Pere Ubu: Classic Or Dud

I owned thee boxset a while back, & sold it, of course, duh. The music was fine, but the cram-happy aesthetic ruined everything past Disc 2. (And I never gave the Ubu-related music much of a spin, and including live Ubu did nothing for me.) That said, I agree w/ Jess on Modern Dance & Terminal Tower. Rock & roll drunk on the couch with Pretentious Art, making out and drooling all over the place. Pass the funnel, woo!

Dub Housing might be a grower, though I can't recall it well because of the CRAP SEQUENCING on the boxset CDs, damn it. I have a tape copy of Cloudland, which sounds just fine (if a bit happy-go-lucky, which I don't expect from DT, despite his kiddie-clown voice). The newer stuff (on Tim Kerr & Thirsty Ear) scares me because of all the conflicting comments.

And what's this I hear about the 5-disc David Thomas boxset being unbelievably awesome? Is this the truth?

The Tenemant Years is good but not classic.

Cloudland is half classic (the last Paul Harman engineered half), and half crap (the Stephen Hague produced first half).

Worlds In Collision and Story Of My Life are not so hot all -- especially Eric Drew Feldman on synth -- his cartoony work is terrible to these ears -- completely lacking Ravenstine's touch or Wheeler in the later period. Completely POP in a cut out all the good parts way. (also, I don't think Cutler was a good fit with the band either).

Raygun Suitcase through St. Arkansas are a return to form, the resurrection of a band that almost sank during the Eric Drew Feldman period. Especially great is the return of Tom Herman. Also to be noted is the underrated playing of Jim Jones, a man who has done many excellent things but hasn't got the kudos he deserves.

I've never been too sure whether it's 'peh-ray ooboo' or 'pear ooboo' or possibly even another way, any helpers?

yeah picnic, walking where were i got dropped right in it, so dub was a bit too much popping dub and the guitar records too much guitar records like sonic youth

the late period stuff, well it's more measured austere and yet part of the continuum of not over till after the fat man's stopped singing that is pere ubu

these guys are carrying the torch for wacky alfred jarry and people complain about silly ok != surreal or sensible but maybe absurdist -- yet absurdism points fingers, reminds us we are the bourguiese (is that correct spelling ? just couldn't resist)

my gripe would be how easy to map to real world via absurdism (which in jarry's case mapped so well) is peter thomas ? anything to say ? (great effects dept.)

all credit to them though for being first to the millenium bug though via "Data Panic in the Year ..", so ahead of their time as much now as then someways -- do not C/D until, y'know, uh, loses some weight ??

"The Tenement Year" may be a bit harder to find, as I do not think it was ever reissued. I've had a vinyl for a long time and got it before I found the first two LPs and the reissue of the early singles.

I think listening to quite a bit of electronic music in the past three or four years has changed my perspective of some of the more abstract/ambient/free form sounding songs.

I've never heard anything after "Pennsylvania" or the "St. Arkansas" albums, are they any count?

So is all Mr Thomas's solo / other stuff, especially Blame The Messenger, Mirror Man and the live CD with the "Monster" boxset.

"I've never heard anything after "Pennsylvania" or the "St. Arkansas" albums, are they any count?"

I don't believe you've missed any official releases since St Arkansas Earlnash, although there were a couple of live albums in between them: Apocalypse Now (which, as others have said above, is an excellent album) and The Shape Of Things (semi-official, dodgy 1976 live recordings, for completists only).

Actually, I just checked the Ubu web site & found this:
The left & right channels are reversed and the tape transfer left all songs running at a slower speed. All Rough Trade / Twin Tone cd & vinyl releases are affected. These faults were corrected by the 1994 digital transfer & eq. The 1998 cd reissue features the Mayo Thompson / Geoff Travis mixes of "Not Happy" and "Lonesome Cowboy Dave" as released on the 1981 Rough Trade single. The 1985 Twin Tone / Rough Trade releases use the David Thomas mixes done at Suma.

.. So I guess the CD is better than the LP.

I've never heard anything after "Raygun Suitcase" are the "Pennsylvania" or the "St. Arkansas" albums any count?

At least from the reviews, it seems if you like Pere Ubu, the last two albums will be to your liking. They are on my list and I probably will look for them when I go up to Bloomington/Indianapolis at the end of August.

