Pere Ubu’s The Modern Dance is THE masterpiece of rock music! It sifts through all the best moments of rock music from the 50s, 60s, and 70s up to 1977 when the album was recorded and boils it all down to the most potent example of what rock music can be; it is the student becoming the master.
Set in the urban wastelands in of a nuclear industrial era, anxieties ebb and flow as the singer sings, whales, yelps, gargles, and most anything else that a human voice can do to pierce through the solitude and frenzy of modern life far away from a battlefield. The heartbreak, street waves, the devil, red books, and adulthood swell in the band’s grooves of “avant-garage” rock, and David Thomas’s infectious warble. As the walls crumble around the singer by the manic-depressive nervosa band, he tries to cope with the progress of western civilization by pacts of love, devotion, and solitude. No matter how dark or frantic it gets the dance is with a misstep. Every moment of every track is cut to perfection, and the sum is infinitely greater than the sum of its parts.
“Non-Alignment Pact” rips out of the 30 seconds of feedback directly onto the dance floor as the drums kick along with the synth belting out an industrial whistle, relieving the pressure of the Thomas’s warble and anxiety of loneliness: the peak of this coming as he recites the thousand names of girls with a nod to the 60s hit “Barbara Ann”. “The Modern Dance” (possibly Ubu’s ultimate masterpiece, up there with Berlioz’s “Songe d’une nuit du sabbat”, or any movement from Coltrane’s A Love Supreme) is the core of the album’s loneliness, hopelessness, and cool intensity. The poor boy will not give up easy, even when chance leaves him stranded amongst crowds of strangers. When the band reflects the shattered pieces of the boy’s mind as the guitar cures the laughter of the bourgeois prattle with fits of rage and concussions of sound, while the synthesizer continues to hiss the indefatigable anxieties that will not leave him be and the rest of the band carve out a funky groove to dance the night and life away.
Needing a rest, the band lounges around a little free-jazz opener, anguishing horns and a little shimmy of the guitar, for the first half of “Laughing” before erupting into a rock & roll protest of love. The singer accepts and even enjoys the prospects of the apocalypse so long as he has his baby and her well of confidence in their love and its ability to outshine the sun, shoot the devil, and LAUGH! Back to the future, “Street Waves” picks up where “The Modern Dance” left off with an eerie synth, and the singer screaming, like in “Non-Alignment Pact”, as the rest of the band kicks out the jams in the second rocker of the album. The world melting from radiation and panic the streets begin to ripple but Thomas’s vocals and the winds of Ravenstine’s are unwavering, piercing through the a mass of funky bass and hard rocking guitar and drums. Up to the wake of the groovy solo, staying afloat with the wind from the synth, a bubbling bass, are reignited by love a guitar explosion.
“Chinese Radiation” opens with a meditative acoustic guitar, sparks of electronic malice, sparse guitar slides and Thomas mumbling over two lovers in the aftermath of nuclear radiation drifting to their heart. (Note: the click around the 40 second mark is not a composed sound, it is a tape splicing problem that was supposed to be corrected on 2009 released Datapanik compilation and is supposed to be corrected on the 2005 Silverline release, but I can still hear it on both…). Like “Laughing,” Ubu cannot contain themselves for very long. They erupt once again with a deluge of slide guitar, oscillating bass, fantastic apache drumming (as is the case for the entire album), as the singer tells a tale of floating over the ocean, then moving into a scream of the beginning verse of Red revolution, directly and indirectly, in the face of cheers. The chaos is corralled by a piano finale which plays the band majestically off of the first side (along with melancholic drumming and the singer mumbling the opening “red guard, new world” verse one more time: devastating.
