You don’t approach a new album from Pere Ubu as you would anyone else. For nearly 50 years, the band have been producing their very personal brand of Avant Gard Rock and, frankly, this new album is as impenetrable and incoherently brilliant as ever.
This incarnation of the band sees David Thomas on vocals & analog synths, Keith Moline on guitar & electronics, Alex Ward on guitar & clarinet, Michele Temple on bass & piano, Gagarin on Digital synths & drums, Andy Diagram on trumpet & electronics plus Jack Jones on theremin. The music is dark and heavy, often based around a single beat with different instruments and voices flying in and out of focus but, if you apply yourself to it, a logic and a melody emerges. And there is the rub of it. This is music that you have to work at. It’s nothing to put on as background music or even as ‘entertainment’, this is an artistic statement that requires you, the listener, to delve in and discover it.
There are similarities to Capt, Beefheart & The Magic Band in that the music is so perfectly structured that a single extraneous noise breaks the intense vision that they produce. Everything happens at the right moment and the music creates a brilliant set of mental images. Kudos also for a version of the Osmonds ‘Crazy Horses’!
It is brilliant, if difficult and totally different to anything else I’ve heard this year.
