Customer Reviews

Modern Dance

5 star:		(37)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

It's an awesome record, one that has inspired a fair degree of bands but been criminally underheard by the buying public.

Influences range from garage rock to the most avant of the avant-garde rock groups. Ubu on this record move from beautifully powerful guitar-driven grunge to abstract fractured art. The whole thing has such a strength and brilliance behind it that it remains cohesive. These are 5 very talented people working together in the service of something greater (art in music).

I've got to say, frankly, that this music blows away most of what came after it. If you like adventurous rock music, you need to hear this.

This album struck me really hard. It may be a loud and difficult album at times but it is a beautiful one with a lot of emotion at its core. Every single song on here sounds like a classic to me. My personal favorites are Chinese Radiation, Life Stinks, and Humor Me. But every one is simple amazing in its own right. David Thomas sounds like a huge penguin with gauze stuffed down his throat. You'll never heard anything quite like it I'm sure. Allen Ravenstine's disturbing and cosmic synth parts will startle you at first but after quite a few listens everything will fit and I'm sure you'll love it too. Defintely on my top 5 albums of all time list. If you don't already have this please check it out.

I love this CD and all the great songs on it. One of the reviewers said that Iggy Pop ripped the bassline off of one of the songs, but I wanna Be your Dog was released almost ten years before this album was. I guess that guy has no idea what he is talking about. Good CD.

It takes a lot of guts to listen to Pere Ubu with an open mind. Since it is so different than anything in the mainstream, one's initial impulse might be to label this music in relation to that mainstream and just say it's weird or dissonant or cacaphonous. But, if you can lay down your preconceived notions of what constitutes harmony, melody, and rhythm long enough to get absorbed into the matrix of this music, you might just find that it is the mainstream that is weird. This music was ignored by the public because it simply went over their heads and those of the critics as well. It, like Captain Beefheart, Henry Cow, Eno, and a host of others, requires an open mind capable of relating to unfamiliar concepts. In other words you have to be pretty smart, but more importantly, you have to be secure enough in your own mind and body to allow others the right to be different before you can understand why this music is so damn cool. So do whatever it is you have to do to open yourself up. "Quit the cool tomfoolery and shed your nasty jewelry", to quote Don Vliet (Captain Beefheart) and listen to this cd. It can definitely be a life changing experience.

The first two minutes of "Laughing" are like a laid-back version of the Stooges' "L.A. Blues," with a saxophone going quietly crazy while a guitar chimes in with chords here and there. The very first sound you here on the album is feedback, which continues even as the guitar begins to come in for the very, very postromantic love song "Nonalignment Pact." This is music with a screw loose, but in a good way.

Pere Ubu came out of the industrial wasteland of 1970s Ohio, from the ruins of a fabled proto-punk car wreck called Rocket From the Tombs. Half that band went and formed the Dead Boys, fled to the Bowery and CBGB's, made some great music and pretty quickly burned out on drugs. The other half renamed themselves after a surrealist Alfred Jarry play ("Ubu Roi") and started playing really weird, really low-fi music that's basically unclassifiable, but could probably be called something like art-garage-punk. Interestingly enough, they weren't the only band playing music like that: a couple boys who'd met at Kent State University, a few years after the famous shooting, played weird robotic songs about the devolution of humanity--Devo. The two bands sounded nothing alike, but they sounded more like one another than like anything on the radio, and somehow it worked, because both bands are still around.

The songs are closer in temperment to the often-obscure lyrics of New York poet-punks like Richard Hell, Patti Smith, Jim Carroll, and Tom Verlaine of Television, than to the British anarcho-nihilist or West Coast hardcore punk scenes. David Thomas, who sang and wrote all the lyrics, had been a rock journalist before becoming a full-time musician (like Andy Shernoff of the Dictators, Lenny Kaye of the Patti Smith Group, and Morrissey of the Smiths). But the music wasn't sound so much self-consciously literate as totally out of its mind. (The first verse to the song "Sentimental Journey": "Window my size outside monoxide inside paradise curtain no breeze.") Thomas doesn't sing the songs so much as he testifies them, screeches them, wails them, squawks them, declaims them. The thin guitars play chunky riffs, the bassist and drums beat in time, and somehow reinforce the psychic mindwave Thomas imposes.

