She said she wished to die in terror
Screaming in the night
With or without their giant veiny eyeball masks, The Residents sure know how to haunt your dreams.Screaming in the night
Albums
- The album contains forty disturbing cover versions of Top 40 songs from the 1960s. Among many bizarre warpings, the bitter break-up garage-pop standard "Hey Little Girl" becomes a genuinely chilling piece with a derisive, almost threatening vocal and grimly march-like music which features plenty of ominous buzzing, droning and rumbling noises in the background (power tools? Brrr...). It must have been a very bitter breakup, indeed.
- After "A Double Shot of My Baby's Love" the music just stops and you suddenly hear a car crashing, guns shooting, a baby crying and an air-raid siren.
- The cover of "Yummy Yummy Yummy (I Have Love in My Tummy)" also sounds disturbing during the second half.
- The album cover of "Duck Stab" features someone sticking a knife inside a duck while showing a Slasher Smile towards the camera. The fact that it is printed primarily in black and red makes it even more unnerving.
- The Last Note Nightmare that ends "Elvis and His Boss", where the already squawky instrumental pretty much collapses in on itself. By the end of the song, it's practically just noise.
- The promotional video for "Hello Skinny" mainly centers around images of a disturbed-looking, emaciated man with dark circles around his eyes, who is presumably meant to be portraying "Skinny" himself. The backstory to the video is both creepy and sad: The man was a mental patient who was released due to hospital budget cuts, who the group met and asked to be in their video. Certain shots had to be rushed because he had a mental breakdown on set. They never learned his real name - since he thought he was Brigitte Bardot, they just called him Brigitte. After completing the video, he took a bus home and was never heard from again.
- This album often has haunting images, but at least every song is below the one-minute mark.
- "My Work Is So Behind" is about a man Driven to Suicide. A pitched-up chorus narrates the act itself:
''The fire sparkled in his smile
And then beneath his skin
And so he jumped right in, right in
And so he jumped right in- "Die in Terror" has a creepy title to start with. But the sound of those footsteps during the intro... (shudder)
- The in-house developed music video
for 2004's The Commercial DVD, in contrast to the much more mellowed take from Incorect for the same project, is simply disturbing. It primarily focuses on a woman's face as she undergoes Rapid Aging, complete with the flesh around her mouth melting and stretching downwards, welding it shut. She fades away and her eyes spin onto a beating heart floating over a silhouette of her face, all of which is depicted above a wavering red background.
- The in-house developed music video
- "The Act of Being Polite" is also frightening. Especially when it implies the "something" the woman was wrapping up is an injury the speaker carelessly caused.
- "The Talk of Creatures" is probably the epitome of Nothing Is Scarier on this album. Minimalist instrumentation, Hardy's detached, weary, almost pained vocals, and those weird, ambiguous lyrics.
The talk of creatures in my spine- "Margaret Freeman" sports a creaky harmonica, half-tuned guitars, and loud, churning percussion; frightful enough in their own right. But then comes Andy Partridge, sounding like a coked-up Danny Elfman as he sings about his crush and her Abusive Parents.
Tunes of Two Cities
- The concept of Tunes of Two Cities is that all of its songs represent the music of either the Chubs or the Moles (the two societies depicted in Mark of the Mole): The songs designated as Mole songs can be pretty unnerving, since they usually revolve around harsh, mechanical rhythms, deliberately grating, high-pitched tones, and occasional chants performed in an unintelligible, deep voice. Even the Chub songs, which are primarily influenced by jazz and big band music, can be off-putting: rendering that musical style on 1980s-era synthesizers leads to a bit of an Uncanny Valley effect, which is added to by chords and rhythms that are deliberately "off", not to mention things like the air raid siren-like wailing on "Mousetrap".
God in Three Persons
- The literal and figurative climax of "Kiss of Flesh".
Animal Lover
- When not beautiful and morose, their album Animal Lover tends towards the seriously disturbing.
Tweedles!
- The album revolves around the thoughts, escapades and internal conflict of a Depraved Bisexual. Quite the disturbing listen.
Singles
- Their disturbing cover of "I Can't Get No Satisfaction", which mentions that the narrator stabs and kicks whenever he can't get popcorn at the movies, among other things.
- The entire final section of Baby Sex, when its not incredibly silly - hell, even when it is incredibly silly - is pure Nightmare Fuel for the uninitiated.
- There is something rather odd with Loser ≅ Weed. It seems as if its tempo is constantly wavering while a disorienting piano plays a repetitive melody on a seemingly endless loop. There's also a weird part where the song just stops, leaving the listeners with nothing but minimal electronic ambience, only for the song to suddenly jump back to life. And that is without mentioning the Word Salad Lyrics.
