Pere Ubu - Modern Dance

The greatest American band of the Seventies (and one of the greatest of all time) owes its name to the play “Ubu Roi” by French writer Alfred Jarry (1873-1907): a work defined by its taste for satire, its unbridled verbal fury and its intolerance of convention.

When Pere Ubu (the protagonist of the play) arrives in Cleveland, Ohio, around the mid-Seventies, his nature as a poetic rebel clashes with an industrialized reality, full of urban neuroses and fears. The Cuyahoga River, flowing freely in a never-ending back-and-forth of waste of every kind, indifferently caresses a city on the verge of collapse, a close relative of many other American urban realities of the time.

After the economic boom of the Sixties, in the following decade a worldwide economic crisis helped plunge into despair and the darkest depression many of those who believed in a long golden age. But it was above all the young who were hit by an existential boredom bordering on the most tragic nihilism. The punk era arose precisely from this socio-economic background. And punk did nothing but enact a desperate rejection of the world as it was taking shape in the era of oil crises and the advent of the “personal computer”. But while punks were not particularly aware of the squalid reality surrounding them, limiting themselves to offering violent, self-destructive slogans, the new generation dug even deeper, reaching a territory where the nullification of reality hits extreme levels.

Cleveland was one of the key centers of this nihilistic phase. The local youth - those least willing to follow the dictates of a crude and petty life - ended up sacrificing their energies either on the altar of rock'n'roll or on the bastard, utterly unsacred altar of drugs: Peter Laughner managed to immolate himself on both fronts. A disillusioned intellectual, a poet enamored of lysergic expansion, Peter had always firmly believed in music's ability to represent the convulsions and hysterics of post-atomic man. A lover of the Velvet Underground, MC5, the Stooges and psychedelic rock in general, he quickly became (also thanks to his knowledge of the punk revolution underway in New York) a central figure of the local scene, which since the late Sixties had already been trying to push rock toward unknown shores, thanks to bands such as Electric Eels, Left End and Mirrors (later Styrenes) (as Charlotte Pressler recalls, it was precisely these bands that forged the aesthetic of what would one day be called “new wave”).

In 1973, Laughner co-founded Rocket From The Tombs with his friend David Thomas (a former rock critic), an outfit devoted to a kind of punk (though perhaps "garage-rock" is the better term) that was ungainly and noisy, dense with psychedelic fragments and orgiastic emphasis (their greatest classic is "Sonic Reducer," a violent anthem dedicated to the memory of the Velvets and the Stooges).

It was Thomas who gradually became the central figure of the new band: one of the greatest singers of all time, a close relative of Beefheart and Tim Buckley, a sort of "negative" crooner, he was a big man who perfectly embodied Jarry's burlesque mask, even though, deep down, his psyche was tormented by ancestral fears and anguish, always ready to erupt into cathartic, devastating performances. In essence, Thomas represented the band's grotesque, surreal side, perfectly balanced by Laughner's intellectual bent.

When Thomas was replaced by Stiv Bators, Peter and David decided to form a new band, renamed Pere Ubu. Something, though, had changed. On the surface, sure, you could still feel punk's fury, its brutal nihilistic charge; but deep down, a remarkable visionary quality was slowly taking shape, born out of the most "outrageous" and experimental strain of psychedelia (Red Crayola above all) and a certain strand of the avant-garde (musique concrète especially).

It's at this stage that the personality of keyboardist Allen Ravenstine, a mad synthesizer terrorist, begins to emerge: his playing owes more to abstract painting than to any musical influence. His ability to "violate" the rhythms laid down by drummer Scott Krauss and bassist Tim Wright (later replaced by Tony Maimone) with sonic gargles and noise of every kind is unrivaled in rock history. His EML synthesizer became the chosen site for an assault on the musical world (and beyond) of the post-industrial era. (The EML was an extremely rare analog machine used in technical schools; it was manufactured for a brief period by a Connecticut company, which later turned to the more lucrative business of making satellites for military use.)

