<p>Over the course of a recording career spanning several decades, the Residents have remained a riddle of Sphinx-like proportions. Cloaking their lives and music in a haze of willful obscurity, the band's members
... <p>Over the course of a recording career spanning several decades, the Residents have remained a riddle of Sphinx-like proportions. Cloaking their lives and music in a haze of willful obscurity, the band's members never identified themselves by name (though in the 2010s they would begin playing with the notion of individual identities) and always appearing in public in disguise -- most often in tuxedos, top hats, and giant eyeball masks, which became one of their visual trademarks. The Residents also famously refused to grant media interviews, though "representatives of the Cryptic Corporation," the business entity behind the group, would sometimes speak on their behalf. Drawing inspiration from the likes of fellow innovators including Harry Partch, Sun Ra, and Captain Beefheart, the Residents channeled the breadth of American music into their idiosyncratic, satiric vision. With their mercurial blend of electronics, distortion, avant-jazz, classical symphonies, and gratingly nasal vocals, they reinterpreted everyone from John Philip Sousa to James Brown while simultaneously expanding the boundaries of theatrical performance and multimedia interaction. Their early work (as presented on 1974's Meet the Residents and 1978's Not Available) was dominated by organic instruments performing in a purposefully atonal and chaotic manner. Beginning with 1979's Eskimo, synthesizers and electronics became a large part of the Residents' musical palette, and nearly all their albums from that point on would be conceptual in nature, with 1981's The Mark of the Mole launching a multi-album narrative cycle they would never complete. With 1984's George and James, the band began taking an idiosyncratic look at the work of other artists, while 1991's Freak Show was the first of several projects where they adopted CD-ROM technology to add visuals to their soundscapes. 2014's The Wonder of Weird found the Residents embracing individual identities for the first time, introducing lead singer "Randy Rose," guitarist "Bob," and multi-instrumentalist "Chuck," who, as Charles Bobuck, would begin recording solo material and deliver the group's closest intrusion into the real world. However, with the 2018 album I Am a Resident!, they continued to confound expectations, reaffirming their long-stated belief that the Residents could be anyone -- or no one.</p>
<p>Mark Deming<br />AllMusic.com</p>
