Friday, November 16, 2018

The Darkened Sky


Pere Ubu : Ubu Dance Party


"Mr Thomas's voice is that of a man muttering in a crowd. You think he's talking to himself until you realize he's talking to you."
-Greil Marcus

In November of 1978, Pere Ubu released their second album, Dub Housing on English Chrysalis which meant it was only available as an import even in the band's hometown of Cleveland. Singer David Thomas and most fans of the band consider this to be Pere Ubu's masterpiece. Where the debut, The Modern Dance, rocked, Dub Housing weaves in experimental synthy swoops, guitar lines and Thomas's high pitched absurdistt lyrics. The words most used to describe the album is "challenging". Critic Dave Marsh called it "Anti rock for anti-rockers. Boo".



Robert Christgau was one of the first critics to hail the album, grading Dub Housing with an A and writing:

Because I trust the way Ubu's visionary humor and crackpot commitment rocks out and/or hooks in for the sheer pleasure of it, I'm willing to go with their excursions into musique concrete, and on this record they get me somewhere. The death of Peter Laughner may well have deprived America of its greatest punk band, but the subsequent ascendancy of synth wizard Allen Ravenstine has defined a survival-prone community capable of bridging the '60s and the '80s without acting as if the '70s never happened. Imitating randomness by tucking randomlike sounds into deep but tactfully casual structures, joyfully confusing organic and inorganic sounds, they teach us how to live in the industrial shift--imaginatively!

From Ken Tucker writing for Rolling Stone:

Self-parodic, intense, austere and ribald, Pere Ubu presents itself as the cutting edge of nothing at all, making rock + roll out of art for art's sake.


From Trouser Press

The spectacular Dub Housing accentuates the more amorphous qualities of the band's sound, drawing heavily on synthesizer player Allen Ravenstine's utterly original soundscaping ability. Songs like "Codex," "Caligari's Mirror" and the ominous title track conjure up images straight out of art-house psychological horror films like Carnival of Souls. Simply one of the most important post-punk recordings


Pere Ubu in Sweden, 2011.

Thomas would tell Melody Maker 

"Ubu was a grotesque synthesis  of all that was ugly in human flesh. Why the band is called Pere Ubu has to do with a number of things I can't easily explain, but on the simplest level it has to do with the thing that I am in a lot of ways: a grotesque character, and the band has a grotesque character. What we are is not pretty."


No comments:

Post a Comment