The new lineup's first official performance was at the Viking Saloon, at the end of 1975. Before that, Ubu had already released their first self-produced single: "30 Seconds Over Tokio/Heart Of Darkness," put out on their own label, Hearthan. One of the most programmatic singles of all time and a sonic archetype for countless musical "deconstructions" to come, the journey to Tokio is a monument to total devolution, to the massacre of man in the age of machines. Laughner's circular riff, Wright's magnetic bass, Thomas's voice coming from somewhere deep in his gut, Ravenstine unrolling half-hidden carpets of synthetic shading, then the synth takes flight, setting off the first noise-rock charge into liberating chaos, out of which a poisonous synthetic residue re-emerges. How to describe the bass gliding over the rhythm that Krauss drives adrift? How to describe the ending, where, amid advancing chaos, Ravenstine leaves his mark, slashing everything as if he were a Jackson Pollock on acid caught at the window by an atomic blast? Throughout the track an extreme tension runs through, and here and there cinematic flashes of rare beauty swirl by. No other band has ever come so close to the apocalyptic "concreteness" of the end, of civilization's twilight and its "passing beyond."

The B-side is a tribal dance diluted in bass pulses and amid the metallic tremors of the guitar. The "heart of darkness" beats out, relentlessly, the time of abandonment, the time of "extreme poverty," as Hölderlin would put it. In March '76 came the second single: "Final Solution/Cloud 149." "Final Solution" in particular defines the band's ideology even more sharply: telling in this sense are the lines "I don't need a cure/ I need a final solution," the voice of an entire generation that feels the meaninglessness of being as a fatal illness. Musically, the track is a reworking of Blue Cheer's "Summertime Blues" (the forefathers of stoner rock): but "reworking" should be understood in a very "creative" sense. In fact, Ubu drift almost entirely away from the original, dropping its garage-psychedelic vein into a post-atomic mood, torn apart here and there by synthetic explosions and dazzled by a tragic, clownish visionary quality. Above it all rises the solo that Peter Laughner unleashes in thrilling (and thrillingly unhinged) fashion just before the final long take: an evocative swarm of notes that seem determined, at any cost, to break through their own literal meaning, smash through the wall, or whatever stands in for it, and peer over to the other side. (And when you consider that, not long after, at just 24, Peter would be killed by a wretched overdose, the whole thing can't help but send a chill down your spine.) "Cloud 149," on the flip side, is a vaudeville number in new wave guise, driven along at a galloping pace.

By January 1977, two more singles had reached stores: "Street Waves/My Dark Ages" and "Modern Dance/Heaven," whose A-sides would land directly on their debut LP, while "My Dark Ages" and "Heaven" are opposites of one another: the former a dark, resigned sonic abstraction, the latter sunny and almost reggae-like (even if Thomas's voice still carries a whiff of something sickly and listless). All the singles released between 1975 and 1980 would later be collected on "Terminal Tower." By early 1978, with Laughner lost along the way, the band's lineup was: Thomas, Herman (the other guitarist), Maimone, Ravenstine and Krauss. It's hard to say what was going through their heads before they walked into the studio to record one of the greatest musical works of all time. What I do know for certain is that, on first listen, you could make out, on one hand, all the rage and intoxication of 1960s garage, spiced with touches of Beefheart and a pinch of Red Crayola, free-form music, avant-garde and theater of the absurd. And you could also glimpse, in passing, the apocalypse and its tragic beauty threading through Thomas's lyrics. There was something else lurking in the grooves, but in the ineffability of the aesthetic moment it all dissolved into a background silence, where our most intimate, inaccessible depths reside. In short, this is music that deserves an attentive, devoted listen. Total music, in the sense that then as now, more than a mere record, The Modern Dance is a genuine essay on the decadence of our time, a poem about the spiritual distance separating us from the world and from the eternalizing ecstasy of Rilke's "Open." In 36 minutes and 20 seconds, Pere Ubu managed to condense the essence of an age steeped in nihilism, devolution, irrationalism, mechanization and fear. But let's take it in order.

Opening The Modern Dance (1978) is "Non Alignment Pact," introduced by the hiss of the synth and Tom Herman's riff in the style of Chuck Berry (this very tension between old and new makes clear, right from the start, what will be the musical landscape of the whole record: a collision between old and new, between the shadow of garage - or proto-punk - and modern technology filtered through a deconstructive, impressionistic lens - many critics of the time, in fact, spoke of a process of "primitivization of modernism"). The track is frantic, a disjointed orgy steeped in industrial-age tribalism, with Thomas's powerful voice clashing against dissonances, mistuned notes, harmonic scars and a chaotic backdrop. Maimone's bass and Krauss's drums interact beautifully, weaving a Stooges-like rhythmic fabric. But it's Ravenstine above all who pushes the track beyond any "ordinary" structure, with a revolutionary use of keyboards, caught up in some terribly concrete and delirious creative ecstasy.

