Residents of a World of Mystery

In this celebrity-besotted culture, sometimes it pays to be anonymous. The San Francisco quartet the Residents has somehow managed to keep its collective identity a secret for close to 30 years--an astonishing feat in this Internet age of privacy pillaging.

As the years have progressed, the mystique of the Residents has only grown, a testament not only to the allure of the unknown, but also to the band’s commitment to a singular vision that’s equal parts cultural critique, musical deconstruction and theater of the absurd. The band’s outlandish sci-fi get-ups, especially the giant, top-hatted eyeball masks that have become underground icons, provide comic whimsy and a perfect way to subjugate egos in the service of its warped art.

In a rare live performance Friday at UCLA’s Royce Hall, the Residents turned in a set that roamed across its three-decade career, much to the delight of the die-hard crowd. The presentation was typically cryptic and shrouded in mystery. The band wore black bodysuits and miner’s flashlights on their heads, and played behind what looked to be muslin scrims.

One band member controlled a DVD player, which displayed the band’s oeuvre of short films--drawn from its recently released compilation “Icky Flix”--on a screen overhead. This show was, in essence, an elaborate form of karaoke, in which the band replaced the films’ soundtracks with live accompaniment.

Although the Residents are pioneers of marrying visuals to rock, the band’s early films, with their self-consciously avant-garde thematic disjunctions and grotesque imagery, look like precocious art-school projects now. The clips for such songs as “Harry the Head” and “Renaldo and the Loaf,” which employ a kind of mutant dream logic, have lost their power to shock.

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The more recent projects, which use computer-generated images, worked the sound and vision equation more effectively. “The Gingerbread Man” morphed a nursery rhyme into a dark jeremiad against the consumerist excesses of postwar America.

In its evocation of an American dystopia peopled by aging rock stars, robotic housewives and artistic sellouts, “Gingerbread Man” was downright creepy, if a tad overwrought. The band’s Grand Guignol soundscape of wheezing synthesizers, processional electronic drums and distorted guitar provided an apt counterpoint to the film’s bleak scenario.

The Residents’ gleeful desecrations of well-known songs have long been a band staple. At Royce Hall, they transformed “Land of 1000 Dances” into a gothic death knell, while the chest-thumping bravado of James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” was effectively neutered by the screechy delivery of guest singer Molly Harvey, who looked like a refugee from “The Rocky Horror Show.”