Customer Reviews

Terminal Tower: An Archival Collection

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Pere Ubu are a great band. Truly. They are also out in the lunatic fringe of sound that probably would turn off listeners who prefer more conventional stuff.

That said, this album is a good cross-section of their early work (1975-80) and is a nice way for people to get a sense of Pere Ubu without diving headlong into "The Modern Dance" or "Dub Housing." The tracks they have on this one are more accessible to a casual listener, which is good and bad (good in that it gets people to listen to them, bad in that they don't entirely do the band justice).

My favorite tracks on this are (of course) the haunting "30 Seconds Over Tokyo," "Final Solution," and "Heart of Darkness." I like "Cloud 149" and "My Dark Ages" as well, but not as much as these first three tracks. Earlier version of later works "Untitled" (later the much-superior "The Modern Dance") and "Humor Me" are interesting snapshots of the band, which is always in transition, anyway.

"The Book Is On The Table" is fun, but seems sort of self-consciously so, which weakens its impact, given what Pere Ubu is capable of. The reggae beat of "Heaven" (coupled with the lurking Ubu feedback buzz, surfacing rhythmically like a shark) is entertaining.

Anyway, if you want to hear for yourself what all the noise about Pere Ubu is about, but are leery of getting more than your feet wet, then this is worth your time. If you find you like it, then definitely go for "The Modern Dance" and "Dub Housing" and you'll never look back.

I've never been a big fan of Pere Ubu, but always enjoyed the musical style of their earlier work. The songs tended to be more guitar-orientated with traditional song structures, albeit twisted in unusual ways, which created a sound that most suited their brilliant label for their music: "avante-garage". One of the key factors in the development of this sound was the late talented guitarist/disaster area Peter Laughner (he died of alcoholism at 24) who's main influences were the Velvet Underground and early Captain Beefheart along with the standard blues rock. He played on the first several singles before being kicked out of the band due to his unreliability. Laughner's imaginative guitar playing could range from a tight coiled scratchy sound (the verses for "Heart of Darkness") to thick psychedelic/heavy metal leads (the ending of "Final Solution") and this mixed well with the bands intelligent use of synthesizer. The synthesizer rarely played notes or chords but instead provided unusual aural coloring ambience. A sound suited as a reflection of the background noise of our Industrial age, or Technological age, or whatever the hell we are living in. "Heart of Darkness" starts things out with some of the bitterest lyrics imaginable, and "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo" continues on into a surreal nightmare with a bizarre dissonant instrumental break. On "Final Solution", things began to lighten up with its rather amusing lyrics (no, the song has nothing to do with the Third Reich). The album covers a wide emotional range; the terrific and catchy "Heaven" is positively sunny. The last few songs signal a movement towards Ubu's later sound. "The Book Is On The Table" is a mildly amusing sonic experiment. On the last two songs, the song structures and synthesizer sounds become more comical and David Thomas' vocal becomes more hyperactive and histrionic. Not really "my thing". "Not Happy", ironically, sounds like listening to bubble gum music (The Ohio Express?) on laughing gas. However, one of the essential cuts, as another reviewer here has mentioned, is the live 1978 version of "Humor Me". The song is for the now departed, from both the band and life, Laughner. The studio version on their "Modern Dance" album is fine, but a little too restrained. On this cut, one can hear Thomas and the rest of the band's rage and pain bellow up at having had to watch their pal self-destruct. This scathing exorcism will bring to mind Horace Walpole's famous quote: " Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel".

I'd always been curious about Pere Ubu. I'd always heard them namedropped along with bands such as Mission Of Burma and Gang Of Four, and I was well acquainted with Claw Hammer's amazing version of the Ubu classic "Final Solution," but it took me years to finally pick up one of their releases, due to their long, varied, and wildly inconsistent back catalog.

Fortunately, "Terminal Tower" captures Ubu in their earliest, best stages, what I like to refer as "the Pink Floyd that doesn't suck." The first three songs show Pere Ubu as a brilliantly skewed rock band. "Heart Of Darkness" is Mission Of Burma a half-decade earlier, "30 Seconds Over Tokyo" is a slow, methodical song that unravels over the course of six-and-a-half minutes, with a haunting paranoid vocal softly intoning lyrics about suicide bombers that are still chilling 25 years later (especially with the recent events in Afganistan) set to a droning Sabbath-esque fuzz guitar riff. "Final Solution" is a classic, anthemic hard rock song buried under a ton of guitar weirdness. It's not hard to see why bands like Claw Hammer, The Pagans, and Gaunt have all decided to do their own version of this song.

From there the mood lightens a bit, with Pere Ubu doing a few bouncy, yet equally absurd pop tunes. Dave Thomas almost evokes an eccentric, white Wilson Pickett on "Untitled," warbling "The Modern Dance...it goes like this!" Elsewhere "My Dark Ages" is Pere Ubu's claustrophobic take on disco, while "Heaven" could best be decribed as futuristic reggae, almost like Peter Tosh with whooshing spaceship noises in the background.