Next comes the title track, the masterpiece within the masterpiece: Ubu create the archetype of the "modern dance," layering onto a funk-derived rhythmic structure (though bent toward something technological and glacial) vivid scenes of the working man's condition in the age of machines and alienation. Cinematic sequences run through the mind, from Chaplin to Fritz Lang, while over the indistinct murmur of the inorganic crowd an assault of disastrous distortions rains down, leaving no escape: "confusion is next," as Sonic Youth would sing years later. Laughner vents the tension built up in the opening free-jazz jam (with horn and sax) into another devastating, merciless garage maelstrom, with shrieking horns and guitar, in an infernal, neurotic atmosphere.

"Street Waves" takes off on a powerful bassline, brushed at its edges by a synthetic wind, rotten with atomic veils, and by an abrasive, distant guitar. Bit by bit the guitar rises to the fore, bit by bit the wind grows more menacing, until it's left alone amid the rubble, accompanied by the bass and the growl of the six-string crashing against the wall, releasing once more, in that collision, the initial fury. As the invisible threat of radioactive fallout slowly burns itself out, the "modern dance" arrives at "Chinese Radiation," opened by Herman with a soft, malignant arpeggio, carried out to open water by a bass that echoes and folds back on itself, injected with synthetic colors that fade away in the distance, pushed aside by a voice that knows nothing but its own monstrous, unchanging hollows. At a certain point the crowd starts applauding ever more loudly, and a bestial bacchanal resurfaces, before Thomas is swallowed up by the delirious crowd. What survives is a desperate voice, cradled within abyssal notes played on piano by a ghost in a dark room with no way out.

The only track written by Laughner, "Life Stinks" is the record's punk moment, sung in a disjointed fashion by Thomas and framed by a downpour of synthetic sounds courtesy of Ravenstine's madness. The latter also lends his analog gloom to the opening of "Real World," a bloated, dazed slab of funk. Krauss and Maimone trade off in the interludes with a class that would put any rhythm section to shame. And then it all climbs up scaffolds of keyboard insolence, goliardic vocal ascents and anarchic screams.

Amid the general silence comes another atonal hiss, coming and going, before letting itself be caressed by bass and guitar that embroider the background with blades to the heart, eyes closed. This is "Over My Head," a slow, anguished prayer, immaculate, bare, diaphanous. Bit by bit, the track wears itself out between the tom-toms of the drums and the hiss of the now-bloodless synth. Together with the following track, this is the record's most "introspective" moment, the point where disaster creeps into the soul, stealthily, like an incurable illness. "Sentimental Journey" is a noise symphony for nervous breakdown: Thomas's sleepwalking mumble, shattering glasses, the synth's retching and the drums' iconoclastic bursts sketch out a listless landscape (like the sound of the harmonica peeking out in the background), a dark recess of monstrous psychic remains. Closing the album is the goliardic dance of "Humor Me," accompanied by Herman's lopsided guitar work and the spectral light shining out from Ravenstine's corner. By the end of this emotional tour de force, it becomes even clearer that the reference to Jarry's work springs from a precise ideological intent: a taste for the grotesque and for satirical distortion must serve as the tool that allows for a depiction, now expressionist, now mimetic, of the contemporary world, disfigured down to its smallest details by the "will to power" that keeps man perpetually on the edge of the abyss.

The record's sales were nothing to write home about (barely 15,000 copies), but Ubu didn't let it faze them. Commercial success was clearly not their ultimate goal. That much became obvious when, again in 1978, their second work, Dub Housing, was released: the sound is even darker, bordering on madness and despair - a sound perhaps even more charged with emotion and psychic reflexes. Their philosophy of self-destruction finds an impressive artistic counterpart, born of a lucid and fertile inspiration. The logic governing these ten tracks has nothing rational about it: it's more a sense of unconscious, archaic perfection that makes these unsettling portraits of post-atomic man intelligible.

"Navvy," the opener, makes clear this is still the same band that, just a few months earlier, had recorded The Modern Dance: unbridled rhythm, alien vocals and synthetic malfunctions; "On the Surface" is more composed, with an excellent central interplay of bass and drums; "Dub Housing" is a slow, malignant vision of ghosts in a dead-end alley (with Thomas's desperate voice and an obsessive chorus of damned angels); "Caligari's Mirror" is introduced by a bare Herman riff and worn down by blasts of synth. Then comes "Thriller!", almost a soundtrack for an alien movie: a bass repeating a single-note riff, voices that seem to come off a magnetic tape, found percussion, screams, footsteps in the distance, a sound laid waste and slowly destroyed. "I Will Wait" is a brief epileptic fit in which Thomas staggers around drunk and Herman delivers a blistering solo; "Drinking Wine Spodyody" is another of their goliardic "modern dances," before the definitive celebration of King Ubu in "Ubu Dance Party," smeared with the synth's cacophonous frequencies amid a surreal atmosphere of a street fair. "Blow Daddy-o" is an experiment for drums, bass and circular synthetic sound, while "Codex" closes the circle with piercing arpeggios, backdrops of cosmic depression and sonic rumblings in the desert of the soul.

