Residents - B*** S** (1971)

I still haven't quite got used to the idea that we now know the names written on at least two of the Residents' birth certificates, and somehow I prefer to continue to think of them as four anonymous beings who may or may not be of this planet. Similarly confusing has been my discovering the existence of this early, early album, apparently some Record Store Day thing which I presumably missed due to a general lack of enthusiasm for green vinyl reissues of Barry Manilow.

The original liner notes of Meet the Residents from 1974 muttered about the notoriety of earlier sound experiments, to which I never really gave much consideration until I noticed they had issued The Warner Brothers Album as a Record Store Day artifact, by which point I couldn't really afford the fucking thing. The Warner Brothers Album was approximately their first record, sent as a demo tape to the aforementioned label and accordingly rejected as too weird or something before being returned to the group - sent to the residents of the provided return address, which is how they came by their name; and this, discreetly abbreviated to BS for obvious reasons, was probably their second album, sort of, posthumously rescued from the can. It seems the bloke at Warner Brothers didn't think much of this one either.

The strange thing is that you really can tell it's the Residents, and yet it sort of isn't, not quite. The tendency to discordant nursery rhyming and pretending to be an alien was already very much a thing, but it sounds as though it was recorded on this planet by a bunch of hairies who may or may not have spent at least some time hanging out with Beefheart or even Zappa, guys who went about their daily business in regular clothes, and who probably had regular names written on birth certificates. The other strange thing is that BS is kind of groovy, jazzy and evocative in terms which had been thoroughly strained out of the musical gene pool by the time we got to actually meet the Residents, because they still sounded like a band of regular guys, at least around the edges of We Stole This Riff and Deepsea Diver Song. Peculiarly, after listening to this record, Meet the Residents still feels like their first album where this might be something popped through from an alternate universe or recorded during the negative time counting down to the birth of the band as we didn't actually come to know them, if you see what I mean. Typically, it seems not even the Residents themselves are unanimous in recognising BS as having been their own work. The more you know, the greater the mystery…