Dub Housing is so classic. Total paranoid schizo vibe. I suppose buying more albums of theirs isn't strictly necessary but surely if you like the box set you'd like others?

Modern Dance > Dub Housing >>>>>>>>> everything else

The Wooden Birds - "Blame the Messenger"
Rockets from the Tombs
& the Peter Laughner disc.

-David Thomas solo records are also great, if you like 'Sentimental Journey'
-Home and Garden records are spotty, but I really love some of em.

xpost...

Pere Ubu = teh classik.

The later stuff varies from meh (Cloudland) to very good (Ray Gun Suitcase), with The Tenement Year being a personal favourite, even tho nobody else seems to like it much - too prog or something, with the doubled drums and accordion and all.

Uh, if you don't count Mushroomhead....

Love the more "rawk" oriented early stuff like Final Solution and Heart of Darkness. And the funky shit that came after, circa The Modern Dance and Dub Housing. Fact, I love both them two records about the same. Dub Housing is darker and woozier, but it totally rules all the way through. Funny, scary and fascinating.

I've got The Terminal Tower and a boxed reproduction set of the first four singles on vinyl (put out by T/K records a decade or so ago). Terminal Tower sucks in comparison.

After "Dub Housing" I dunno that anything the band did is truly essential. I like "New Picnic Time" and "The Tenement Year" well enuf, but almost never play 'em. On the other hand, I spin the early stuff all the time...

Man I would like to see them on stage with maimone and ravenstine!!!

Fuck me none of them sound like bad lineups

Eric Drew Feldman, a secret secret weapon.

https://www.discogs.com/release/6592285-Pere-Ubu-The-Pere-Ubu-Moon-Unit

Sounds like this sort of thing

Per the Patreon livestream today Thomas teased "maybe a super-secret mind-blowing guest" in LA, which I'm guessing is Van Dyke Parks, he also mentioned he hasn't asked this person yet, so...

New album is even farther out there than the last one...

seeing them tonight - in fact DT has just malevolently watched me parking my bike in front of the venue - and i will pick up the album.

the musical elements are increasingly attenuated, closer to the moon unit approach than anything else you might call pere ubu. DT’s well worn symbols and tropes sit in a sparse landscape, without much propulsion or dynamic intensity around them. q a lot of wailing. *mood* as they say. i quite like it, but it doesn’t take much for it to become a bit boring or overstay its welcome. when it works it’s great.

the group seem very enthused about the album, other responses seem a bit more muted.

I listened to about half of it earlier this week after having not listened to a new Ubu album since ...Women. I liked what I heard a lot and plan to check out the second half soon.

my post above was largely nonsense, probably due to the fact that the main times i've seen David Thomas recently have been in the experimental Moon Unit format, and an utterly disastrous Pere Ubu gig in Canterbury (Chris Cutler's drumming had fallen apart from someone obscure reasons).

This gig was really good, David Thomas, looked for all the world like some sort of grizzled Gendo, his glasses reflecting the lights, leaning forward and pointing to emphasise obscure but dictatorial pronouncements. He got himself in a pother, as is frequently the case, after a very good actually version of Crocodile Smile off the latest album. He got cranky, and the gig looked like it might turn sour, but he had a cigarette, took his hat off, and suddenly seemed as benign and warm as a sort of punk GK Chesterton. Malevolent, self-destructive to sympathetic and humorous – not a terrible summary of Pere Ubu, and as theatre it was a-grade.

Music was as the album, and the album is really good I think. I had a bit of trouble structuring it, and I think it works best if you impose the side a/side b of the vinyl onto the cd main tracks. I haven't got to the extra tracks yet. Love, death and departure, death and eternity, US delta blues and highway symbolism are all present. It's the mood of the music that is most compelling though. The group shifts the tempo and mood of the music in strange, rich ways, never the same thing twice, recombining continually throughout tracks and through the album. It does have the sort of dynamism I'd associate with a lot of Pere Ubu, but mixed with the exploratory methods of Moon Unit, and the effect is like... well, what's it like? I've got an unhelpfully hackeneyed image in my head of a painter improvising a painting as part of the performance, with exuberant brush strokes expressive of emotional shifts in the moment, but contributing to a completed, final piece of work that captures the freedom of composition as it does the original intent. Sorry that's terrible - i'm awful at writing music.

