Pere Ubu – Lady From Shanghai

Fire

Being a late explorer of Pere Ubu, my first encounter with them was The Tenement Year album from 1988, and I was sure I had found a pop band, but with something out of the ordinary still. Going back into their discography – to more experimental releases such as The Modern Dance or Dub Housing, not to mention the boxed set Datapanik in Year Zero, which also contained the early singles – showed me a band quite far from a pop kind of attitude, but still it had rhythm and beats and catchy pop songs in between all the experimental weirdness in their rock music. So when David Thomas – the only constant through all these years, and probably the main creative force – 35 years after the début album The Modern Dance announces that the new release, Lady From Shanghai, is an album of stand-still dance music, it makes perfect sense.

I am not quite sure what to say about this album. It’s not punk or rock, maybe not pop. I might not even be a dance album, definitely not a standing still dance album (Thomas says: “Smash the hegemony of Dance. Stand Still.” It has dance rhythms, so how can you stand still?). The term avant-garde comes to mind, or progressive, but somehow it is not that obvious. Some tracks made me move my feet anyway. For me Pere Ubu has also always been about songs. Even in the early albums, I find good songs. Not made by the standards, of course, but still songs. This album is full of good songs, maybe the best I have heard in years. Songs with catchy repeating phrases, with the weird singing of Thomas, almost as if he is out of tune. But then he isn’t. He sings perfectly, but with a tonality that nobody else does.

It is fun also. The lyrics are hard to understand, as usual, but fun, or with a twist that makes me wonder if Thomas has a quirky smile on his face when he writes them, as if saying, “Hehe, you will never figure this out!” On the opening track it almost sounds like he is asking Anita Ward to go to hell (remember “Ring my bell”?). Wonderful weirdness all the way, strange sounds and soundscapes appearing (my daughter of 10 claims it is the most scary music she has ever heard), but simple melodies, not difficult to listen to at all. But the songs have bits and pieces that you need to find, which makes you want to listen again and again to find it all. And still I haven’t.

Lady From Shanghai is a brilliant album, looking forward, and might become an all-time classic as Orson Wells’ film of the same name did. I certainly must listen. Even more.

-Ronny Wærnes-