LONG LIVE PERE UBU! – Pere Ubu with Sarah Jane Morris (Hearpen)
"If you're not going to listen to this with the same effort you'd devote to a literary novel, you're wasting your time," says Pere Ubu mastermind David Thomas in the press release for the band’s latest album – the soundtrack for a theatrical piece based on Alfred Jerry’s Ubu Roi, an 1896 political satire in the form of a re-imagined Macbeth, the title character of which supplied the name for Thomas’ band. In the same release, he calls “Long Live Pere Ubu!” “the only punk record that's been made in the last 30 years," and he ought to know, having fired the opening salvo of the punk revolution way back in 1975, with Ubu’s debut indie single “30 Seconds Over Tokyo”/“Heart of Darkness.”That was back when “punk” meant an artistic response to, well, whatever the fuck you wanted, before it became just another rebellion-as-conformity fashion on offer at the mall. To his credit, Thomas has kept pursuing his singular muse for, um, 35 years now, when most of his contemporaries are either dead (too many to list here), retired (Television, Patti Smith for all intents), or rehashing the past (Richard Hell, surprisingly). (Notable exception: fellow Ohioans Devo, who remain almost as willfully idiosyncratic in their maturity as Thomas is.) Most punk aficionados lost the Ubu thread a long time ago, leaving the band as fodder for the likes of Greil Marcus -- who pronounced Ubu’s Pennsylvania the best album of 1998, an act as willfully perverse as Rolling Stone’s anointing the Pretty Things’ Parachute as “album of the year” for 1969 – and people who read The Wire.
The claustrophobic ambience that informs “LLPU!” stems from Ubu’s adoption of “junk-a-phonics,” an artistic response to Thomas’ admitted tone-deafness that employs modified speakers, doors, windows, and other objects as microphones (I’m not making this up). It’s hard to replicate the shock of the new, and at this point, Thomas & Co. don’t even try. The sonic elements here will be familiar to long-time Ubuphiles: close-mic’ed voxxx, brooding chord progressions, clouds of ominous analog synth noise, mechanistic beats, percussion clatter. To that mix, add untrammeled vulgarity: Jarry’s original text was rife with scatology; drummer Steve Mehlman gets a credit for “belching galore,” and he earns it, too (the track “Less Said The Better” is basically a vehicle for his vomiting sound F/X). Besides Thomas, the key players here are Brit political soul chanteuse Sarah Jane Morris, who does sterling work as his vocal foil in the role of Mere Ubu, and Ubu soundman/electronica artist Gagarin (a.k.a. Dids, ne Graham Dowdall), whose contributions lend the music much of its dark menace.
The first “LLPU!” song that rocks as hard as, say, The Modern Dance’s “Nonalignment Pact” is “Road To Reason,” and that comes halfway into the program, but that’s hardly the point. The net effect of these songs is one of dementia and dislocation, not unlike that of Peter Weiss’ Marat/Sade. When Thomas comes across like Swordfishtrombones-era Tom Waits -- on “Big Sombrero (Love Theme),” f’rinstance, or “Slowly I Turn” -- it’s worthwhile remembering that both men’s shticks are derived from Captain Beefheart, down to his propensity for wearing hats. Thomas wants to make you think, and he wants to make you feel a little uncomfortable, too. When he succeeds, as he does on “Big Sombrero,” “Watching the Pigeons” (which mocks the folly of war and the cowardice of those who “lead from behind”), and the climactic dialogue between Pere and Mere Ubu in “The Story So Far,” the results are powerful, knotty, disturbing, and worthwhile.
Cop via Hearpen here and don’t say I didn’t warn you. - Ken Shimamoto
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