The Residents: Freak Show

"We couldn't believe it when we heard that one of our favorite art/rock bands wanted to do a CD-ROM based on their Freak Show album. The locale is the macabre world of the carnival, with the real action to be found by sneaking out of the Big Top and into the trailers of the freaks themselves. As we made our way through the nooks and crannies of this animated twilight zone we could see why Freak Show was four years in the making. We have never seen computer-generated artwork so gorgeous, and so truly strange: sweat gleams, candles flicker, flesh quivers. Claymation meets Tales from the Crypt. Not surprisingly, the Residents break new ground intellectually as well as esthetically: this is a work of fiction, driven by character to a degree that's pretty unheard of in this medium.

Each trailer is home to a creature only the Residents' warped sensibilities could have cooked up. Harry the Head looks out fetchingly from his jar of formaldehyde; Wanda reveals the lurid secret that led to a life of sucking worms; bouncing Benny echibits his Bump; the eyeball-headed Residents, freaks themselves, perform onstage. Each trailer is also a puzzle. No tour guides stand by to help us navigate this maze of weirdness, where a click of the electronic eyeball might trigger ghoulish revelations and transform us from voyeurs to uneasy confidantes.

Freak Show is also an interactive tour of the Residents' entire career, featuring album covers, clips from their music videos, and memorabilia. It's dark, it's eerie, it's a good time. Enter this world in the spirit in which the Residents' dedicated it to P.T. Barnum, 'whose legacy of 'suckers' and 'freaks' defined the yin and yang of popular culture.'" -- from Voyager