And so the avant-garde art-pop continues. I’d not heard of The Residents, who are a kind of anonymous art collective who wear headpieces in the shape of a giant eyeball. As you do. I recently (as of time of writing) visited the Buchheim Museum south of Munich, a modern art museum dedicated to Lothar-Gunther Buchheim. As well as being the author of Das Boot (based on his own experiences on a U-boat), Buchheim was a prolific artist and the place is chock full of his strange found-item sculptures and a recreation of his house, where every surface was treated as a canvas for artwork.
This album is a little like that experience. Although it’s actually two EPs glued together – Duck Stab is Side One, Side Two is Buster & Glen – there’s no particular difference to Side One and Side Two.
The lyrics are like nursery rhymes, or the doggerel of Edward Lear or Lewis Carroll, for example from The Laughing Song: “A red red rose saw a big pig pose, on the edge of a silver dollar. The end of his tail was a long-necked nail, and in place of his face was a scholar”. Or from Hello Skinny, “Skinny was born in a bathtub, and he grew so incredibly thin, even the end of an eye dropper sucked. Him. In”. By turns hallucinatory, creepy, and just plain strange. On the extended version, some of the tracks quote actual nursery rhymes, notably Plants, and it highlights just how odd or disturbing the content of nursery rhymes actually can be.
As with Pere Ubu, I’m glad I live in a world where such oddness is allowed to exist. I don’t think there are any tracks on here I’d necessarily listen to for pleasure, but the sense of “What the actual...?” is always fun at first.
Just as with the Buchheim Museum, there were some bits that were great in their strangeness.
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