This came out in 2000 — or at least that’s when I got it. Here’s what I said about it back then (with some minor editing):
With their anonymous giant-eyeball masks, multi-media performance-art aesthetic and primitively creepy, bleepy synth-noise sound, San Francisco’s much-beloved Residents clealry inhabit own weird little world.
So naturally, when these true originals set out to honour some musical forefathers, the results did not amount to your typical collections of covers. On these delightfully skewed discs (released in the ’80s on vinyl as Volumes 1 and 2 of The American Composers Series), the foursome bring their chilly, Pee-Wee’s Playhouse vibe to the works of James Brown, George Gershwin, Hank Williams and John Philip Sousa. If you can imagine alien robots trying to play Billie Jean while warbling country lyrics through Cher’s AutoTuned voice box, then you’ll love their stab at Kaw-liga. And that pales next to the Brown portion, which recreates Side 1 of Soul Brother No. 1’s seminal Live At The Apollo album — right down to the crowd noise and between-song banter — and teleports it to the Star Wars cantina.
It’s perhaps the only disc ever that will satisfy fans of both Brown and The Residents — with the possible exception of German techno artist lb’s new Pop Artificielle. I’ll bet lb — aka Frankfurt’s Uwe Schmidt — has worn out his share of Residents discs, not to mention a few Kraftwerk albums. Here, he splits the difference, filtering 10 classic pop tunes through a similarly cracked filter of squishy beatboxes, squiggly synths and synthesized vocals. His cover of JB’s Super Bad may seem derivative, but unlike the icy Residents, lb really does have soul. His alien-robot takes on Donovan’s Sunshine Superman, ABC’s Be Near Me and David Bowie’s Ashes to Ashes all jive to a definite, if deformed groove. The cherries on top of this kooky sundae, however, are the mesmerizing deconstructions of John Lennon’s Jealous Guy and The Rolling Stones’ Angie, which get stripped down to their raw nerve endings and rewired for life on Mars. He may call it artificielle, but it sure sounds like the real deal to me.
