The Residents

Any artist that has been around for a while eventually releases a compilation, but how about a compilation of a compilation? In the shadow of the Residents' recently released Icky Flix, a collection of their vanguard music videos, comes the complimentary soundtrack disc, a natural thing to release when it comes to the Residents. Select material was extracted from the DVD, in the form of re-recordings, which in turn give a decent indication of how songs were rendered during their recent tour of said DVD. The more far-out aspects of the group are represented here, with latter day tracks like "Bad Way on the Midway" and the "Gingerbread Man" to an excerpt from the still-unfinished feature film project from the early '70s, Vileness Fats (an epic story about the goings-on in a community inhabited by round, one-armed midgets). This may not be the disc that will inaugurate one's Residents worship, because the images these pieces invoke are perhaps more lurid, surreal, impressionistic and ambitious than their catchy material, but they are fine examples of just how far storytelling has progressed when incorporated with song.