The key band members are from Shreveport, La., and the disc has a Southern Gothic ambiance that would make Flannery O'Connor feel at home. Simply put, it's a dead-of-night stunner that crawls under your skin and stays there.Īs with Freak Show, the Residents don't 'appear' in Bad Day, yet their fingerprints are all over it, from the haunting kitchen-sink dialogue to the ticky-tacky songs to the general atmosphere of humane decay. Now the group's latest project, The Residents' Bad Day on the Midway, expands on that expansion. Its 1994 disc, Freak Show, vastly expanded the medium's narrative and graphics possibilities in a way that discs as varied as The Artist (Formerly Known as Prince) Interactive and Under a Killing Moon immediately picked up on. Yet a funny thing's happened in the last few years: The band has become the single most influential artistic force in multimedia CD-ROM. Aggressively conceptual, obscurely witty, so leery of fame that its anonymous band members favor giant eyeball masks in concert, the Residents pretty much define the words underground and cult. But consider yourself forgiven if it's passed under your personal pop-music radar. The San Francisco avant-garde rock group the Residents has been around for more than 20 years.

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