The shadows are dense, the depiction of evil and absurdity terrifying. Post-atomic civilization leads its legions down impervious, nameless roads. The void flickers in the distance with chemical flashes. Dub Housing is a journey with no return, deep into our own vertigo.

On the following tour, Ubu arrive in Britain, supported by Human League, Soft Boys, Nico and the legendary Red Crayola, whose leader, Mayo Thompson, immediately clicks with the band. At the end of the tour, recording begins for the new album, whose working title, "Goodbye", will eventually be replaced by New Picnic Time. Released in 1979, the album abandons the claustrophobia of Dub Housing and carries out a stinging reinterpretation of rock'n'roll, bearing in mind the lessons of Red Crayola and, above all, of Captain Beefheart, whose "Trout Mask Replica" is, without doubt, the main reference point.

Industrial music is no longer the backbone of the songs: the friendship with Mayo Thompson, in fact, inaugurates the transition towards the visionary psychedelia that had shone so brightly on Red Crayola's own debut album, that "Parable Of Arable Land" which was a gem of chaotic, disconcerting experimentation in the sacred year of 1967.

Moving through murky, at times impenetrable waters, Pere Ubu systematically deconstruct popular music through a slow but progressive process of abstraction. Alongside tracks that retain the powerful rhythmic drive of their early days (due above all to the Krauss-Maimone axis), "impressionist" sonorities make their way in, seeking an atmosphere full of rarefied technological visions. In this dichotomy lies the strength of the record and, above all, its destabilizing power.

As mentioned regarding the rhythm section: the propulsive force of the bass and the pseudo-anarchic spatiality of the drums form the solid foundation on which Thomas's increasingly eclectic voice, Herman's essential guitar work, and Ravenstine's anti-academic sound painting are anchored. This perfect synergy is immediately evident on the opening "The Fabulous Sequel". Along the same lines are "49 Guitars & One Girl", more anarchic and full of animalistic exuberance; the dance of "Small Was Fast", which unfolds along a pseudo-funky trajectory, brilliantly seasoned by the usual Ravenstine; "One Less Worry", an assortment of electronic flourishes, guitar whirlwinds and a feverish, insatiable vocal that turns Thomas's body and soul into a stage for our obsessions. More "linear", on the other hand, are "Make Hay", immersed in an electronic whirlwind, and "Kingdom Come", with tribal percussion and synthetic trumpets. On the more properly avant-garde side are the experiments of "A Small Dark Cloud" (rarefied percussion, whispers, artificial heartbeats, solitary piano notes and free vocalizing); "All The Dogs Are Barking" (a glacial urban vision marked by a guitar obsessively repeating a single chord, clear as metal amid raging rain); "Goodbye" (guitar phrasing and synth flights of fancy, almost a sonic transposition of space and silence); and, finally, "The Voice Of The Sand" (in which the "syntheticness" of the sound has by now reached a "vital" awareness, reducing the human voice to a pure ancestral whisper). While still wrapped in an air of decadence and cosmic disaster, New Picnic Time manages, thanks to Thomas's lyrics (influenced by his conversion to the Jehovah's Witness faith), to maintain contact with the things of everyday life. In this sense, beneath the chaotic musical structure, an unprecedented clarifying will makes its way through, which, while acknowledging the darkness of existence, still manages to hope for a redemptive "revelation".

