Pere Ubu – Annotated Modern Dance (Hearpen/Smog Veil Records)
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“Culture happens in secret, all art is secret. Ordinary people only see the ashes of art, or the failures, or frozen moments. Only rarely onstage do bands achieve reality; mostly it’s in rehearsals, in lost moments.”
– David Thomas, Pere Ubu vocalist.
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If ever there was a band deserving of the term “evocative,” it is Pere Ubu, whose barely-classifiable music offered a sonic re-creation of their point of origin: mid-1970s Cleveland. Channeling past and future into a heady mix, the band combined their hometown’s rich history of rock and roll (the term itself was coined there in 1955) with the manner in which the defeated promise of the industrial sector in postwar America was made readily apparent. Like the chemicals that trickled into the Cuyahoga River in such quantities that the river itself caught flame in 1969, the area that was fast becoming known as the Rust Belt saw economic and social stability rapidly seeping away and had come to experience a sense of cognitive dissonance as it awoke, startled, from the American Dream.
The chroniclers of this decline and harvesters of this dissonance, as so often happens, were those who never really bought into the promise of a material utopia in the first place. Like missionaries in search of fresh converts, Pere Ubu took their cacophony to whoever would listen. They sought out whichever patrons of dive bars on the edge of town who might share, if not necessarily a taste for squalling dissonance, at least an understanding that a pre-fabricated suburban home is no suitable place to be found at nine o’clock on a Tuesday night.
Pere Ubu – Annotated Modern Dance (Hearpen/Smog Veil Records)
—
“Culture happens in secret, all art is secret. Ordinary people only see the ashes of art, or the failures, or frozen moments. Only rarely onstage do bands achieve reality; mostly it’s in rehearsals, in lost moments.”
– David Thomas, Pere Ubu vocalist.
—
If ever there was a band deserving of the term “evocative,” it is Pere Ubu, whose barely-classifiable music offered a sonic re-creation of their point of origin: mid-1970s Cleveland. Channeling past and future into a heady mix, the band combined their hometown’s rich history of rock and roll (the term itself was coined there in 1955) with the manner in which the defeated promise of the industrial sector in postwar America was made readily apparent. Like the chemicals that trickled into the Cuyahoga River in such quantities that the river itself caught flame in 1969, the area that was fast becoming known as the Rust Belt saw economic and social stability rapidly seeping away and had come to experience a sense of cognitive dissonance as it awoke, startled, from the American Dream.
The chroniclers of this decline and harvesters of this dissonance, as so often happens, were those who never really bought into the promise of a material utopia in the first place. Like missionaries in search of fresh converts, Pere Ubu took their cacophony to whoever would listen. They sought out whichever patrons of dive bars on the edge of town who might share, if not necessarily a taste for squalling dissonance, at least an understanding that a pre-fabricated suburban home is no suitable place to be found at nine o’clock on a Tuesday night.
That history has vindicated Pere Ubu’s experiments and bestowed upon them an air of respectability seems appropriate given the era of their inception. Songs such as theirs, created in the surroundings which birthed them, present a vision – whether blueprint or metaphor is difficult to determine – of the next decades of American production. Cultural capital triumphed over material production; cities were built on rock and roll (to borrow from the worst song ever written) rather than the blood, sweat, and tears that flowed into the material nirvana of late 20th Century capitalism. Not that Pere Ubu ever expressed much interest in changing widespread perceptions of what constituted viable means of production. They were zealous, but sought converts to a sound as much as an idea – a visceral, confrontational reconfiguring of the daily disillusionment and dissonance of their surroundings into something rapturous and transcendent.
By the band’s own admission, few people understood their approach at the time, which is not at all surprising. There are fleeting shadows of influences in the songs: wisps of the Velvet Underground’s noisier moments, hints of Captain Beefheart’s dilapidated free jazz, intimations of the thousands of garage rock bands whose names and songs have been buried by the sands of history. There are even hints of early industrial music in some of Pere Ubu’s more aleatoric moments, but where bands like Throbbing Gristle or Cabaret Voltaire borrowed strongly from the regularity and consistency of industrial machinery, Pere Ubu sounded more like those same machines falling to pieces, a sound that would be called post-punk in subsequent years, but was performed by people whose music predates all but the earliest of punk rock itself.
The extent to which early Pere Ubu is tied to a specific time and place might arouse fans’ suspicion when confronted with Annotated Modern Dance. The album is a live recording from March 2010, and features the band performing the entirety of their 1976 album The Modern Dance alongside a handful of other early songs. Skepticism is justified: so many recordings of long-running bands plowing through old chestnuts come across as uninspired sentimentality, the sort of retrospection indulged in primarily by artists whose relevance has slipped into questionable territory. There are those who will likely level that criticism at Annotated Modern Dance. The songs featured on the album are no longer bewildering, otherworldly howls from rock and roll’s lunatic fringe – they are simply rock and roll songs by a band who, while certainly boundary-pushing, have achieved some degree of canonical respectability over the years.
But criticisms like that fail to do the album justice. The original Modern Dance was a product of a specific time and place, but to relegate Pere Ubu to the narrow historical avenue of Cleveland, Ohio, 1976 is to severely undermine the music’s staying power. If “Nonalignment Pact” were simply an appropriation of the imagery and language of Cold War political division to describe an individual’s failure to connect with others, or if songs like “Street Waves” and “Real World” were simply indictments of Midwestern industrial decline, they would hold little power except possibly as historical oddity. But for all the discussion of the songs’ prescience and envelope-pushing, it can be easy to forget that there were songs there as well, a skeletal cohesion giving form to their body of noise. That the songs don’t shock in the same way they likely did in 1976 is no discredit to the band – while Pere Ubu’s dissonance could be bracing, there was more at work than shock value.
Annotated Modern Dance shows a band breaking free from the shackles of its own history by offering a tacit acknowledgement that the only reason it had attained such stature in the first place was through the power of its songs. And the songs are presented in as unadorned a fashion as possible. The recording is very raw, even for a live recording, and might be a turn-off to all but the most devout of fans. But the no-frills production is an excellent touch – the listener feels as if he or she is fighting to see the band through a crowd of onlookers. The performances themselves are top-notch as well, possessing an energy and intensity most bands Pere Ubu’s age would be hard-pressed to muster. It is precisely this vivacity that acts as the album’s nucleus. While there will certainly be naysayers, Annotated Modern Dance presents a band that, through tackling decades-old material, is able to add another layer of nuance to their aesthetic and to further cement their reputation rather than simply rehash the glory years.
