Pere Ubu

Essential Albums

  • Dub Housing
    Dub Housing
    Dub Housing

    The title for Pere Ubu’s second album came from a drive the band took through Baltimore while on tour in early 1978. The streets were empty, and Jamaican music played on the stereo—spacey and repetitive and a little eerie. Block after block of identical row houses disappeared behind them. Look, singer David Thomas said, dub housing. It’s a quick story, but it gives you a good picture into the band’s world. Released in 1978, Dub Housing proved that not only were the members of Pere Ubu open to the abstractions of something like dub (“Blow Daddy-O”), but that they approached the straight lines of punk with a lateral sense of humour more indebted to French surrealism than American rock ’n’ roll. The result was a mix of high and low—featuring both experimental subtlety (“Thriller!”) and lunchpail brutishness (“Navvy”)—that the band’s drummer Scott Krauss once called “avant-garage”. As for Thomas: Depending on how you looked at it, the singer was either a philosopher teasing out the repetitive absurdity of language, or just a moron barking his inner monologue to whoever happened to be passing by (as evidenced by the haunting “I did this/And I went there/And I think about you all the time” on “Codex”). It was hard to tell if he was a Homer Simpson-type written by Samuel Beckett, or a Raymond Chandler detective investigating his own shadow. On Dub Housing, Pere Ubu come off as smart as Talking Heads, but only half as showy; as dark as Public Image Ltd., but funnier. This is a group in touch with its mystical side in ways that felt totally different from the wit and intellectualism of post-punk. And Dub Housing is the album that gave rise, even if indirectly, to bands like the Pixies and Nirvana, as well as also the overstimulating style of hyperpop, in which manic blasts of sound try to convey the limits of what we can logically process, and how. But maybe we shouldn’t overthink it: Part of what makes Dub Housing so inspiring is that, in the end, it comes from the gut.

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About Pere Ubu

Influential art rockers Pere Ubu emerged in 1975 from the ashes of Cleveland proto-punk legends Rocket from the Tombs. Their industrial-strength sound on early masterpiece Dub Housing was characterised by unruly garage riffs, dissonantly haunting synthesiser gurgles, and, most enduringly, singer/lyricist David Thomas’ seemingly extemporaneous absurdist yelps. After disbanding (for the second time) in 1982, Ubu re-emerged in 1988 with The Tenement Year, which craftily balanced hard-rocking art moves with a smart pop sensibility. Over the band’s next dozen or so albums, Thomas (the sole original member since 2002) divided his attention between pop records exploring the emotional state of the union, as on Pennsylvania and 20 Years in a Montana Missile Silo, and more overtly conceptual projects (Long Live Père Ubu!, an adaptation of their namesake symbolist play) and inventive new scores to noir-esque films (Lady from Shanghai, Carnival of Souls). In 2019, Pere Ubu released The Long Goodbye, a loose, hard-boiled take on the Raymond Chandler classic.

ORIGIN
Cleveland, OH, United States
FORMED
August 1975
GENRE
Alternative

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