review by daniel

1. Pop music is mostly a repetition of two types of musical and lyrical phrases: The verse and the chorus.
2. These elements repeat an average of three times in a “top-40” radio hit.
3. Cut out the fat and a pop song is only one minute long.
4. One minute is also the length of most commercials, and therefore, their corresponding jingles.
5. Jingles are the music of America.
Conclusion: This compact disc is terrific in shuffle play. To convert the jingles to pop music, program each song to repeat three times.

As you might have guessed from the quote from the album cover this is a rather unusual concept album, consisting of 40 one-minute tracks. It is obviously a mockery of pop music, but is it anything more than that?

Fortunately this is not the kind of mockery that focuses on the faults and make them worse, and thus apparent to everyone. Sure, that could have been amusing to hear, but not likely something you would listen to more than once. The Residents mocks pop music by demonstrating how it COULD be done; presenting 40 well-crafted and weird, but still catchy, tunes that work surprisingly well. The band (with guests Fred Firth and Chris Cutler from the Henry Cow camp) plays bass, guitars, keyboards (mainly non-eighties-sounding synths), various electronic devices and lots of percussion in the strangest possible way and completes the approach with silly voices and nonsense lyrics. The only thing that reminds me of pop music is the catchy melodies, that never really get too catchy. The catchiness is really a good thing since the music might have drifted too far into “Henry Cow territory”, and lost some of its appeal, without it.

You might suspect that the one-minute limit inevitably would result in some rather brutal editing of the songs. That is, however, not the case and the band manages to present most of the songs as if one minute were their natural length as well as keeping a decent flow throughout the album. Nice.