Track Listing

1. Non-Alignment Pact
2. Modern Dance
3. Laughing
4. Street Waves
5. Chinese Radiation
6. Life Stinks
7. Real World
8. Over My Head
9. Sentimental Journey
10. Humor Me

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #21621 in Music
• Released on: 1998-06-02
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .20 pounds

Chronique amazon.fr
Si le patronyme du groupe est pioché chez le pataphysicien Alfred Jarry, sa musique semble venir de nulle part. A écouter ses rythmes trépidants, les riffs de guitare répétitifs de Tom Herman et la voix haut perchée de l'excentrique David Thomas dont on ne rencontre guère d'équivalents que chez les Talking Heads et PIL en les personnes de David Byrne et Johnny Lydon, elle ressemble à un improbable croisement entre le blues concassé de Captain Beefheart et les chansons robotiques de Devo. Des titres comme "The Modern Dance" et "Life Stinks" écrit par le rock critic Peter Laughner sont typiques de ce punk rock arty alors que "Chinese Radiation" diffuse une ambiance plus cinématographiquement contemplative. Séminal, ce groupe du Midwest a influencé l'avant-garde new-yorkaise de la fin des 70's. --Philippe Robert

Customer Reviews

Smokestack lightning, indeed
Rock and roll from the factory floor. "Non-Alignment Pact" and "Modern Dance" are the only reasons you need to buy this CD. High glare sodium pop snap. Let's pogo amid the bricks and broken glass and shattered dreams, baby.

I thought I'd heard everything, but...
Just when your expectations are set, then you hear something truly different. I loved Captain Beefheart and felt that I got what it was all about immediately with him, but this...something is so innately disturbed within it. Maybe this is because David Thomas is as screwy as the proverbial cartoon squirrel. His voice is a maelstrom of total insanity and gurbling and burbling and raving - yes, I know that description is completely incoherent, but it's about as incoherent as Thomas himself is on this album - and it is Pere Ubu's signature and weakness. I simply can't sit through this album in its entirety. That's not to say that there aren't any great songs. Most of the songs here are excellent, truly innovative reinventions of popular conventions. "Nonalignment Pact" is simply one of the best songs of the '70's - straight from the intro of ear-piercing white noise that reveals tiny, tinny little minor-key melodies, to the super-catchy garage riff that carries throughout the song, to the "slow" middle section, to Tony Maimone's lead bass solo, to Allan Ravenstine's consistent air-raid white noise synth, to Thomas's very clever lyrics. "I wanna make a deal with you, girl/Get it signed by the Heads of State/I wanna make a deal with you, girl/So won't you sign my/Nonalignment Pact!" Unfortunately, it's the first and best song on the album. The title track features some of the best tape effects work I've seen in a long time, and shows Tom Herman's intelligent lead guitar work. The album's more avant-garde stuff, though, like "Laughing" and "Sentimental Journey", verges on unlistenable (and, in the case of the latter song, sometimes leaps unashamedly into that category). See, I wish that the mood would lighten. There is no palpable sense of humanism that so thrillingly infused Beefheart's "Trout Mask Replica" (and it is this, as well as the unbelievably complicated song structures, that makes "Trout Mask Replica" the "Ulysses" of popular music), or any of the humor, except in "Nonalignment Pact". Maybe it's exceptionally unreasonable to expect a sense of humanity from the band, because it is for so many groups. I did read that Pere Ubu was very inspired by Beefheart, so when I found it in my library, I took it out and expected something, well, more Beefheart-esque. So many things that are avant-garde are consistently mired in desperation and depression - it runs like an artery throughout the genre. I wish that Thomas would get witty more often, because anybody who could write "Nonalignment Pact" and "Humor Me" obviously has a sense of humor. It also doesn't help at all that the second-best song on the album, "Life Stinks", was written by the then-dead Peter Laughner. My rating is three-and-a-half stars, for the reasons you see above; but it is obviously different for other people. The album as a whole to me is non-cohesive, unchanging in mood and tone, and ironically mostly stocked with brilliant songs. It just doesn't hang together well.

Timeless Classic
The owner of my favorite record store insisted that I buy The Modern Dance the week it was released in 1978. Not knowing what to expect, I played it and was completely blown away by an original and unique mix of prog rock, experimental noise, 60's garage rock and punk. David Thomas' wild bellowing fit perfectly. During a year when disco dominated the airwaves, prog rock bands were truly terrible (remember Yes' Tormato?!), and the tidal wave of punk bands were often formulaic and predictable, Pere Ubu was completely fresh and different.

I've listened to this album continually over the past 25 years. It's one of the few records that I'll never tire of. The Modern Dance is a great introduction to Pere Ubu.