It’s often said that The Residents are avant-garde, though they’re avant-gardists for herberts. That, of course, can only be a good thing. The long-running San Francisco-based art-rockers have always been outsider artists making unpredictable and uncompromising noise for the masses, even if the majority of that mass doesn’t know what’s good for it.
That’s apparent on Doctor Dark, which indulges in metal – the most mystifyingly looked down upon of genres. It’s a work that’s unlikely to appeal to anyone whose idea of a good night out is Ubu Roi on unicycles performed in the original French. Technically, it’s an avant-metal / neoclassical hybrid with themes of terminal illness, euthanasia and drug taking, with further inspiration coming from the now infamous Judas Priest subliminal messages trial of 1990. Moreover, Doctor Dark is structured as a three-movement opera made with the conductor Edwin Outwater and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, though at its core it’s a rock and roll record.
The opening ‘Prelude / Metal Madness’ is a reasonable slice of what to expect, where sorrow-drenched strings come up against the hard fury of a heavy thrash outfit featuring regular collaborators such as Eric Drew Feldman wailing: “I hate them! They hate me! I hate you, too!” It’s in stark contrast to the blissful sound of trickling water at the beginning of the track and the album, which we’ll return to again at the conclusion with ‘Ol’ Man River’ and ‘Take Me To The River’. According to The Residents, the water represents the endless flow that precedes and succeeds life – life itself is merely a brief, painful interruption from the rest of eternity. Or to put it another way: “Life is just a jizzy pisshole full of farts and empty manholes,” according to the track ‘Tension’.
The death of founding member Hardy Fox in 2018 has clearly had an impact on the collective, though they’ve rarely been ones to swerve death as a source for their art. Nevertheless, there’s a rare poignancy here on tracks like ‘Maggot Remembers’, at least when they’re not obliterating the tristesse with nullifying power chords. ‘She Was Never Lovelier’, meanwhile, plays with the idea of transient beauty, where everything is gradually dismantled and what we assumed to be true is subtly undermined by a quiet sense of terror. As for the heavy metal show trial that is referenced throughout, it’s something the collective have considered as source material since the infamous case back at the start of the 1990s. Finally realised more than three decades later, it becomes a Crucible-like indictment of our times, and if it’s an anachronism then it’s a welcome one, adding a layer of remove that enables us to observe with added objectivity.
Doctor Dark, then, is a remarkable late sonic salvo in a back catalogue full of startling shots fired. 2022’s much delayed film project Triple Trouble looked like it might be a valedictory squib (they somehow managed to get over the line in spite of COVID, the death of the actress Gerri Lawlor, and a production time of almost a decade), but it appears Dr Anastasia Dark isn’t finished yet. Should this release go as well as is hoped then The Cryptic Corporation is looking to stage it somewhere, though it’s unlikely there’ll be any unicycles involved. The Residents might consider life a painful blip but that doesn’t stop them being gluttons for punishment.
