The Residents | Fully Seated

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Anonymity used to be a career-ending choice and this band made it the entire point, spending five decades on stage with their faces covered while releasing records that treat pop music as an anthropological specimen. Nobody agrees on who is in it. That is deliberate and it has held. What gets lost in the eyeball costume is that the work itself is genuinely unsettling — song cycles about American violence, obsessive tribute albums, an approach to storytelling closer to outsider art than to rock. Seated shows suit the current material, which is more narrative than noise. The audience is one of the strangest and most pleasant in music: people who have followed this since vinyl, art students, and a scattering of the merely curious who will leave changed. Music at 8:00 PM in Ventura on East Thompson Boulevard. It falls the night before Thanksgiving, which is either the worst or the best possible preparation depending on your family.