Customer Reviews

New Picnic Time

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

 

 

Yes he sings some lyrics about Jehovah's Kingdom on here (to the discomfort of other band members) ... yes they were on the verge of pretentious excess, caused by the singer's domination of the band ... yes some of the tracks here are so-so moody meanderings ...

But the better part of this record is fantastic! I mean, good grief! Really unbelievable!

I'm almost speechless as to how beautiful parts of this record are. I came here to say something, so I'll say that on tracks like the first two each member of Ubu is contributing to a strong, slightly bizarre rhythm that moves and grooves. I'll also say that Tom Hermann (who left after recording this) was a genuinely astonishing player and that he left the evidence all over this record. Highlights are the first two tracks and "One Less Worry"; those tracks make nearly all of the history of recorded music seem like a mere build-up to this.

Pere Ubu's 'New Picnic Time' is to begin with, a startling rock music, joyously performed.
The greedy and selfish critic would have you believe that this stuff is 'difficult' (ie beyond us plebs) therefore more relevant, but this is plainly not so. 'NPT' positively hums with good tunes and delightfully unforced spluttering singing, so why is it 'difficult'?

Obviously PU are one of those groups sure to make the critisorial elite and intellectual cognoscenti explode with (quiet) excitement; plunder the thesaurus in search of new and powerful superlatives to expound, theorize generically about PU (a dislocated but potent rock force), and their high positioning in the performance/art hierarchy.

Important stuff indeed, and about as useful as a viper up your trouser leg.

If you're going to stalk the periphery of this-thing-we-call-rock, then you might as well do it wearing great clod-hopping boots and banging a bin-lid. Such is the delight in the sheer audaciousness of people who loudly make a music that is worthy of anguish among the assessing minority. Themselves, through vast years of 'knowledge' and time-served at the listening booths and concert halls, take great pleasure in knowing better than us. Speak down to and not for us.
This is a pop-group that needs retrieving.

So, if PU want to make albums, it's important they do so in this setting, and with half an eye on the immovable block of very little indeed, that hides itself from humanity, but is omnipresent in most that we see today.
Looking at it from above, it's all shimmer and light. A true rock fan MUST dance with glee when hearing 'NPT', WILL celebrate ITS celebrating of age-old rock ideals of being madly original and (in a good way) experimental.

There's nothing safe about 'NPT'. It's a vast rebel yell of an album, more overt than a hundred Green Days; and the whistling, yelping of singer David Thomas is worth a thousand times the sycophantic posturings of a Bono.

The songs themselves are nigh on beautiful, but you'll get no indication from the extraordinary titles; you gotta submerge yourself in them. There's fast rockers, slow ballads, in fact, everything-in-a-cliché you could possibly want from a great rock'n'roll record. It's a kind of bellicose 'Marquee Moon', if you can imagine Verlaine and co, on stilts, heading to Kingdom Hall.

It's a feel-good album too. It can raise a smile with the best of 'em, without any of that strained attempt at forced fun you sometimes have to suffer. The same modus as good Capt B. only more mainstream, more streamlined.
Initially, the songs SEEM to run round like headless chickens, but after repeated listening's (essential with ANY PU), they reveal themselves as very tight and stable; smooth as silk and easily as seductive.

In other words; this is a deep and vital music, worth every effort you need to make. Gladly unshackle your senses from the years of insidious and sideways abuse by critics, who despite prolonged extolling of its many 'difficulties', would dearly love to keep it to themselves.

They have no intention of giving PU up to the world. So smug in that hard-earned comforting impracticable, and safe on a higher tier of thought, it's one way they can sleep soundly in their beds.

During the late '70's, a new Pere Ubu record was a huge event in my life. When New Picnic Time was released, I eagerly snapped it up and rushed home to listen. "IT'S ME AGAIN" blared through the speakers at ear-splitting volume. The grin on my face stretched from ear to ear. The Fabulous Sequel indeed! In the wake of Dub Housing, this is certainly a fabulous effort.

Pere Ubu is truly a love/hate band. I've cleared parties faster than a half dozen cops could've by spinning a Pere Ubu disc. But the few who stick around to listen are saying "Wow, this is really cool, who's this band?"

New Picnic Time is classic Pere Ubu. Buy it or better yet buy the Datapanik in the Year Zero CD box set.

Like The Byrds' NOTORIOUS BYRD BROTHERS before it and Six Finger Satellite's LAW OF RUINS after, Pere Ubu's NEW PICNIC TIME is the literal soundtrack of a band falling apart...brilliantly. Coming as it does in the band's history between the extreme avante garde noise rock on DUB HOUSING (1978) and the outright art attack of THE ART OF WALKING (1980), NEW PICNIC TIME, Ubu's third album and guitarist Tom Herman's last (for almost 20 years), has remained much misunderstood throughout the band's history, perhaps owing to it's "deformed blues ethic" (to quote Trouser Press) and the twisted and bleak tunes (many of which hinter on falling apart at any instant) that make up it's sequence. It's not quite as accessable as some of their other albums, but it remains perhaps their finest achievement.

