Beautiful Eyes

***Beautiful Eyes*** is rarities compilation by The Residents, released on July 16th, 2010, through the Robot Selling Device. It focuses on the "beautiful but cold" music throughout the group's history and is described as a "great late night listen."

A reviewer receiving a promotional copy of the release noted that it arrived "by email and [contained] absolutely no press release." The compilation was reissued on CD by Klanggalerie on November 14th, 2020.

## Background

With the advent of easy online music sales, The Residents opened 'Robot Selling Device,' a website dedicated to selling digital versions of existing Residents' releases, as well as new hyper-niche download-only products, the likes of which usually would not be worth the pressing fees.

The Residents eventually decided that this format would be a perfect format for their rarities collections, which allowed the group to release shelved material as part of a new album. By 2009, the group had already released the El Año Del Muerto and The Bridegroom of Blood rarities collections through the digital platform.

The group decided to theme the album around their low mood, atmospheric, and creepy material, choosing to ignore their more bombastic and loud pieces to showcase their *beautiful eyes*.

The month prior, the group released what has been regularly seen as this album's companion piece, Morning Music, a digital 'Best Of' album, collecting released material by the group which would be appropriate for morning listening.

In 2020 Klanggalerie released a remastered 10th-anniversary CD version of the album.

### Unreleased Tracks

*Beautiful Eyes* features primarily previously released material. However, it does feature a handful of tracks that were previously unavailable. These new tracks include "VOM Theme" (an outtake from *The Voice of Midnight*), "D Of S" (a demo track later used as the outro to "The Black Behind" from *The Bunny Boy*), "Saturnalia (Binaural)" (an extended binaural mix of "War Zone" from *Dollar General*) and "Pinkrosebuds," an excerpt from an instrumental re-imagining of "Blue Rosebuds," later released in full on the compilation *D\*ck S\*ab - 35th Anniversary*.

The closing track, "Available Piece," is an extended instrumental segment from the group's 1978 album *Not Available.* This excerpt is otherwise unavailable and was even excluded from the 2019 pREServed reissue of the album (although keen listeners can faintly hear it throughout "New Mexico Dream").

The other exclusive track is an early instrumental version of "The Old Woman," from the 1994 album *Gingerbread Man*; this version doesn't include the "Gingerbread Man" motif in the intro or the "internal monologue" section at the song's end.

## Reception

When the album was reviewed by Christel Loar for PopMatters in 2010, they gave it a 7/10

### Legacy

On Discogs, the album has a 4.19 / 5 rating. On Amazon it has 4.5/5

## Track listing

1. What Have My Chickens Done Now? (Instrumental) (2:47)
2. Pinkrosebuds (2:04)
3. Notchi (2:22)
4. Ode To Billy Joe (4:36)
5. Inner Space (3:06)
6. Return To Sender (2:52)
7. Cold Metal Strikes A Soldier's Bible (2:57)
8. Forty-Four No More (3:37)
9. Dreams (Instrumental) (1:34)
10. The Whispering Boy (3:03)
11. Strange Culture Cue 2 (2:21)
12. D Of S (2:34)
13. My Brother Paul (3:01)
14. Day 11 (2:51)
15. Saturnalia (Binaural) (5:45)
16. Bathsheba Bathes (2:48)
17. The Black Behind (Arkansas version) (3:43)
18. The Old Woman (Early instrumental version) (2:24)
19. VOM Theme (1:29)
20. Available Piece (5:06)

## Credits

#### 2020 release

* Remastered by Christian Loebenstein
* Images by Hardy Fox
* Layout by Lisa Robotka
* Thanks to Homer Flynn, Brian Poole and Steven Kloman
* Issued under license from Cherry Red Records Ltd.

## Liner notes

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. You hear that all the time. When the eyes you are talking about are those of The Residents it means something different. In this case, the eyeball masks long used by the group were always a mysterious factor. The Residents' sense of beauty was one of distance, even a calculated distance. And so it is with this music which is beautiful but cold, you can listen but not possess. This is a great late-night listen.

There are a number of unusual items in this collection, including a binaural experiment that must be experienced with headphones.

## See also

* Robot Selling Device
* *Summer Tunes*
* *Morning Music*
* *Smell My Picture*
* X Is For Xtra

## Extended links and references

* *Beautiful Eyes* at Robot Selling Device (archived)
* *Beautiful Eyes* at Discogs

1. ↑ "The Residents: Beautiful Eyes" review by Christel Loar, PopMatters, August 16th 2010
2. ↑ https://www.popmatters.com/129344-the-residents-beautiful-eyes-2496156077.html