TWEEDLES!

'The Tweedles' is the Residents at their most controversial concerning the maniacal musings of a perverted clown. We hear all his contorted thoughts and venture into his jaded world with bizarre music and melodies, occasional singing such as on The Perfect Lover. More often we are hearing his narrations and sometimes there are some oddities that really strike home as coming from a deranged but intelligent mind; 'The memory thing is kind of like eating, we don't bother to remember what it felt like eating that steak when we were really hungry, slicing into the charred flesh and watching, as the ruby juice flows from the fresh incision, and out onto the otherwise pristine plate. And the same single minded dedication that goes into eating that steak duplicates itself in the pursuit of physical pleasure. Hunger and sexual gratification, is there anything else?'

The clown is lonely and disturbed and even considers himself as disgusting; a reject of society that is unwanted and unloved. He imagines himself as a cannibalistic predator, he muses on his humanity and his lack of it and there are a lot of expletives to wade through.

Brown Cow has some unsettling lyrics 'He said that he loved me and, He told me that he cared, He said that he loved the way, I walked and I was weird, Now he hovers over me, And motions in the air, He's pointing at the oven, And I'm getting really scared.' The clown talks of how she melts at his feet with a confused look on her face and he points at the oven door and she begins to blubber like a baby. He sounds like a sociopath and has no emotions, perhaps he killed her, and he is killing many others and is telling us about his feeling towards his victims. This is demented stuff.

Ugly At The End is even more disturbing talking about how his mother died an ugly death. Keep Talking is a jaded conversation with the clown desperately trying to persuade his girl that he didn't have an affair but of course we know he did as he is a nymphomaniac. The album closes with Shame on Me and finally the clown reveals his true name which is his childhood name for his member, we all know that is of course The Tweedles. So that's his secret revealed.

What a bizarre album. I can manage 2 stars as this is too unpleasant for repeated listening.