Alex Ward's guitar and clarinet adds a *lot* imo. Full disclosure, he's a friend so i would say that wouldn't i, but it adds a substantial new element governed by his own creative wellsprings in improv and rock, and his playing. The whole group is now well used to playing pere ubu material together in more improvised scenarios now anyway, and it really comes together on the album. will repay repeated listens I think. i may not listen to enough music, but it's hard to find music - at least in the post-punk tradition - that has this level of invention to it imo.

Shame they're against tape sharing, at least on dime etc. Would love to hear this lot live. I thought Ward was pretty great with the Flying Luttenbachers when I saw them a few years ago.

though there are bits of them appearing on youtube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83xzLp_YSsU

Will have to check out those bits, thanks.
Fizzles, your description is perfectly valid, going toward the xpost rock & improv, also jazz, ideal: "The song turning into itself," as the poet Al Young puts it.

And your report on the album is even more appealing.

Yeah good write-up Fizzles. I like the new album too. There are moments that remind me of specific elements from past Ubu/DT projects: "Love Is Like Gravity" starts off sounding exactly like something from one of the DT + Two Pale Boys albums, "Crocodile Smile" makes prominent use of an actual sample of "Drive" from Pennsylvania, the creepy whispered vocals on "Let's Pretend" make me think of Mere Ubu from Long Live Pere Ubu, and "Nyah Nyah Nyah" almost feels like a darker take on some of the goofier stuff from the early 80s Ubu and David Thomas albums, but at the same time it does seem like this is a new era of the band -- I keep thinking of it as "The Pere Ubu Big Band." In that regard it's almost the opposite of The Long Goodbye, which to me felt more like an actual solo album from David Thomas than maybe anything else he's done, with Pere Ubu or otherwise. (Pretty sure it's the only album he's been involved with where's got the sole writing credit on every song.) I wasn't really able to get into that album, so this is a welcome change-up.

Found this last night while I was trying to find the current tour footage from Rich Mix
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNG4QHHvOPE

Incidentally watched the Rich MIx footage last night and does the Face in the video behind the band during Worried Man Blues morph into a load of Gerry Anderson puppet faces from Stingray and Thunderbirds or is that me? Probably a number of other notable popular culture sci fi faces too from Dr Who and Star Trek among others.

Man I would like to see them on stage with maimone and ravenstine!!!

Here's a glimpse of them at LPR in NYC covering 'Kick Out the Jams' for obvious reasons.

Don't sleep on the recent live album, "By Order Of Mayor Pawlicki (Live In Jarocin)". It's relentlessly great.

Oh yes. And highly good-natured.

Dave T is *funny*

(Always knew this)

There is a guy that's PISSED on my tl about seeing a show on their current tour and calling it "creativity bankrupt"!!

Don't sleep on the recent live album, "By Order Of Mayor Pawlicki (Live In Jarocin)". It's relentlessly great.

― Blood On The Knobs, Friday, 30 June 2023 06:14 (ten hours ago) link

Great record, greater stage banter

"I'm not yelling at you...yet"

been enjoying the album on this swampy uk morning. i’d been feeling it takes a worried man got in the way of the album, sucked the energy into a not particularly outstanding track, but this morning it worked. the bass provided the swampy feeling appropriate to the mood - the chains around the heart, ‘i asked the judge what might be my time’, death and love again, thomas’ psychic landscape overlaid onto the music and geographic spaces of the south.

in general tackling this album i’d been turning round the view that the music is better than the DT element. A precondition or implication of this is that the music is separable from the DT element, which is ofc RONG. the interplay is complicated though, it’s almost like a (very successful) extrapolation and interpretation of the DT’s mental landscape.

Anyway, good listen.

oh and the last seven tracks really add some murk and strangeness, as a sort of side 3 coda. i don’t think they’re really intended to perform that function as such, but they feel pretty essential tbh. odd, intriguing album.

Amazed by the vintage shows being offered on their bandcamp page. Quite a gold mine.

Any recommendations?

