Pere Ubu

Alternative Press (10/99, pp.105-6) - 5 out of 5 - "...Ubu were some of the most danceable freaks in all of post-punk America...if David Thomas' caterwaul and Allen Ravenstine's mind-altering keyboard riffs don't get you leaping around...you're not really alive and you never were..."

Dub Housing, the second album by Pere Ubu, has the effect of an extremely stimulating
dream: images and emotions emerge from cacophonous songs only to disappear just as
quickly, never to be found again in subsequent listenings. This five-man Cleveland band is
willfully, even aggressively eccentric, but their expansive spirit is quick to charm. In any
given Pere Ubu composition, cracked and mostly incoherent phrases are wailed... More >

Because I trust the way Ubu's visionary humor and crackpot commitment rocks out and/or hooks in for the sheer pleasure of it, I'm willing to go with their excursions into musique concrete, and on this record they get me somewhere. The death of Peter Laughner may well have deprived America of its greatest punk band, but the subsequent ascendancy of synth wizard Allen Ravenstine has defined a survival-prone community capable of bridging the '60s and the '80s without acting as if the '70s never happened. Imitating randomness by tucking randomlike sounds into deep but tactfully casual structures, joyfully confusing organic and inorganic sounds, they teach us how to live in the industrial shift--imaginatively! (Grade - A)