Cloaked in anonymity, the Residents have spent fifteen years playfully dancing around music's strangest regions to create a vast, influential and mostly enjoyable body of willfully antimainstream work. Bizarre vocals, dizzying concepts and blithe disregard for rules and tradition are the hallmarks of this mysterious San Francisco group – the band's members are unnamed, always masked and have never been publicly identified – which has proven equally adept at audio realizations of Eskimo culture, intricate narrative epics and scabrous parodies of Sixties pop.

Puckish reinterpretation of musical icons has always been a Residential hobby; the Beatles and Rolling Stones were early targets. Recent albums have paid affectionate, if patently irreverent, tribute to James Brown, Hank Williams and others. With The King and Eye, the Residents confront rock's ultimate figure, launching an invasive cultural exploration into Elvis Presley's musical core. More insidiously perceptive than most critics, the Residents dismantle and rebuild sixteen of his standards, from "All Shook Up" to "Burning Love," offering radical new ways to hear the commonplace.

Cruelly but kindly pushing the songs to the limits of recognizability, the Residents deliberately strip away everything familiar to reveal previously hidden depths of passion, leering sexuality and gripping drama. Such dusty jewels as "Viva Las Vegas," "Return to Sender" (expanded into an epic of misery and abandonment) and "Teddy Bear" are reborn in twisted melodies, imposed rhythms, radical rearrangements and distended vocal phrasings rendered with an exaggerated Southwestern drawl. Along with the provocative music is additional food for thought: In the five segments of "The Baby King," an adult and two young children discuss Elvis's psyche and symbolism.

The King and Eye is no mere Cat in the Hat mischief. Focusing a giant jaundiced eye on the unassailable achievements of a genuine rock god, the Residents have made a powerful and passionate statement about the man, the myth and the music that is bewitchingly entertaining and brilliantly enlightening. (RS 571)

IRA ROBBINS