Here it is, the damaged, manic-depressive sound of Pere Ubu at it's most accessible without sacrificing it's crooked, quirky edge. Thusly, "Terminal Tower" is regarded as one the group's few essential releases, where the strangeness of the arrangements adds to the the greatness of the songs, rather than detracting from them.

Forget what that last guy said. Terminal Tower is NOT a best-of collection. It is a collection of the band's earliest (and most obscure) singles. Short of buying the boxed-set (which is the bands ENTIRE albums and SINGLES from 75-82), this is your best bet for some of the greatest "on-the-edge" rock n' roll you can find. So far ahead of their time that the world hasn't even caught up.

Were there justice in the world, and with a bit of luck, these songs would have been HUGE and appreciated worldwide. Rock music doesn't get made more artfully, or with more power, than this.

The majority of tracks here are Ubu's early singles, originally released in the mid-70's on their own Hearthen label. The players on here went on to demonstrate their brilliance on subsequent Ubu albums, except for original member Peter Laughner who left the band. (Laughner was a very talented and tasteful guitar player). It's shocking to me the degree to which they had their act together from the get-go on these early singles. Guitarists Tom Hermann and Laughner promulgate some of the most delicious guitar sounds you'll ever hear, and actually influenced a fair amount of 90's music (most notably through the Pixies and the Breeders). Their bezerk duet on "Cloud 149" is one of the most beautiful things I've ever heard in rock. Drummer Scott Krauss plays like a combination of Charlie Watts' propulsiveness and Bill Bruford's sense of fractured rhythm; he's completely brilliant. Allen Ravenstine's synthesizer starts its course of emulating Brain Eno's Roxy Music sound, and adds bursts of noise that augment the other players in sounding something like the end of the world. Tony Maimone emerges a few singles in as one of the world's great bass players. David Thomas puts his vocals on top, during his younger days when he seemed to have something to say - before he became the alternative version of Tiny Tim.

It's awesome. You have to hear it. You may want to consider purchase of the "Datapanic" box set.

This is a collection of the group's earliest and best singles on the Hearthan label. A great band straddling punk/new wave, art-rock, progressive/electronic, avante-garde,or "avante-garage" as they call it. All these tunes are strong and a better representation than some of their albums which tend to be a little uneven, with the exception of The Modern Dance and Dub Housing which are still from the early period and very excellent.

This collection of early Pere Ubu rarities is a good place to start a Pere Ubu collection. The songs fit into the rest of the American punk revolution nicely, and Pere Ubu does Cleveland like Lou Reed did New York or Iggy Stooge did Michigan. The group's first single comprises the first two tracks. A-side "30 Seconds" is a 6 minute odyssey while the B-side "Heart of Darkness" starts simple and quiet, quite restrained, but vocalist David Thomas's emotional intensity is as scary as anything since Suicide's "Frankie Teardrop". The restraints are dropped in "Final Solution", that great standard of Middle-American adolescence. "A little bit of fun's never been an insurrection!" The B-side to that single, "Cloud 149" has a perky bounciness, and rocks more like an upbeat Radiohead song. The early version of "Modern Dance", here untitled, has the cool lead guitar, and "Heaven" is a simple, laid-back, and quite lovely song. These first seven tracks are what critics are talking about when they describe this album as a must-have, but one of my favorite Pere Ubu songs is the rare live version of "Humor Me". Here it is a reaction to original member Peter Laughner's death, and it cranks the volume up several notches. The best artistic reaction to tragic death I've ever experienced. Forget "Tears In Heaven". The last three songs are arty stuff which you might love or consider unlistenable. Not a perfect album, but still worth buying, of course.

An absolutely essential collection for anyone who loves music, or art in general. It blows me away how far ahead of their time Pere Ubu was: most of the songs on this compilation were recorded in 1977 or earlier! It makes a perfect companion piece to The Modern Dance, though you should really get everything by this amazing band.

Terminal Tower is the album that got me into pere ubu. There are tracks on this that are so powerful that they chill your spine. Especially the song "heart of darkness". This song, to me, is the anthem of conscience. The first sound was truly the best intro of a pere ubu record. Though I wasn't alive when they started in Ohio, I heard that David Thomas would strike an anvil with a sludge hammer in this song. Songs like "30 seconds over Tokyo" and "final solution" are also very powerful and interesting. There is even a version of "modern dance" (the song) without the "Mamba Mamba" part of the verse. Generally this is a very interesting CD.

Not a new release, but rather an old disc too long unavailable, this "archival collection" has totally overpowering early singles, such as "Final Solution" (check out the band Bob Hund for a slamming cover of this number in Swedish!) and other items not included on the classic albums. These tracks crackle with a singular dark energy and have been suitably influential -as other artists tried to emulate Ubu's strange energy- ever since their release.