Somehow, out of all this avant-garde post-modernist soundscape they tease absolutely recognizable, head-bounceable rocknroll. The rhythm section is tight enough to dance to, and by the time you're actually moving your body in time with the music the squawks of David Thomas overhead seem perfectly normal. Pretty soon, you're hooked, and once the music gets into you, it all starts to make sense inside; it's just the rest of the world that's crazy.

At last, the single-CD issue of Pere Ubu's debut album (economically priced, too!): a brilliant instance of "avant-garage" rock mixing sterling hooks, moving lyrics, eerie sounds and musique concrete. Criminally underestimated in its own time, this ageless treasure puts nearly all other bands of any type to shame. Forget the new Hole release, this is the album you need to buy

I'm not going to tell you that this is a great piece of art. That's usually used as a cover up, and is subjective. "That painting looks like crap!" "No, you don't understand. It's art." "Oh...I guess that makes it o.k., then."

I'm not going to tell you that this is a timeless classic. I don't know enough about the band to make such a bold statement. I have been a huge punk fan for a while. The name Pere Ubu would surface now and again, but not so much that I would hunt it down until very recently when I heard Henry Rollins talking about them on his radio show.

I will say that this album is amazing, and deserves all the praise it is getting. It is NOT a first listen album. I am a big fan of John Zorn, Mike Patton, Melvins, Atari Teenage Riot, Einstürzende Neubauten, Psychic TV, and all sorts of even weirder and more experimental music.

Even with that as my musical taste, when I first put this CD in, I was angry. I hated it. I mean, I was so mad that I had spent my money on it. A few days later I gave it a second listen, and started to hear it a bit more, but was still annoyed. On the third listen, it sunk in, and I "got it".

This album demands your attention. This is not something you put on while driving or trying to work. This is an album that you truly have to pay attention to. Once the listener removes all distractions and takes it all in, it all makes sense. It is wonderful, and a worthwhile challenge for those who enjoy complicated music. On a certain level, many songs on this CD, such as "Sentimental Journey", remind me of some tracks by later bands such as Einstürzende Neubauten or Throbbing Gristle. While many bands in the late 70's were following a "punk rock formula", many bands from the early 70's were more punk than most of those bands could ever hope to be. Bands like Suicide, DEVO, Pere Ubu, and Kraftwerk were not only challenging society with thought provoking lyrics. At the same time they were challenging the entire musical art form of structured rock and roll.

This is not a CD for everyone. The is not a CD for most. The CD is filled with dissonance, crashes, strange noises, and many reviewers have mentioned the bellowing warble of Dave Thomas. There is a lot of space in the music, and yet at times it can sound tense and claustrophobic. That being said, I think most fans of mind-bending music won't have a complete collection without this CD sitting on the shelf. Most fans of pre-punk/proto-punk/etc. will definitely want to pick this up as well. Another reviewer mentioned The Meat Puppets. That was a good call. If you like The Meat Puppets and Neubauten, this is definitely a safe purchase.

Even though it's not for everyone, I still give it five stars. For what it is, it is perfect.

It's rare for any piece of work to come along that you absolutely cannot understand at face value. Here's one such piece of work - it has no face value. Take that Soviet-style worker's hero in ballet shoes on the cover; any meaning the image has is a matter of the viewer's interpretation and nothing else, and the whole album is like that. You have to make up your own mind this time. Sorry.

Most of the world has never heard of Pere Ubu, and of those who have, many seem to believe that the band is a crew of dangerous semi-humans intent on breaking into suburban homes, stealing the color television and committing unspeakable acts on the family cat. Well, good news, folks - on the evidence of this album, at least, Pere Ubu is a crew of good old-fashioned rock fans, totally in love with surf guitar, British Invasion rhythm sections and teenage love songs.