I've been trying to put together an overview for Doom & Gloom for a while, there are a lot of great ones and lots of recordings of short-lived or one off line-ups that are esp interesting

For inst, this 98 gig with Wayne Kramer filling on guitar at the last minute

https://pereubu.bandcamp.com/album/mubuc5-pere-ubu-featuring-wayne-kramer

I also really like this one from 2022, which ends up being one of their last performances and is mostly or fully improvised around the idea of songs as "themes"

https://pereubu.bandcamp.com/album/beatitude6

You can listen to them doing "30 Seconds Over Tokyo" in 1975 and it is like the apes in 2001: A Space Odyssey discovering tools and then hear them doing the same song in 2022 in full star-gate mode

I also really like this one from 2022, which ends up being one of their last performances and is mostly or fully improvised around the idea of songs as "themes"

https://pereubu.bandcamp.com/album/beatitude6🕸

You can listen to them doing "30 Seconds Over Tokyo" in 1975 and it is like the apes in _2001: A Space Odyssey_ discovering tools and then hear them doing the same song in 2022 in full star-gate mode

https://pereubu.bandcamp.com/album/sunday

This one is part band practice, part live improvisation, part album recording session

It was also a live video stream, which they would do from time to time and always with an impressive amount of technical problems

In the same spirit, the Montreuil bonus disc included with The Long Goodbye is possibly better than the resulting album. I didn't realize they were regularly putting out "in-between" recordings like that!

otm. that disc is great.

Are we mourning David Thomas’ passing in some other thread or something?

Ok, I guess we are.

Over here: In praise of Pere Ubu

Just listened to flac dl of this:
https://archive.org/details/pere-ubu-the-paradise-boston-ma-1988-09-16
Sound starts clear, gets razory, without digitalitis, initially synth sproting just ebough around voice and drums, which are never hyper, always alert, maybe 12 minutes in there's a kind of bent caterpillar ska, then inside -out blues form, w blues workingman feel--harmonica-melodica-melodeon-violin? more of a def. violin sound on some later/overlapping performances--whole thing keeps building, exemplary for live, and what a fine singer(I'll rub it in with italics, because DT might hate the tag) he turns out to be, once again. Eventually, maybe last 10 minutes seems like a different band, even more of an upfront clarity, speedier, slicker, Brit vocalist? Maybe on the same bill, anyway fits w Ubu well enough.
Google robot, citing Ubu Projex as source, says:

Based on the Pere Ubu timeline and tour history, the band played in Boston (Paradise Rock Club) on July 11, 1987, during their American tour in support of the reformed lineup.
The members of the band (identified as version 5.1/5.2) during this 1987 tour included:
David Thomas (vocals)
Jim Jones (guitar)
Allen Ravenstine (EML synthesizers)
Tony Maimone (bass)
Chris Cutler (drums)
Scott Krauss (drums)
Ubu Projex
Ubu Projex
+3
The 1987 tour, which followed their reunion, often featured Peter & Kristopher Blegvad as support.

Oh wait, stupid robot! Ubu Projex has Chris Cutler as only drummer for Feb-Sep shows; Scott Krauss doesn't get w him and all the others above until Oct.!

That one was uploaded by thriftstorekid, found when looking for Aadam Jacob's vaunted vault on archive.org; the first one of his I've heard is here---didn't really get into it on first listen until track 8, "Something's Gotta Give, "then a good long ride on through and after that, sufficient high points (of course I'm listening for free, with all the comforts of home, incl. FLAC, but also sufficient you-are-there, beer-here-now vibes): https://archive.org/details/ajc01215_pere-ubu-1988-09-23

Also I mistook these other Ubu uploads on archive.org for Jacobs', so posted on his ("Chicago taper" etc) thread:

Was going to listen to the Ubu in Australia show, where they play early singles and all of The Modern Dance---but then I thought, good as it might be, this is 2013 Ubu, near the end---why not go back to the originals, which the taper also offers: 6 '76 A & B-sides, and all of Feb. '78's TMD: OMG---clearest they've ever sounded to me, and cleared my sinuses like Tabasco.

― dow, Friday, February 6, 2026
See those along w Jacobs' shows and related here:
https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%22Pere+Ubu%22

(TMD's Side 2 mostly sounds as inherently hazy, despite/because of this aural clarity, as it did in daze ov weed yore, to my now ancient sobriety---still a subject for further study, though now I can't help but relate it to ex-Crocus's later art-rock studies, but this is better than a lot of that, cause still early Ubu.)

― dow, Friday, February 6, 2026

(Don't get me rong: Side 2 was never a buzzkill, or even a plateau.)

― dow, Friday, February 6, 2026