The Residents – ‘Animal Lover’ – Cherry Red
Animal Lover has always carried a strange reputation. Some listeners treat it like a puzzle that demands explanation and a map, a late‑period curio that sits awkwardly in the Residents’ catalogue, too murky to decode and too melancholy to shrug off. Listening now, with the benefit of distance and without the noise of mid‑2000s expectations, the album feels far more deliberate than its reputation suggests. It behaves like something grown rather than designed, a record that accumulated its shape through years of drift, false starts and emotional residue.
The booklet for the new pREServed edition makes this clearer than any retrospective ever could. The Residents spent years circling ideas that never quite settled. Civil War sketches, abandoned operas, a detour into mass hysteria, even a stretch where the album was still called ‘Box of Rocks’ while the artwork was already underway. Then there is the title they finally chose, lifted from an Alex de Renzy bestiality film that caused a minor stir in San Francisco in 1970. The band went to the screening, lasted a few minutes, got bored and walked out, although they agreed the film had a great name. That detail says more about the album’s internal logic than any neat concept summary. The animal‑perspective idea had been “floating around for a while”, and they had simply never bothered to mention it.
What gives the album its power is the melancholy that seeped through from ‘Demons Dance Alone’. The booklet describes it as a lingering mood, a kind of post‑9/11 exhaustion that never fully lifted. You can hear it in the pacing, in the way the vocals sag at the edges, in the way the arrangements feel both lush and airless. The animal stories included in the booklet sharpen this mood rather than explaining it. A tiger who misses the man who tried to feed her dog meat. A pigeon watching its world shrink to a single human. A chimp living in luxury but unable to fill the hole left by her mother. These stories are not metaphors in the neat literary sense. They show the same quiet despair that runs through the album, the same sense of creatures trying to make sense of human behaviour and finding only confusion.
Some critics over the years have tried to decode the album as if it were a locked box. Others have dismissed it as quirky or opaque. The problem with both approaches is that they assume the album is built around a single idea that can be extracted and held up to the light. The archival material shows something different. The Residents were working through a long period of uncertainty, and the music reflects that. It is a record about instinct, fear, tenderness and the strange ways humans behave when they think no one is watching. The animals are not symbols, they’re witnesses to the madness.
Musically, the album remains one of the Residents’ richest late‑period works. The textures feel hand-stitched, full of small details that only reveal themselves when you stop trying to decode the record and let it breathe. The vocals carry a kind of bruised clarity, fragile without tipping into vomity sentimentality. The arrangements feel layered in a way that suggests years of ideas settling into each other, not a collage of leftovers. Even the buried animal sounds the booklet insists are tucked into every track feel less like a gimmick and more like a quiet acknowledgement of the album’s perspective.
The booklet also includes a line that lands with a thud of bleak humour. In explaining the album’s concept, the Residents write that from an animal’s perspective, the human race would appear “dumb as a box of rocks”. It’s a joke, but it is also the album’s emotional centre. The animals in these stories watch humans with a mixture of confusion, pity and fear. The music does the same. It observes rather than judges, circling and then deciding to take a wide berth.
What makes ‘Animal Lover’ feel so alive today is the way it captures a moment when the world was shifting under everyone’s feet. Wars, hysteria, ecological dread, the slow erosion of certainty. The booklet notes that each stage of the album’s evolution reflected what was happening around the band at the time, which feels about right. The record absorbs its era without being trapped by it, meaning it sounds even more relevant now, when the same anxieties have only deepened.
In hindsight, the album’s reputation as a difficult or confusing work seems misplaced. It is one of the Residents’ most emotionally direct records, even if it hides that directness behind masks and fur and feathers. The animals are not a concept; they’re a way of looking. They allow the band to step back from the human mess and see it with fresh eyes. The result is an album that feels tender, wounded and strangely hopeful (though perhaps not for Mankind). It trusts the listener to sit and listen without feeling the need to unscramble it. Because, quite frankly, if you’re listening to music to write a manifesto from, you’re a bit mental.
With the shadows of its era finally receding, it feels like one of the Residents’ clearest statements. A record about the strange, sad beauty of being alive among other creatures who are trying, in their own ways, to understand us. Pity them.
Daz Lawrence
