Meet The Residents: The Residents

How does The Residents's crazed, concrete-esque debut effort hold up? How does it compare to its follow-up? And just who the heck was N. Senada???

Compared to the so-called "Warner Brothers Album" and "Baby Sex", two officially unreleased albums preceding the proper debut of Meet The Residents, MTR is amazingly accomplished.  They achieved a fairly sophisticated avant garde form seemingly out of nowhere.  The album gets better with age, for me.  It's now possibly my favorite of their albums.  It was also the first one I bought, back when it first got reissued on vinyl (pre-CD).  It was a bit too strange for me back then.  I guess I wanted it to "rock" more, even though I supposedly knew what I was getting into when I bought it (or thought I did).  Later on, the CD Age brought us a nice compilation on Ryko called "Hell!" that eased me into the Residents' world more easily.  As for Meet the Residents nowadays,I can't even detect a single weak spot.  If anyone is still making albums that sound like this, I want to know.


Edited by HolyMoly - February 11 2015 at 19:07

TODDLER wrote: Meet The Residents ...although very good, is not my favorite. I am more hung up on Not Available and Mark Of The Mole/Tunes Of Two Cities. There was an EP I owned in the 80's which featured a sick parody of "Old MacDonald"....(I think?), ...can't recall the title of the EP and can't locate it on a cd release either as bonus tracks or just the EP itself.

That's a good EP - you're thinking of "Goosebump", and the Old McDonald parody is actually titled "Farmers".  It was released on CD appended to the "Diskomo" EP (a dance remix of themes from the Eskimo album).

Not Available and Mark of the Mole are definitely in my top 5 Residents albums too.

TODDLER wrote: HolyMoly wrote: TODDLER wrote: Meet The Residents ...although very good, is not my favorite. I am more hung up on Not Available and Mark Of The Mole/Tunes Of Two Cities. There was an EP I owned in the 80's which featured a sick parody of "Old MacDonald"....(I think?), ...can't recall the title of the EP and can't locate it on a cd release either as bonus tracks or just the EP itself. That's a good EP - you're thinking of "Goosebump", and the Old McDonald parody is actually titled "Farmers".  It was released on CD appended to the "Diskomo" EP (a dance remix of themes from the Eskimo album). Not Available and Mark of the Mole are definitely in my top 5 Residents albums too.   Is "Goosebump" on cd?

Yes - the whole 4 song EP is on CD with the Diskomo single now.  Now called Diskomo 2000, I believe.