*** The Residents

OUR TIRED, OUR POOR, OUR HUDDLED MASSES

(Rykodisc)

These are the guys with heads that look like big bloodshot eyeballs. Thirty albums in 25 years. Possibly you went through a phase with them.

Anyway, this is their big retrospective double-CD, and it's a bit spotty. Not that any bases are left untouched -- you get the better cover versions (Hank Williams's "Jambalaya," and the Stones' "Satisfaction," to name two), a good sampling from their prodigiously imaginative and incidentally new-wavy 1980 Commercial Album (all cuts one minute long), a condensed version of The Third Reich 'N' Roll (1975), where the music sounds presciently industrial and the singer sounds drunk, and four songs from the consensus favorite, Duck Stab/Buster & Glen (1977-'78). It's just that surrealistic, disjunctive satire becomes a bit much stretched over two discs, and there are time-suspending episodes where you may wish you were doing something else. Verdict: for fans, redundant; for everyone else -- oh, why not give it a try.

-- Richard C. Walls