The album opens with a near-pop crash ("The Fabulous Sequel") and takes the listener through dada blues, rock, musical breakdowns ("One Less Worry"), and waxing sonic frustrations ("Make Hay"), all of which David Thomas sings, screams, bleats, howls, moans, whines, and laughs his way through until ultimately finding peace at the very end with "Jehovah's Kingdom Comes!" (revisionistically re-titled over the years since as "Kingdom Come" and "Hand A Face A Feeling"), quite possibly the most beautiful Jehovah's Witness hymn ever written. Over Herman's and Tony Maimone's calming dual guitars (no bass is used), Scott Krauss' simple drums, and Allen Ravenstine's trumpet-like EML playing, Thomas coos that "you and I need never die" and the song ends in an abrubt fadeout.

Maybe it was a hope for the future, for himself and/or for the band, but following their summer '79 tour, Herman left (eventually co-founding Tripod Jimmie), was eventually replaced by Red Crayola's Mayo Thompson, and the band took a direct dive in absolute art, never quite looking back to the absolute honesty and brilliance they achieved on NEW PICNIC TIME.

Buy this, study it, play it endlessly, LISTEN to it, and let it seep into your system. NEW PICNIC TIME will get to you, if you let it.

This is the original line-up of Pere Ubu at its most improvisatory, nearly every song clearly built up spontaneously in the studio around some core musical idea. David Thomas riffing on words ("Dishes! dishes! dishes! All for love of you...."), Maimone's killer bass lines, Herman and Ravenstine working it out in the best free-jazz tradition. Although it isn't jazz at all. And then all the mounting but masterfully controlled tension is released with "Jehovah's Kingdom Come", Thomas' most beautiful pop song until the Cloudland album a decade later and the album's only truly "composed" piece. New Picnic Time falls almost unnoticed between more rock and blues-oriented masterworks like Modern Dance and Dub Housing, on the one hand, and the more self-consciously arty Art of Walking and Song of the Bailing Man, on the other. But it stands as Pere Ubu's singularly greatest work in this first period of their career. An incredible masterpiece.

The "New Picnic time" is an album that I greatly enjoy. Some may say that it is too experimental and becomes too fast... or whatever reason. The truth is that this is an album that can grow on you very fast. When I first got it, I was lost and impatient. Back then, a song over two and a half minutes would boar me, which is a side effect of being part of the generation with the attention span of a goldfish hopped up on coffee and PSP abuse, which is what most people are now. But as I listened to it more I found that this record has very strange energy to it. The only track I could do without is the opening track "the fabulous sequel", which is like a version of "not happy" without as much thought put into it. But tracks like "A Small Dark Cloud" and "All the Dogs Are Barking" really make this album. Other tracks, like "Make Hay", "Small Was Fast", and "One Less Worry" give another spin on the quality of this record. These songs are musically interesting and give some room for thought. In "Art of Walking", which isn't nessecerely their best, has one song "Go" that would have fit in this part of the album very nicely. Actually, that song sums up the theme through out "New Picnic Time".
The record concludes with the song Kingdom Come, which ends things well. It is echo-y and has a keyboard that sounds like a custom car horn.
So my point is that this pere ubu stuff can be seen as very good, it depends on how you look at what they were trying to do.

There's a constant juxtaposition, from the very first track (ebullient almost schizophrenic vocals tied to an almost Rolling Stones riff combine in a song about obsessive love) to the last (a dark moody masterpiece about Jehovah's Kingdom). Ubu albums aren't listened to; they are absorbed through osmosis... slowly and with patience. It took me months of digging through Terminal Tower before I was finally hit with the revelation of just how amazing the songs were.

Compare to Beefheart all you want, but these are tigers of a very different stripe. Both are essential. While Beefheart mused sometimes just about words themselves, Dave Thomas never left themes of urban decay, love, dystopia, and The Beach Boys.

This is their most jagged and exploratory effort, and feels like a band on the verge of break-up. Listen to it repeatedly while you are alive and I guarantee it will change your outlook on music.

At one point in history, Pere Ubu threatened to be one of the greatest rock groups this planet has ever seen or heard - avant garde yet accessible, uncompromising yet listenable. Then David Thomas took over the reins and drove them up the nearest cul de sac. So instead of being the Sex Pistols of the avant garde, they became the Henry Cow of punk rock - some achievement! This album is where it all began to go off the rails, or more accurately into a overgrown, moss-covered siding called "art rock". Worse was to come when Mayo Thompson replaced the brilliant Tom Herman (whatever happened to....), Thompson being a thoroughgoing obscurantist, heroically dedicated to musically disappearing up his own hindquarters. Stick to "Modern Dance", "Dub Housing", "Datapanik" - remember them THAT way.