The feedback of “Non-Alignment Pact” is not in the opening of the second act, “Life Stinks” does have Thomas at his most manic. Covering a song by their former, and recently deceased, founding member and friend Peter Laughner, Ubu supercharges “Life Stinks” with fits insanity as the singer does everything but lose his vocal chords competing with (and demolishing) the guitar in a spasmodic interlude where each instrument fights for manic supremacy. Grieving the stinkiness of their life with quick inane hyperbolic statements of a life forlorn, Ubu is in and out before anyone can catch their breath. “Real World,” caught between electronic pulses and a cool relaxed jam, Thomas sings the absurd, earning the Ubu in their name, with more heartache, “Techniramic Heartache [TM]” in real time. Though superficially relaxed in many ways, “Real World” continues the insanity evoked on “Life Stink” an absurd manner rather than vitriolic one, and marks the third masterpiece from the album.
Running out of energy as the poor boy struggles in his modern world, and the destruction thereof, “Over My Head” has the singer whispering as he drifts to sleep, with sirens going off slow and distant, promising to be perfect from now on as he loses contact with the world. The band drags along to the anti-climax, “Sentimental Journey” (sometimes released as “Doris Day Sings Sentimental Journey”). The boy is now alone, but has a home. Concrete music (broken glass and the broom to clean it up), very sparse impressionist guitar and bass, more electronic antics, and a solo horn diffusing the tension of the singer’s peril of his paradise as he slides and scrapes his way to his safety from the outside world. The boy is still confused with himself and his surroundings; he takes solace once again in a girl, and her advice: go home. At home, the boy lists the contents in disgust, but with acceptance, meanwhile the band self-destructs along with the singer every couple of minutes reaching deeper and deeper into the remnants of a personal/industrial holocaust.
Sweeping up the glass and the various horrors of the last 30+ minutes, Ubu dissolve the sorrow with the quasi-reggae tune, “Humor Me”, claiming the preceding sentiments to be a farce, all in jest, and that it is merely “the way of the west”: to suffer with a smile. The world described was all in his mind. The “classical girl” put him in such despair. He never had love; he never had anything but himself and his thoughts. He never got “the modern dance”. The emotions were real, but everything else was a joke, just like the music which has a good laugh as well with, skipping along amid the destruction and anxiety as the singer asks to be humored – “it was just a joke mon.” “My Dark Ages (I Don’t Get Around)” could have been the ending to this saga as well, or spliced into “Humor Me” with the singer coping with his loneliness all the same. Another ending could have been “Final Solution” but that would drilled the final nail into the coffin, whereas “Humor Me” pulls down the curtain to reveal a world that continues on if you’re willing to accept it, work with it, and joke about it. (Both singles can be found on Terminal Tower)
Some prefer the succeeding albums by Pere Ubu, but none have a concept as real, harrowing, or executed as well as The Modern Dance. Dub Housing (Chrysalis, 1978) is a tighter recording, but lacks the supreme emotion of The Modern Dance captures in virtually every moment. Thomas’s vocal antics jump to greater heights on New Picnic Time (Chrysalis, 1979) as the band becomes less rock focus and more psychedelic and dada oriented: more Ubuish. The Art of Walking (Rough Trade, 1980) almost abandons rock music completely, and Song of the Bailing Man (Rough Trade, 1982) abandons everything the term Pere Ubu had meant in terms of physical sound from the 70s, but keeps the anything goes mentality. Tom Herman’s guitar would never ignite, and Tony Maimone’s bass would never grind, groove, and dance in the hollow places like here again. Allen Ravenstine would produce other very interesting sounds on later records, but nothing as cohesive and agonizing as here. Scott Krauss’s drumming exercises are never as unrelenting as they were here as he pounded whatever agony, danger, or violence the others were calling for.
The Modern Dance is about a fictitious love set in the nuclear age; it is about “heartache,” real or imagined; it is about “the real world and Dorthy’s mantra – “there [really] is no place like home.” Find home, journey to your sanctuary, and love it; let it caress you and warm your bones; let home keep you safe for another day, a day you will need to participate in again and again, to find “that Classical Girl [or Boy];” ride the big waves and take them as they come. Oh, and have some surf music playing in the background, you gotta love surf music, The Beach Boys rule!
The 2005 reissue by Silverline mixes the album into 5.2 DVD surround sound and has a lengthy interview with David Thomas about the album and reissue.
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