After Herman's departure, Thomas and Ravenstine decided to bring in Mayo Thompson (it was certainly the latter who marked a turning point in the band's course, even though, to tell the truth, Thomas himself had already been searching for new musical solutions for some time). The new course is opened by The Art Of Walking, their biggest commercial success up to that point. The work represents the shift from the harsh, violent structures of previous records to a kind of noise-making that is, so to speak, more "reasoned". Moreover, with Herman gone, the sound loses that "pulsating" quality, making room for an almost "elusive" guitar style and an overall sense of abandonment and melancholy. But it is above all abstraction and formlessness that dominate the labyrinths of the songs. Of course, the classic clownish funk dances are not lacking - see the case of "Go, Misery Goats" and "Rounder" - nor are tracks more in line with the band's standard psychedelic style, such as "Birdies" and "Horses", missing - enriched, however, by a visionary quality that is no longer nihilistic, but essentially surreal and expansive. In any case, Ubu focus their "deconstructionist" gaze above all on tracks like "Rhapsody In Pink" and "Young Miles In The Basement", where one witnesses a kind of formal and psychic dissolution of the classic "song structure" (not that this hadn't already happened on previous records - quite the opposite - but now everything has taken on more decidedly "conceptual" contours, where Thompson's lesson, and his "avant-garde music for a rock band", finds clear and firm confirmation). And, incidentally, it is precisely these tracks that see Ravenstine become the pivotal element, the pole of attraction towards which all the sonic elements converge, becoming a single dizzying mimetic breath.

Also on display are the obsessive minimalism of "Arabia", the icy dissonant nightmare of "Loop" (with menacing synth shadows), the free-form drumming and Thomas's screams in the delirium of "Lost In Art" (with a cold, floating piano in the distance) and, finally, the Cage-like radio frequencies of "Crush This Horn".

With the first phase now exhausted - that of the "modern dances" and the Beefheart-style sonic assaults - Ubu arrive at a new and boundless land, the one that years earlier Thompson had had the merit of "invading" with his Red Crayola. In the distance the desert looms threateningly, stretching as far as the eye can see. But in those few, very few oases where survival is possible, one senses, even if only faintly, the scent of something terrible and fascinating. The Art Of Walking is one of those oases.

Songs Of The Bailing Man, released in 1982 with Anton Fier (ex-Feelies, later in Lounge Lizards) on drums, continues along the path taken by the previous record. The novelty, however, lies in the wave of jazz that the newcomer brings to the rhythmic structure, as is evident in "Long Walk Home" and "West Side Story" (although structurally it can be traced almost everywhere). With Fier's arrival, and after Herman's departure, the sound has lost any "rock" connotation, becoming essentially "art", if that term has ever meant anything. Distant echoes of what the more aggressive, martial Ubu once were can be heard in "Thoughts That Go By", "Big End's Used Farms" and "Horns Are A Dilemma". In truth, the record, although it has splendid and undoubtedly "daring" moments, shows signs of a certain weariness, and it is no coincidence, therefore, that after its release the group decided to break up.

The "classic" period, and also the most original and innovative one for Pere Ubu, gave way to the solo career of Thomas, who achieved extraordinary artistic results with albums such as The Sound Of The Sand and Monster Walks The Winter Lake.

In 1988, the lineup backing Thomas decided to rename itself Pere Ubu, effectively marking the band's rebirth: that lineup included Maimone, Ravenstine, Krauss, plus the newcomers Cutler (ex Henry Cow) on drums and Jones on guitars.

Tenement Of The Year, released in 1988, thus also sees a return to their roots, to their apocalyptic modern dance, now flanked, however, by an unprecedented, vibrant pop sensibility (a clear sign that the old mood has given way to a calmer and, perhaps, more resigned view of things). Among the tracks worth remembering are certainly "Say Goodbye", "We Have The Technology" and "Hollow Heart".

After the disappointing Cloudland, Worlds In Collision and The Story Of My Life (all united by a search for more distinctly pop structures), Ray Gun Suitcase, released in 1995, will put an end to the period of crisis with another series of compelling tracks, among which stand out "Electricity" (with a wonderfully evocative guitar), and "Montana" (with violin, accordion, assorted noises and Thomas's classic "drunken" voice sketching out evanescent trajectories). Some tracks, like "Surfer Girl" (from the Beach Boys repertoire) and "My Friend Is A Stooge", are closer to pop-rock conventions, though never banal or predictable.

In 1996 Dgc released the anthology Datapanik In The Year Zero, a box set collecting their first five albums. Also from 1996 is Apocalypse Now, a recording of a live show. Two years later came Pennsylvania, an album more desolate than usual, dispensing the abrasive folk of "Urban Lifestyle", the alienated atmosphere of "Silent Spring" and the industrial tracks of "Woolie Bullie". Thomas himself spoke about this new project as follows: "Consider that all words belong to liars and culture is a weapon that can be used against us, but geography can be a mirror and behind it hides an incorruptible language. Geography bypasses words and is far removed from liars".

The last gasp of the rebellious ogre is the very recent St. Arkansas, certainly not on a par with the masterpieces of old, but still a work to be listened to with dedication and respect, keeping an eye out for gems such as "Dark" and "Steve", the latter reminiscent of the industrial tribalism of their classic period.

