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Tuesday, June 06, 2006

Pere Ubu


To be honest, I don't feel like I have a keen enough intellect to adequately analyze and expound on Pere Ubu. While I like the band and their music on a high level, I feel like I'm missing something critical that everyone else is getting - kinda how I feel whenever I listen to Jazz. Kinda how I felt when I failed advanced calculus, or tried to read Dostoevsky. Just plain dumb. So I'll leave it at that, but suggest you head over to Vinyl Mine to check out Jim's take on Pere Ubu's first album The Modern Dance.

Deconstruction aside, I've grown comfortable with the majority of material Pere Ubu released in their "Historical" period (1975-1982). The band produced 3 fine albums (Modern Dance, Dub Housing, and New Picnic Time) in little over a two year span, in addition to a couple of fantastic singles. If you can put aside David Thomas' off-key yelping/mewing and the band's more artsy-fartsy avant weirdness there's much to enjoy. The tracks here come from the band's 5-song 1978 12" Datapanik in the Year Zero, originally released in the UK on Radar Records. The EP collects cuts from the band's early releases on their own Hearthan label, including the first single from 1975, the b-side to their second single ("Cloud 149"), a demo version of "The Modern Dance" (marked as "untitled"), and the b-side to The Modern Dance single ("Heaven"). A nice sample of the band's early output, though the exclusion of "Final Solution" is puzzling:

from 1978 EP Datapanik in the Year Zero
Pere Ubu - Heart of Darkness.mp3
Pere Ubu - 30 Seconds Over Tokyo.mp3
Pere Ubu - Cloud 149.mp3
Pere Ubu - Untitled.mp3
Pere Ubu - Heaven.mp3


Notes:
> Photo from official Pere Ubu website: Ubuprojex
> Rocket From The Tombs tracks are still available from an earlier post. I prefer the RFTT early version of "30 Seconds Over Tokyo"
> The entire Datapanik EP is included in the Terminal Tower singles, etc compilation and the Datapanik in the Year Zero boxset.