2007-02-16 - 12:11 a.m.

It was a blissful scene, reader: cardigan snuggled around my shoulders, the fez tassel drooping lazily over my nose, glass of single malt in hand, feet up on the cat, and the Residents on the stereo, filling the air with glorious weirdness. A new Residents album isn’t something to take lightly. You need to set aside some time and give it your full attention, preferably while it’s dark and stormy outside. One of the many great things about the Rezzies is that their conceptual albums are lovingly produced, with pictures, stories and themes provided in a booklet that is folded into the CD case. Before you even get to the music you can look over the packaging and gain an impression of what’s inside, the curiosities that are about to be unveiled. Tweedles! features a clown’s face on the cover that on closer inspection turns out to be a large, made-up penis. So far so good. Cocks feature heavily, both in the album artwork and in the content. As far as I can tell, the songs narrate the story of Tweedles, an “emotional vampire” who shags around with men and women and occasionally murders them. We get lust, isolation, indulgence, regret and alcoholism as subject matter, set to the squelchy studio-based keyboard sound these masters of the rum and uncanny have adopted as their eyeballs dim.

I found it a real pleasure to have to concentrate while listening to music for once. It was also a relief to find that after Animal Lover, the music wasn’t so unrelentingly bleak. Animal Lover is the only album to feature enchantment, castration and a public stoning within one song, but the overall tone seems to be that human life entails only suffering and cruelty compared to the more instinctive animal kingdom. It ends with a horribly nihilistic dirge called Burn My Bones. I don’t really have much time for such a pessimistic view on a daily basis. I do like the sheer balls-out theatricality of What Have My Chickens Done Now? though, in which a withered old crone is set against a choir of angelic sounding girls who torture and frame the chicken-keeper for murder. At least I think that’s what it’s about. You have to surrender to confusion with the Residents, and it’s not such a bad feeling. The doom-laden church organs, freaky xylophones, nasal southern Baptist vocals and tribal drumbeats coalesce into those middle-of-the-night moments when your imagination runs amuck and you find yourself prevaricating between genius and absurdity. X-factor it ain’t.

So, with Tweedles! there’s less despair and misery and more of how great it feels to have a hard-on. “Hunger and sexual gratification….steaks and orgasms, how empty life would be without them.” This is an album about loveless, predatory sex and the alienation it causes. I think. The subject matter is sometimes dank, yet I found this album uplifting. Perhaps because there’s a narrator to make a connection with. Tweedles may be a scumbag, but his musings voice enough regrets about his amoral lifestyle so that you can make a connection with him while the music’s playing. He admits he drinks too much and sometimes thinks about forming normal relationships. He confesses that “Tweedles” is the name he and his brother used to call their dicks. He begins one song with a rant about how stupid conspiracy theories are. I dig that. All the darkness, mystery and nastiness is offset with enough naughtiness to stop it becoming too negative. Thus, when Tweedles imagines himself onstage, singing about “Adolph Hitler butt fucked by baboons,” you get a smooth cocktail of hilarity and horror. As well as bad-stand up comedy, this song also charges abusive parents with causing wasted lives and ruined ambition. “The clown in Cassanova is…frowning.”. I’ll always be happy listening to a sad clown. Especially one with a raging hard-on.

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