Pere Ubu

It's not always possible to write about an album with detachment — in fact, perhaps it's almost never possible. And when the album in question is regarded by this writer as one of the greatest masterpieces of 20th-century music, not to mention the album of a lifetime, the one that would never be missing from an eventual desert island... well, then objectivity goes right out the window.

Then again, how could anyone listen to a record like this from the lofty heights of their own "intellectual honesty"? It isn't even a matter of emotional predisposition toward this kind of sound, and so on and so forth... The truth is that "The Modern Dance", like every great work of art, triggers a chain reaction of emotional responses, buoyed by an explosive structure, an excessive sound, imaginary landscapes chasing each other across multiple levels. Though firmly rooted in its era, Thomas & co.'s masterpiece still has an enormous amount to teach anyone who looks to music not for answers, but for questions; not for dreams, but for organized nightmares; not for disengagement, but for authenticity and courage. Not just (great, monumentally great) music, but visions of "possible universes".

After a pair of unrepeatable, revolutionary singles like "30 Seconds Over Tokyo" and "Final Solution", still featuring the late, great Peter Laughner on guitar (listen to the solo on "Final Solution" and you'll understand), Pere Ubu decided to brand their name into rock history for good by recording this album in 1978.

The hiss that opens "Non Alignment Pact" makes things clear right away: modern dance is an orgiastic synthesis of garage rock, unbridled primitivism, noise and abstract psychedelia. The hinges of this revolution are Thomas's "Beefheart-ian" vocals (though with a grotesque charge and a sense of humor even more unsettling than those of the Glendale genius — with a touch of Jarry's mask thrown in) and Ravenstine's aleatory, ultra-impressionistic keyboard work. Around these two focal points, Krauss (drums) and Maimone (bass) prowl menacingly, redrawing the coordinates of the rhythm section and, in turn, shaping the essential structure of this dance of the technological age — the result of a clash between two opposing tendencies: a "primitivist" one (tied to dance as a means of bodily expression) and a "modernist" one (evident in the attempt to reread that first component in a postmodern key). Closing the circle is Herman, with his lopsided, dissonant guitar, still mindful of rock's earliest cries.

Having laid out these premises, all that's left is to note the importance of the "concrete" element within the economy of their revolutionary synthesis. On one hand, Ravenstine pushes his EML synthesizer into sonic excursions that are true "abstractions"; on the other, we run into actual fragments of reality demanding their right to become the very "sign" of that reality — by now alienating and anguished, slipping away from any conclusive definition. Take the title track, for instance: this schizophrenic, feral dance number is astonishing in its tragic balance between "concrete" sequences and disastrous pseudo-musical surges. The sonic amalgam has the same effect as a documentary film about industrial society. Another kind of "estrangement" effect can be found, in a wholly peculiar way, in "Laughing", where a listless free-jazz intro ends up dissolving into another of their mad, inhuman boogies. "Street Waves" returns to the rock matrix of their sound, but with an even more palpable tension, reinvigorated by the chemical fumes that, from start to finish, trail the song's unfolding in a requiem as desperate as it is solemn — a post-atomic one.

Their poetics of alienation and unease find an extraordinary "dramatic" counterpart in the "exploded" structure of "Chinese Radiation". But we're still in the age of punk, and so here comes the frantic, disjointed punk of "Life Stinks", with a great free-form synthesizer jubilee. The neurotic funk of "Real World", however, steers this latest chilling apocalyptic vision back into the groove of a more solemn revelation, seasoned with sinister synth frequencies and Thomas's "imploded" vocals. This liturgy of disorder and despair comes within a step of mystical silence in the slow wandering of ghosts that is "Over My Head", where every sonic fragment sits in a zone of total shadow.

The hermeticism of these masterful frames of our times probably reaches its most effective moment in the experiment of "Sentimental Journey", amid shattered crockery, a voice now on the verge of collapse, synth gashes and mangling rhythmic explosions: a noise-rock symphony for a nervous breakdown, if ever there was one... And, in the end, not even the sticky tomfoolery of "Humor Me" can remedy the icy claustrophobia this absolute new-wave masterpiece has by now reached.

There exists, in short, a new religion: the religion of the absurd; of the absurd as a remedy for despair. Alfred Jarry had already understood this by the end of the 19th century. But the absurdity of Pere Ubu's music leads our neuroses back to listening to the primordial whisper of the world: tragic joy.

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05/11/2006