This is grim, downcast music with a lot of lounge-funk drum patterns and minor-key Twin Peaks pads. Rilla Contemplates Love suggests a hermetic profile. David Bowie and Leonard Cohen anticipated their deaths with grim swan-songs, but Fox gives us an album about a gorilla.

This year, he released two autobiographical albums on top of this cipher. He departed the band in late 2016, he says, citing a conflict with the more live-centric, theatrical ambitions of the “singing Resident” (most likely one Homer Flynn). Sebald, “Men and animals regard each other across a gulf of mutual incomprehension.” Would an ape understand this album better than us? Or a child? Is there really anything to understand?įox passed away in October 2018 from brain cancer at age 73, not long after revealing himself as the primary composer in the Residents, the Bay Area-based art collective known for protecting their identities with massive eyeball masks and other whimsical accoutrements. Maybe it’s meant to simulate how unknowable the brain of an animal truly is, even one so closely related to us. Lyrics about sharing condoms and owning cars don’t.

Or does it? Lyrics about touching one’s crotch and peeing in a pool seem consistent with the behavior of a great ape. The late Hardy Fox’s swansong, Rilla Contemplates Love, is a circular, impenetrable album that approximates the thought processes of a kept gorilla.

25 minus minutes hardy fox