Much like Radiohead’s recent excursions into hyper-real electronica, Pere Ubu are taking it to the dancefloor for their first album in three years.
Though of course David Thomas’s merry experimentalists have been at this sort of thing for the best part of 40 years now, subverting the norms of pop music by mapping out an alternate world where great art is fashioned from chaos and discord.
Rhythm is king here, with Neu!-like synths creating a bed over which Thomas’s nagging voice cavorts like a good ’un, dipping in and around sheets of fractured noise and songs that pay little heed to old-hat notions of verse-chorus-verse.
At times, as on the siren squeal of And Then Nothing Happened, it can get too dissonant for its own good. But mostly it’s an invigorating set that sounds, like a cubist marriage of King Of Limbs and Eno & Byrne’s My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts.
