Fridge / The Residents

Fridge Brilliance

• The Looped Lyrics in "Smelly Tongues" directly refer to three of the five human senses, namely smell, sight and touch: "Smelly tongues looked just as they felt". So where are the other two? Tongues are what you taste with, and since it's a song, the audience themselves are hearing it.
• John Phillip Sousa once wrote an essay called "The Menace of Mechanical Music", arguing that recorded music and early mechanical instruments (like the player piano) would take away jobs from working musicians and cause "social decline" - so side two of Stars and Hank Forever, a recorded medley of Sousa pieces performed entirely with synthesized instruments, can be viewed as an especially ironic way to pay tribute to him.
• "Rest Aria" is a Pun-Based Title merging a musical Aria with a "rest area", as in a public facility next to a motorway - one possible interpretation is that, as a Surprisingly Gentle Song, it's an audio "rest area" for the listener; the music gradually becoming more dissonant and sinister towards the end of the song could even symbolize how some actual rest areas are reputed to be unsafe at night. Another is that, since the most traditional definition of a an "aria" is a vocal piece, yet the song is fully instrumental, it's a "rest aria" as in an "aria" where the vocal part consists entirely of rests.