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Concert reviews Music

Pere Ubu at Lee’s Palace

PERE UBU at Lee’s Palace, Wednesday, September 18. Rating: NNNN


In 2007, before seeing Pere Ubu at Le National in Montreal, I talked to singer David Thomas, who was working the band’s own merch table. Like a dumb fanboy, I asked if the band had any plans on working Non-Alignment Pact, from the band’s 1978 debut, The Modern Dance. “Eh,” Thomas croaked. “So you want a brain dead rock show?”

A Pere Ubu concert is the opposite of “a brain dead rock show,” or whatever David Thomas perceives “a brain dead rock show” to mean, denote, stand for, etc. The band plays fully lit up, no strobes or pyrotechnics. Thomas sits half-slumped in a chair, sipping on red wine and Diet Coke, squint-eyed and pear-shaped, like a homeless Rob Reiner. It’s like watching a rock concert stage-managed by Samuel Beckett. It’s a counter-spectacle, and so, itself its own kind of inside-out spectacle: a grand show of earnestness, non-pretension, artiness and other sundry qualifiers of punk/indie cred.

Unlike Devo’s, Ohio’s other high water mark post-punks, Pere Ubu’s show isn’t just some parody-of-capitalism-as-capitalism. It is, or feels, actually earnest, unadorned to the point of contemptuousness. Thomas reminded the audience that he and us were not friends (before launching into Musicians Are Scum, from the group’s latest record) and repeatedly made snide jokes about entertaining “the ladies” – the kind of thing that would maybe scan as innocent enough, embarrassing grandpa stuff, coming from anyone other than a guy who named his band’s 13th album Why I Hate Women.

All this – the stage setup, Thomas ambling raconteurish interludes about ghost towns and Florida vacations, even the outright contempt – works in service of Pere Ubu’s screeching, raw-boned post-punk. It’s like that LOUDquietLOUD thing Steve Albini worked out for the Pixies, except quietquietquietquietLOUD.

The dynamic invests everything they do. From new stuff like Mandy to “hits” like Heaven, Modern Dance and Final Solution (opening the uneasy encore, a rockist indulgence for the premiere anti-rockist rock act), the quality of the drama, like not just the songs, but the concert itself, is pitching and yawing across some loose narrative arc. Even the act of buying merch was folded in, with drummer Steve Mehlman jumping off his kit and cutting through the crowd to a table in the back to hawk records while Thomas and co. improvised an ambient jam about buying and selling merch at rock concerts.

Nearly 40 years on, Thomas’s voice remains the most schizoid and neurotic of all the venerable post-punk yalpers. Piercing, warbling, trembling, it is so hopelessly, perfectly anxious that it’s easy to imagine David Byrne and Mark Mothersbaugh’s voices ganging up to shake it down for its lunch money. It’s the voice of the world’s last nervous man, the cry of a panicky planet, the off-synch metronome keeping time of this not-brain-dead not-rock show.

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