27 years on from their first single, Pere Ubu remain one of the greatest rock outfits of all time. With an album like The Modern Dance they gave life to one of the most "elevated" aesthetic experiences of all time, capable both of influencing an entire generation of musicians (Husker Du, Pixies, Sonic Youth, Minutemen, Mission Of Burma, to name just the best), and of channeling into music the historical truth of an entire century.

It is not far-fetched, then, to claim that this work deserves a place alongside that of Joyce, Picasso, Kafka, Warhol, Heidegger, Stockhausen, Freud, and so on. The greatness of the Cleveland band lies perhaps above all in this ability to link together human experiences that are distant from one another, yet all united by the unease of our time, by its inexorable flow into nothingness, by its hovering far from the silence that is eternal divine radiance. "And yet" — as George Steiner wrote — "the dark zones occupy the centre. To ignore them is to make impossible any serious account of human potential" ("In Bluebeard's Castle", 1971).

Pere Ubu return in 2006 with Why I Hate Women, their fifteenth album in roughly thirty years of an extraordinary career. A bizarre title, some might think. Much more simply, it's a novel that Jim Thompson never got around to writing.

Of the original line-up, the only one left for some time now is David Thomas, a Gargantuan crooner of an extremely post-industrial age. Aside from the arrival of guitarist Keith Moliné, the rest of the band is the same one that recorded the compelling St. Arkansas four years earlier: Robert Wheeler (synthesizers and theremin), Michele Temple (bass) and Steve Mehlman (drums). By now a tight, well-oiled unit that backs up Thomas's theatrical flair, delivering a solidly rock sound that, once again, through its surreal and eccentric use of synth and theremin, doesn't hide its destabilizing tendencies.

"Extremely obsessive": that's how Thomas describes the album. An obsessiveness sharpened further by his narrating-singing, in that scrupulous, detailed style that recalls Jim Thompson directly. The loping, narcotic funk of "Two Girls (One Bar)" and the listless dissertation of "Babylonian Warehouses" are immediate, glaring examples of this. Urban darkness wraps around "Blue Velvet", a sinister, elusive ballad that crouches somewhere between the abstract psychedelia of "The Art Of Walking" and the diabolical visions of "Dub Housing". Claustrophobia; and obsession, without a doubt. While the synthesizers hurl thread-like shapes all around, Mehlman struggles on the skins and Moliné stitches together glowing borders. Take note, please!, for future eulogies. You come back from this circle of hell exhausted, yet unable to resist being swept up by the frenzied punk of "Caroleen", wrecked by the deranged filigrees of the theremin (see also the disenchanted "Flames Over Nebraska") and hooked on the gospel of certain Rocket From The Tombs.

But it's in the long psychodramas like "Love Song" that Ubu still make their strongest case, this time enriched by feverish vanishing points that, in tearing apart its narrative fabric, try, in vain, to translate its dreamlike dimension into a liberating jam. If "Mona" finds us in full danceable-and-grotesque territory, the alien vignette of "My Boyfriend's Back" sets the stage for yet another psychic tour de force, "Stolen Cadillac", where a hypnotic bass figure serves as the centre of gravity for the sonic evolutions of vintage electronics. This is highly imaginative music, introspective to the utmost degree. Perhaps not as overflowing as it once was (slightly "normalized", but so be it), yet still every bit as capable of tempting our darkest fears.

Today more than ever, it seems increasingly clear that Pere Ubu is fundamentally a black hole into which rock is repeatedly forced to return in order to dissolve and be reborn, incapable of dying. A monstrous interpenetration of tradition and futurism: that's the whole point. And while "Synth Farm" is a death drive wrapped in a jokey shell, "Texas Overture" further cements rock's status as the youth music par excellence. That is, a non-place of adrenaline surges, emotional crashes, existential disasters, devastating bodily impulses and whatever else an open, adventurous mind might possibly imagine.

Three years pass and Thomas brings out the long-awaited rock opera dedicated to Alfred Jarry's creature. Accompanied by the radio-drama "Bring Me the Head of Ubu Roi", Long Live Père Ubu is an album in which the musical dimension goes hand in hand with the theatrical one, as demonstrated, first and foremost, by the "vocal split" between the big man from Cleveland and soul-jazz singer Sarah Jane Morris.

