i love pere ubu! you love pere ubu! everybody loves pere ubu. but which one? the pere ubu of the first two albums, of the mayo thompson years, the new wave 80s pop period at fontana, the hard rock zz top period from raygun suitcase, the strangely catchy 21st century collage albums? the fragments on tape from precursor band rocket from the tombs? david thomas’s solo stuff, peter laughner’s solo stuff, that one red krayola album which is basically pere ubu plus lora logic? other cleveland bands from the same scene and period, an argument advanced by the band themselves when they put numbers band and electric eels on the “ubu related rarities” disc of their own compilation set?
it is a broad terrain and i have my own preferences and blind spots, whole albums i’ve never given time to yet. but pere ubu mean a lot to me in part because their range is so contradictory
and weird. lots of leftfield choices and sudden swerves into / away from pop music and elaborate acts of self sabotage. so here are semi arbitrarily 20 songs i picked out as a taster, that maybe don’t flow together super well but who knows. i’ll be doing little batches of my own liner notes as to what i like in each as i go.
bonus 2: someone uploaded the thurston moore / david thomas ep of an old uk music video show where the guests get to skip a video by honking a big button if they dont like it, full thing is pretty fun as you get to watch the host look increasingly annoyed as they both start honking the buzzer for escalatingly petty reasons (at one point a pixies video meets the ax bc frank black makes a thumbs up, provoking displeasure from both guests)
track notes p1 in weird format bc i wrote them in a notes doc at work (trying to get fired)
obsession - david thomas and two pale boys:
from the live album “meadville”, which also has the 10min version
of brian wilson’s surfer girl with cameos from kool and the gang
and outer space. i think of this one a lot and the way it builds
out that initial credo of self defeat at the start, the way so
much of thomas’s and ubu’s music seems to be trying to get to a
point where it seems like the whole thing will just collapse, a
gimmick taken too far, and making it hold instead.
sonic reducer - the dead boys
not even an ubu track to begin with - a song by rocket from the
tombs, the band that split into both ubu and the dead boys and
scattered songs between them both. both the original and reunited
versions of rftt do a good version of this one but i’m always taken
by the one by the dead boys, not traditionally seen as the most
complex or inward looking of the nyc punk bands so how strange to
hear them singing about becoming a pharaoh soon, ruling from some
golden tomb. showing everyone by dint of this terrifying apocalyptic
machine which may in fact do nothing. what is a sonic reducer, anyway?
golden surf - pere ubu
as much as i like david thomas’s solo stuff it has to be said a major
appeal of pere ubu proper to me is that of idiosyncratic sensibility
paired to an honest to god rock band capable of being startlingly intense
when they need to be. special credit goes to michele temple on bass and
steve mehlman on drums, a combination referred to internally as the
“tank part” of the band.
heaven - pere ubu
kind of wary, loping, reggae-ish but with the odd background chirps
and buzzes of allen ravenstine’s synth. i think one of the most
attractive things to me about pere ubu’s early stuff is that unlike
other bands who set out selfconsciously trying to make music for
an industrial setting, they often seem quite charmed by the sense
of a new world to explore or inhabit. the smiling, leaping factory
worker on the cover of the modern dance isn’t totally sarcastic.
prison of the senses - pere ubu
some of the later albums have their own cantankerous charm but sorta
ditch a bit of the whimsy, which is why it came as a pleasant surprise
that “20 years in a montana missile solo” feels almost playful in a
late style kind of way. let’s go pop!!
honey moon - pere ubu
from their 80s-90s new wave period on fontana, a period which was also
perversely their most unlistenable in the sense that most of those albums
were just never reissued for the longest time as a result. there’s an ongoing
idea in them of like, catchy playful pop music infused with odd things happening
in the sound mix and lyrics, but it’s also just a pleasure to hear the band just
decide to go for it on more comparatively straightforward songs - i can’t get
enough of the guitar and drums breakdown at the end of this one
414 seconds - pere ubu
lady from shanghai is one of my favourite ubu albums, an attempt at
“dance music” composed iirc by all the band members submitting different
parts without hearing each other’s bits and then having thomas try to
stitch them back together in the studio. the result really can be weirdly
catchy in an odd clockworky kinda way at times but standout to me is this
take on a kind of dream-logic moebius familiar from mulholland drive.
chinese radiation - pere ubu
for the concert part - after slow, fearful, oblique strumming, a vamp
on the new world seemingly inspired by the rumour that cleveland in the
70s had the highest population of maoists in the usa - and then suddenly
there’s a “hooray!”, delighted crowd noises, yelps and cheers, the band
builds, the red god the new world, everyone is completely along for the
ride - - i think the crowd parts were sampled from “frampton comes alive”
or something but for just a second the idea of ubu as an arena-filling
mainstream rock act feels so natural and obvious that it’s like glimpsing
a world that never came to pass.
miss you - pere ubu
at times it can feel like the various perverse takes on the concept of
american music thru the band’s career can cancel themselves out into
an oddly moving kind of simplicity. the lyrics to this are more potent
to me in that the band almost sound too locked into their dogged country
rock vamp to notice them at first.
what happened to me - pere ubu (?) w loudon wainwright
again always caught by the false intros to this - the cute one that
has the studio audience chuckling, the “outsider artist” one that has
them playing along, ok, we’ll bite, and then postponing the song again
for one even more undirected spiel that has everyone kind of tensely
waiting, oh god, is this the whole thing? is he gonna play anything?
and THEN it starts, and the seesawing kind of shanty rhythm to this
captures that sense of using the odd momentum from starting off on
the wrong foot to go places. a catchy pop or even folk song playing
with the tension between revelation and inherited garble lines in the
pop song form.
this, absolutely, there’s some line in an interview about how nobody in that band wanted to keep doing stooges style straight rock n roll afterwards bc they all felt like they’d all already nailed it with that band and i thought they were bullshitting until i heard that instrumental break
They’ve always been a big blindspot for me. Every couple years I try to dip deep than like Sonic Reducer and Final Solution, and my friend who was steeped in this sort of stuff ain’t alive anymore, so in lieu of regular mix tape trades with him, I’m going to dive into these links. Thanks!
Turquoise Fins is my favorite song by Pere Ubu not already mentioned. This song is so magical I can’t say all I like about it without feeling like I’m spoiling it so I’ll just assume that everyone else who hears this reacts the exact same way as me.
I was lucky enough to see David Thomas perform twice in Cleveland, once as Pere Ubu and once as one of the Later reconstructions of RftT. Both shows were amazing.
For anyone who wanted to see the Guardians that the baseball team is now named after, there’s one right above on the cover of Ray Gun Suitcase.
Crocus Behemoth, which was David Thomas’s stage name in Rocket from the Tombs, is just the name I use in every Atlus RPG that let’s you have a long name, because running around with that name in SMT games is just really funny to me.
I have the 4 disc Peter Laughner vinyl set that smog veil put out a few years back and what I’ve listened to of it has been great. A weird sad story, that guy. As a sidenote, the Harbor Inn mentioned in Amphetamine is a still open real bar in Cleveland, though I have never been inside it.
