THE BIG BUBBLE

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This album is billed on it's cover as "Part Four of The Mole Trilogy", and by this time, the whole "Mole" thing was getting as tired as that joke. The music on the album is not bad, primarily played on synthesizers and drums, in a minimalistic symphonic style. But the whole album suffers from sameness. For track after track, each song has a similar sound. Now this works for individual tracks, but the album gets tedious by the end. I first heard the tracks Sorry and Kula Bocca Says So on the "Heaven?" and "Hell!" collections, and expected much more from this album.

My CD is the ESD release, which includes the Safety Is The Cootie Wootie songs. The liner notes say that this is the first time all three parts of the piece were released (part three was releases on a Japanese cassette, and as the B-side of the This Is A Man's World single. This piece is more like what I enjoy from The Residents, a weird, minimalistic, but at the same time, varied and lush set of songs, that also makes me laugh.

In a weird way, this is probably the funniest album in the Residents' catalog. While "Third Reich and Roll" may inspire some chuckles for the out-of-tune renditions of "Hey Jude" and the like, there's an underlying seriousness to that work that belies the insanity on the surface. Here, however, the Residents just sound like they're either totally joking or totally clueless.

This album's contribution to "The Mole Trilogy" (of which only the first part, Mark of the Mole, was really necessary) is the depiction of a fictional pop group called "The Big Bubble" that reflected the cross-cultural mix of the Moles and the Chubs. But oh, the music they make. Repetitive grunts, whines, growls, repeating the same lines over and over again, with musical accompaniment that sounds like one guy fooling around on a keyboard... this is what I like to play when I want to inflict pain on myself (even masochism has its place).

This album is just another of the (unfortunately) many examples of Residents albums that match a fairly neat concept with lazy, indifferent music. Contrast this with the superior "Mark of the Mole": the musical arrangements, textures, and complexity of the latter are nowhere to be found here. As a concept piece, this album is somewhat successful in its admitted goal of documenting a not-very-good fictional band. But you have to wonder why anyone would make an album like that. I'd still recommend this album for confirmed Residents fans, who might enjoy hearing this every once in a while, as I do from time to time, but others should probably stay away from this.