With a narrative plot naturally derived from the work of the French writer-playwright, the American band's new record (of whose legendary line-up only Thomas remains) has going for it the allure of a long-delayed encounter, but, musically speaking, it's a shame to have to point out a certain lack of inspiration. Alongside meatier numbers (the near-hard rock of "Road to Reason" and the sinewy verve of "Watching the Pigeons"), there's room for compositions where the theatrical slant of the whole operation is on full display, starting with the voices passing the baton back and forth, as in a kind of musical of the absurd, on "Song of the Grocery Police" and "Bring Me the Head". But the music — take, for example, "Banquet of the Butcher" — almost always unfolds listlessly, infected (though this time, that's not a compliment...), almost a watered-down version of what, "just" 30 years earlier, had turned the American underground upside down.

What's missing, in short, is a sonic counterpart capable of "supporting" but also completing and, why not, illuminating the vocal narrative of the Thomas/Morris axis. Tracks like "March of Greed" (which pays a visit to the most grotesque side of Residents), "Slowly I Turn", the long noir-jazz apnea of "The Story So Far" and "Big Sombrero (Love Theme)" (which seem like strange reworkings of the Waits-ian body of work, with traces of Birthday Party stoned on valium during their last days) tell of a band for whom that synthesis between music and words, which one would expect from a work of this kind, succeeds only in part. A misstep, in short.

Lady From Shanghai, released four years later, is presented as their dance album. However, there's little to no "dance" music in the strict sense on this record. The entire first part of the album, starting with the minimalist, synth-based neurosis of "Thanks", reveals, at most, their "danceable" side, a dimension already widely explored in the past. Amid the usual flourishing of electronic-noise disturbances, obscure syllable-strings take shape, along with robotic beats haunted by the ghost of Edison ("Feuksley Ma'am, The Hearing" samples his "version" of "Mary Had a Little Lamb"), bizarre takes on an ancestral melancholy ("Musicians Are Scum") and synth blades that slash through menacing half-light ("Another One (Oh Maybellene)"). At this point, modern dance can't help but reveal itself in full light for what it is and for what, deep down, it has always been: the transfiguration of an absurdist cabaret, as suggested, without too much abstraction, by the over-seven-minute hypnotic-android mode of "Mandy".

An album, in short, that captures a band still eager to have its say, but unable to go beyond a dignified statement of that desire. As a result, these fifty minutes flow pleasantly enough, between predictable dissertations, the inevitable Captain Beefheart paying a courtesy visit bearing trout ("Lampshade Man") and mysterious space odysseys ("And Then Nothing Happened"). And, as the tracklist wears on, you can sense the Beast running out of breath. And you recognize it, clear and plain, in its inability to bite down and skin us alive, so much so that even the free-roaming noise of "The Carpenter Sun" barely tickles.

A year later came Carnival Of Souls, the B-movie horror directed by Herk Harvey in 1962, which David Thomas had already engaged with in 2011 when, at the request of the London East End Film Festival, he tried his hand at scoring some of its scenes. He would later bring the other Pere Ubu members into the project, developing sounds that, moving away from the danceable tropes of Lady From Shanghai, ended up returning more decisively to the origins of their saga. The scene is still dominated by the gentle ogre Thomas, with his slurred, listless, alien voice. Around him, the electronic superstructure, while less dense than in their most recent works, acts as the glue holding together the generally crooked, grotesque developments of a restless, standoffish art-rock, running the gamut from flare-ups of "modern dance" (like those propelling the opening "Golden Surf II"), post-punk dirges like demented ring-around-the-rosies ("Bus Station") and more sinister numbers shot through with ancestral paranoia ("Drag The River") or turned into delicate chamber nightmares stirred with noir undertones ("Visions Of The Moon"). It's an album that captures a moderately inspired band, even if the average quality of the songs is light years away from the peaks of their best days. In any case, even this time the band at least manages to stop time, generating a space-time short circuit that prompts us to take stock of the evolution, the present state and the near future of "cultured" rock, or whatever you want to call it. The twelve minutes of "Brother Ray" fail to convince, however, a dissertation that gives away all too clearly the improv background these songs grew out of. Elsewhere, though, even as they grow more abstract ("Dr Faustus"), they manage to keep a decent dose of "constructive" anguish intact, moving on toward nocturnal swoons in jazz orbit ("Road To Utah", with an intro probably recalling that of "This Is Radio Clash" by Joe Strummer & co.), Tom Waits-like hypnosis marked by the film's menacing theme ("Carnival") and even the love song "Irene", so languid that, for a moment, you feel as if you've been dropped into the grooves of an entirely different album...

