Pros: The residents music is always... interesting...
Cons: But this isn't one of their essential albums.
The Bottom Line: If you like the residents or if you wan't a creepy version of children's music this is a good buy. Otherwise there are other Residents albums that are better.
boffo's Full Review: Have a Bad Day by The Residents
I was planning to try to review something fairly well known to see if it could help me get more hits. Then my eyes fell on this CD lying by the side of my keyboard and I decided to postpone those plans in favor of reviewing some more time-honored weirdness.
The residents in case you don't know is a band most famous for being mysterious. They perform wearing eyeball-masks and the band members names have never been revealed. Much of their music has been meant to poke fun at pop-culture and pop-music.
In the ninties the residents branched out into the new CD-ROM media. They produced a few CD-ROM releases with various concepts such as a tour through a freak-show and the like. This was a few years before most bands thought about CD-ROm enhancing and the residents were at the forefront of the medium much like they had been years before with the music video.
Have A Bad Day is a music-only CD with reworkings of the music from one of their CD-ROM releases called Bad Day On The Midway. The music does sound like it comes from a computer product. To put it blunt: it sounds like the residents have discovered the joys of MIDI. My guess is that pretty much all of the music is played on keyboards and recorded in a home studio. The tunes are ofte quite simplistic with childish melodies, but since the goal is to evoke a sort of creepy carneval/theme-park mood this works pretty well.
Some of the earlier recordings show that the residents were not particulary skilled musicians when they formed but by the time of this recording they have had over 20 years of practice so the music is shows a good understanding of melody and harmonics. Understanding musical rules dosen't mean the residents' feel the need to follow them though.
Musically this can be described as some sort of slightly computerized demented carnival music. Vocals also appear throughout the album this are contributed by various voice actors portraying the characters of the CD-ROM. Pictures of these demented cartoon characters can also be found in the CD-booklet. These characters have pretty much in common with your average children's comic-book or cartoon characters with the difference that none of them are really that cute or likeable.
The voices vary from childrens voices to some redneck country ones. The CD has three tracks with actual singing on them. God's Teardrops is sort of a upbeat country number with only a short little female vocal singing the words:
It's only god's teardrops, falling from the sky
It's only gods teardrops, getting in your eye.
The woman then starts talking about to her man Ike. That and some of the other spoken passages on the CD are hard to understand if you haven't played the CD-ROM wich I haven't.
Lottie The Human Log is the only song that's identical on both this CD and the CD-ROM release.
One of the freakshow performers sing in a happy hillbilly voice about the tragedies in her life that turned her into a freak show performer. The music consists of some cheerful keyboard chords, harmonica and pounding drums. This song is irritating as hell, but I'm sure that's quite intentional.
Daddy's Poems is one of the album's darkest and less subtle moments. It's a mix of some more country hick singing and some spoken passages. A man sings about the pointlessness and ugliness life. The synthezised orchestra this time consists of xylophone, bass piano chords and various atmospheric noises. I think the man singing(slurring) on this song might be an actual resident as the voice sounds similar to some vocals on other residents albums.
The rest of the album is more or less instrumental. It sounds like a nasty cross between circus music and children's music. If you've heard the music to Pee-Wee's playhouse you might have an idea of what this album sounds like. The residents composed some of the music to that show.
I have a hard time rating this album at sometimes the music sounds cold and the lack of real instruments can clearly be hear. But this is just one of the many ways the residents have intentionally sounded bad during the years. The problem I often have with their music is that it can sound pointless. Just weirdness for weirdness sake. They have also recorded some brilliant satires of pop culture and insightful commentaries on organised religion. This album has none of these concepts to hold it up it's just a collection of weird and slightly creepy songs without any really memorable tracks.
This album is still good but there are better and more important residents albums. 3 out 5 seems about right.
I'll get around to reviewing something popular and well-known sometime.
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