Pere Ubu: Classic Or Dud

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...

only saw them live once, doing the music for roger corman's the man with the x-ray eyes. interesting and funny, especially how they slotted in some of their better-known songs (e.g., playing "the modern dance" during a shot of people dancing at a party). david thomas attempted to "conduct" the band, which meant he made flailing arm movements that they completely ignored. great show, though.

The "reunion" show I saw in 1987 was indeed a return to form for DT but I sorta lost track of all the albums released since then.

what's the ILM buzz on the Rocket from the Tombs reunion? I've got bootleg tapes of RFTT from 1975 that are crazed takes on metallized proto-punk. But my favorite UBU is another bootleg tape from 1976, the last gigs with Peter Laughner. from his bedroom to the baroom.

ah the avant-garage. so many people followed in these guys footsteps it's hard to imagine just how isolated/unique it all was at first.

My favourite moment on Night Network...

more exciting are the Home & Garden Mp3s and these websites:
http://www.homeandgardenmusic.com/index_main.asp
http://www.homeandgardenmusic.com/index_multimedia.asp
http://myspace.com/homeandgardenmusic

and the release of History & Geography on CD ..

after the insufferable mayo thompson joined (did adrian belew really need to be cloned?),

I may not love the Pere Ubu stuff with him on it, but insufferable? Forget the version of Horses done with Pere Ubu and listen to the original. Amazing.

Wow, Tom Herman, haven't thought about him in about 20 years. I auditioned for him around the time of "Long Walk Off a Short Pier". He played some very nasty slide guitar. I wasn't called back.

Saw Ubu on the Urg tour w/The Members, Dead Boys, and Magazine. Devoto was a putz. Thomas should get over himself but I still dig his work. He makes himself such an easy target... and I ain't talking about his size.

Mercury UK has reissued the long OOP first bunch of Ubu Mk II albums. (Tenement Year, Cloudland, Worlds In Collision, Story Of My Life).

I can take or leave the other three, but I've always loved Tenement Year, which IMO yields only to the early singles and first two LPs. But it always sounded like shit, gray, cluttered and muddy. Got the remaster and it sounds fucking marvelous, all the fidgety detail of the double drummers exposed, Ravenstine's synth disclaimers sounding thick and rich, etc etc. I'm very happy to have this album un-lamed.

Cool! That's good to hear. The only time I saw them they were touring that record iirc. Thompson deliberately ruined "Final Solution" by wailing all of the lyrics in an incomprehensible yowl, which was at least, uh, interesting.

No mention of Tripod Jimmie on this thread that I see... Tom Herman's post-Ubu band. They have at least one fantastic album that I still own, archival stuff that came out in the 90's, but I am 2000 miles away from my records right now so I can't look it up.

I like some of Dub Housing, almost none of New Picnic Time. Tenement Years and Ray Gun Suitcase are pretty good also, I imagine Ray Gun is oop after the meltdown on T/K Records (also home of the needs-so-bad-to-be-reissued Peter Laughner double LP).

Ray Gun Suitcase has been reissued on either Smog Veil or Hearpen, can't remember which. It's on eMusic, too.

Someone upthread implies that they auditioned for Tripod Jimmie, actually! I was a big fan of TJ's Warning To All Strangers LP. I'd buy that in a minute if it was on CD. "There ain't NO WAY I'm gonna put MY HAND in THERE without my box."

Luckily Tom Herman was back in the lineup when i saw Ubu in 2003; it was really nice to see him in action.

Pere Ubu is one of those bands that I've wanted to like for quite a long time, but I can't really get past Thomas' voice.

I resemble that remark. It amazes me that people can like this but hate, for instance, Phish, because of their squeaky voices and endulgent "noodling." How do these criticisms not apply to PU (good abbreviation!)? Beats me (and I'm sure many of you would like to right about now). Oh well, I don't have to like or understand everything.

I've never owned Cloudland and have wanted to for years. This is good news.

I interviewed Thomas for a Wire cover story last year, and he mentioned there was some talk of reissuing those discs. Glad to hear they're back out there.

A very enjoyable interview, too. Fun guy to talk to about the mechanics of record-making and live performance, etc. Philosophical "meaning of rock" stuff, not so much. Keep it quotidian and you'll get a great conversation out of the guy. Try to get arty, or fetishize the past, and he'll slap you down in a heartbeat.

Alfred, a phonograph player and a three dollar copy off ebay could have done the job nicely! : D

Ok, slight tradeoff for the much-improved sound on Tenement: A very different mix of one song, "Dream The Moon," is used this time. Bass/Drums/Guitar sound the same, but totally different vocal track. Can't tell yet how I feel about the alt. mix, just 'cause I'm so imprinted on the old one. I'll probably tag the original mix onto the end of the reissue in my library for good measure.

The two B-sides included as bonus tracks are really fun. Two Peel sessions as well.

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