In 20 Years In A Montana Missile Silo, released in 2017, we instead find a band that seems to come from another temporal dimension, as if they'd pulled out a forgotten project or one deliberately shelved, to the point that the exuberance of the first tracks is not only reminiscent of their early days but slightly unsettling. This is a David Thomas on form, growling like a character out of a horror movie, heedless of the winding, jagged chords beneath him ("Monkey Bizness"), or taking a cue from an old James Gang song ("Funk 49") spitting and croaking like a young Iggy Pop, without forgetting the rules of the blues ("Prison Of The Senses"), which the musician wraps in sepulchral, grimy tones that never sound comforting ("Walking Again"). In its admittedly predictable art-freak weirdness, it's the most authentically Pere Ubu album in a long while, as unsettling and gloomy as the best Yo La Tengo ("Cold Sweat") and also delightfully paradoxical like a Captain Beefheart track ("Swampland"). A bold album, mildly iconoclastic in pairing a blues master like Howlin' Wolf in the carnal noise-rock of "Howl" with the electronic soundscapes of early Tangerine Dream on the adventurous "Plan From Frag 9". There's no shortage of anecdotes and legends surrounding the genesis of the new Pere Ubu album, starting with the titles Thomas discarded before settling on the final one ("Bruce Springsteen Is An Asshole" and "Robert DeNiro Is An Asshole") or the recording sessions, during which the musicians were isolated in dark rooms with the presence of an object or an animal meant to stir their wild side. What remains is the constant impression that, although David Thomas is still a master of the grotesque, 20 Years In A Montana Missile Silo only partly manages to break free from the shallows of routine, even if the American musician proves he can age like a fine wine, without relying on the nostalgia effect for his appeal.

In 2023 came Trouble On Big Beat Street, presented by Thomas as his response to hearing, back in the day, "Song Cycle" by Van Dyke Parks, containing 10 tracks on the Lp version and as many as 17 on the cd. An album that, overall, is more successful than its more recent predecessors, and that precisely thanks to the bonus tracks found on the cd version, where, when we're not dazzled by the sensation of having fallen back into the grooves of The Art Of Walking, amid abstractions and nightmares collapsing in on themselves ("76 BPM", "Pidgin Music"), they keep holding forth or wandering in pataphysical mode with Alfred Jarry's holy card tucked in their right trouser pocket ("Nothin But A Pimp", "Sleep", "From Adam").

Recorded according to the "first take's the charm" rule (with the exception of the charming cover of the Osmonds' "Crazy Horse"), the tracks capture, in short, a band (which also includes the two trusty Two Pale Boys, Keith Moliné and Andy Diagram, on guitar and electronically-filtered trumpet respectively) in decent shape, here grappling, right off the bat, with a "Love Is Like Gravity" whose opening seconds even bring to mind the Jon Hassell of "Dream Theory In Malaya", before crossing paths with the usual electronic whistles that push the mind to surf beyond the borders of rock (courtesy of Gagarin, aka Graham Dowdall, former Ludus drummer), finally settling, cradled by Thomas's oblique vocal textures, into a hybrid of post-punk minimalism and deconstructed jazz.

If, with the disco-pop of "Crocodile Smile," Thomas is still wrestling with the obsession for reworking pop that had marked the gestation of The Long Goodbye, with "Moss Covered Boondoggle" and, above all, "Worried Man Blues" the band instead sets sail for the lands of blues, but with that sly, demented swagger which, as Captain Beefheart docet, drains a tradition of its power only to keep it eternally alive. Elsewhere, "Nyah Nyah Nyah" looks to the Residents' Beatles sendup. "Satan's Hamster" is as dark as an outtake from "Dub Housing", while "Uh Oh" evokes the anguish of "Final Solution."

Trouble On Big Beat Street isn't an essential record, but it's always a pleasure to spin again, which, you'll agree, is no small feat for a band that debuted nearly fifty years ago.

In 2025 comes the sad news that may mark the end of the Pere Ubu story: David Thomas has passed away at 71, after a long illness. His band announced it this way: "He died in his hometown of Brighton & Hove, with his wife and youngest stepdaughter by his side. The MC5 were playing on the radio. In the end he will be returned to his home, the farm in Pennsylvania, where he had insisted on being 'thrown in the barn'... We leave you with his own words, which sum up who he was better than we ever could: 'My name is David Fucking Thomas... and I am the singer in the greatest rock and roll band in the world.' Long live Pere Ubu."

Contributions by Gianfranco Marmoro ("20 Years In A Montana Missile Silo")

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