Pere Ubu Dub Housing LP

Pere Ubu reissue their second album Dub Housing on Fire Records. Originally released in 1978, the same year as their debut The Modern Dance, Pere Ubu continue to tear up the rule book, chew it up and spit it out with glorious splendor.

Mesmerizing critics, fans and musicians along the way, their follow-up has been repeatedly regarded as one of their best and captures Pere Ubu in one of their earliest incarnations. Dub Housing's assaultive noises and melodic rock still annihilates the senses setting Pere Ubu apart from their peers with vision and an inimitable ability to push boundaries.

For this reworking, Paul Hamann at Suma has transferred from the original 2-track analogue mix tapes to digital at the highest resolution available, which is at least four times the resolution of the original. The tracks have carefully been re-mastered by sonic architect Brian Pyle so as to capture the unique qualities within.

Dub Housing appears harsh, impenetrable and repellent... it seems to be working on some hidden internal logic, from some parallel (and disquieting) universe. On subsequent listens, the 'logic,' if indeed the tapping of the subconscious and intuition can be called 'logic,' becomes clearer; the album remains baffling, infuriating, haunting, menacing and ferociously funny...

A voyage into unchartered space. Unfathomable, inscrutable, unmissable

Make no mistake, as much as Ubu indulged in arty dissonance and mucked about with song structure, this is very much a rock & roll record, albeit one made by a band interested in pushing the envelope when it came to sound, song construction, and performance. As much as this is a band effort, the guitar of Tom Herman and the synthesizer of Allen Ravenstine frequently stand out. Herman's strong, polished playing veers from assertive riffing to assaultive noise; Ravenstine, who may be one of the all-time great synth players, colors the sound with ominous whooshes of distortions, blips, and blurbs that sound like a sped-up Pong game. But, as is often the case with Ubu, it's David Thomas' singing (here at its most engagingly unrestrained) that is front and center. Part comic foil, part raging madman, Thomas utilizes all of his limited range in a whacked expressiveness built around hiccups, yodels, screeches, and, sometimes, singing. Dub Housing sold next to nothing and signaled the beginning of the end of Ubu's relationship with Chrysalis, but it remains an important and influential American rock record.