Now, no one could possibly listen to this stuff and imagine that Pere Ubu is a bunch of traditionalists - it's too twisted. It's what might happen to a bunch of standard rock and roll songs after a few years' exposure to radioactive industrial waste. Well, there's plenty of such waste in Pere Ubu's native Cleveland, a place where in 1977 the river still caught fire from time to time. So The Modern Dance sounds like a slightly mutated K-Tel hits compilation, which is just about threatening enough, thank you very much.

In any case, it's certainly not punk rock, despite the presence of the punk classic "Life Stinks". That song's whole attitude is aggressive punk nihilism - "I can't wink, I can't blink, I need a drink." Unfortunately for punk rock fans, the writer of that song, Peter Laughner, wasn't even in the band when it recorded this album, and if you listen to the rest of it you can tell why - unlike Laughner, the other members of Pere Ubu are not punkers. (Don't ask me what they actually are - I'm not sure they know themselves.)

What's most fascinating about these songs is the way the lyrics and the music match up. It's like the singer is describing a world where meanings have mutated, and the band plays music from that mutated world. The rhythm section, for instance, does all the usual things in all the wrong places, and the synthesizer plays no notes - it just makes noise, a different wall of noise for each cut. While all of this is going on, the vocalist sings about things like his inability to communicate, his reliance on his girlfriend for protection against evil, his panic about the possibility of real intimacy. And the whole time he's warbling and cackling and whinnying like a drunken hippopotamus. In short, the songs are about vulnerability, and the music is about chaos - the same chaos that produces the singer's vulnerability. You can listen to this stuff for hours and keep finding new depths to it.

Of course, at the very end, the singer giggles "It's just a joke, mon!" like some deranged Rasta after too many cups of coffee. So maybe I'm dead wrong about this whole thing - maybe these guys really were just kidding around. I don't care - if Pere Ubu is just kidding around with me, I can make my own decision about what their material means to me, can't I? One of their own songs gives good advice for a time like this: "When the devil comes...we'll laugh!"

Benshlomo says, Think - it ain't illegal yet.

Just like the debuts by The Beatles, Velvet Underground and Roxy Music, this deservedly sits way up there..life altering!! True, David Thomas' vocals are challenging...and an acquired taste. True, the atmospherics can get rather bleak at times...and the synthesizer by Allen Ravenstine sounds like radiator steam hissing. Therein, however lay its charm. Fantastic stuff! Makes so many other bands' efforts pale in comparison. They have set the bar pretty damn high. Highest recommendation!

I was there-I lived the punk explosion in the late 70s-early 80s.And as much as I loved the Clash and the Sex Pistols, they-along with Iggy Pop and the New York Dolls, were mainly working within the rock/blues paradigm. They were notable because of their intensity, passion and integrity. On the other hand, there were a few bands that were actually trying to create something new. The most commercially successful of these bands was the Talking Heads, but they were not alone. There were also Gang of Four and Pere Ubu. The only thing Pere Ubu had in common with mainstream rock was the 4/4 time signature. Everything else went out the window. I can't describe how exciting it was to watch and wait for these bands to issue new albums. Just allowing David Thomas to sing took courage and vision. The band that developed around his sound didn't sound like anyone else. Of the early Ubu albums, this is my favorite. The experimentation on this album represented a line in the sand for every other rock band in the world. "Non-Alignment Pact" and "The Modern Dance" use the basic rock strutcture, but that's the only thing they have in common with traditional rock songs. My favorite song on this album is "Sentimental Journey." While synthesizers and saxophones noodle and squawk, Thomas mutters and breaks dishes.This is a band like no other,and they never received the attention or success they deserved. If any of the Ubus read this, let me tell you,brothers,there were plenty of us out there gasping with admiration as we watched your tightrope walk!