ROADWORMS: THE BERLIN SESSIONS

Roadworms is a studio recording of a couple of songs from Wormwood, played in those live versions that was used on concerts. Now I may be biased cause I thought Wormwood was pretty good at what it was all about, nice underground pop songs which made darker stories from the Bible downright cute, be it about faith, murder, circumcision, creation or genocide. But songs on Roadworms are made longer, dissonant, and too weird. Just one example would be enough, like "How To Get A Head" was a nice song with I presume Molly Harvey as a vocal but on this album the song is slowed down as is her singing, and nothing musical is going on in the background, maybe some guitar noodling here and there. Even when the song does take off it doesn't really go anywhere. Beside the vocals, the sound I think is generally lacking in quality as you can feel everything in the studio, especially vocals are the ones that pick up a lot of reverberation. Whether this was intentional I don't know, but it does distract a bit as does a lot of "music" sound too improvised and noisy.

Besides the first song "Un-American Band" all the other ones can be found in original format on Wormwood; I'm guessing the inspiration for the song came from protests about the Wormwood tour. If you're a fan of RESIDENTS live recordings then you might be interested in this but otherwise I recommend the original songs which are more accessible and less experimental than this one.