in (1). He rants about being obsessed with sex, comparing one's penis to a gun, and his dead mother, and the whole picture just turns out a mess; not to mention that all of the themes on the album have been better explored in their previous work.If you haven't heard the Residents, please don't hunt down Tweedles; Animal Lover, on the other hand, is as good as an intro to the group as Duck Stab or The Commercial Album, which means I DO recommend that album (and Meet the Residents, and Intermission, and Mark of the Mole, and Third Reich & Roll...) (2).(1) (save for in the delicious God in 3 Persons, which has him reciting a lyric poem with just the right pitch for the job)(2) (enough parentheses in a post for you?)
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