STARS & HANK

Past "The Commercial Album", The Residents have been in an era of hit-or-miss, love-it-or-hate-it, take-it-or-leave- it albums. But the second in a series of albums of the anonymous kooks covering great composers and musicians who came before them, here Hank Williams Sr. and John Philip Sousa, is a rare and perhaps only masterpiece from them past 1980. Side One covers Hank I, the founding father of country music and one of its vanguards even decades after his untimely death. The Residents wonderfully cover a few classics of his into variously weird or eerie directions. Those tracks given the latter treatment, such as "Six More Miles", are the major shining moments of this record. Side Two redoes Sousa, the American March King, and this is where things go masterfully off the rails. Now long tried and true patriotic marches are turned into horrorshows done in the massively whacked and parodic fashion as some of the covers on "The Third Reich 'N' Roll", done in an ever seguing and theme sharing suite style. As well, samples of crowds and sirens figure. This is The Residents at their best, a perfect companion to their legendary second album and its own gem.