Dub Housing

About

The title for Pere Ubu’s second album came from a drive the band took through Baltimore while on tour in early 1978. The streets were empty, and Jamaican music played on the stereo—spacey and repetitive and a little eerie. Block after block of identical row houses disappeared behind them. <i>Look</i>, singer David Thomas said, <i>dub housing</i>. It’s a quick story, but it gives you a good picture into the band’s world. Released in 1978, <i>Dub Housing</i> proved that not only were the members of Pere Ubu open to the abstractions of something like dub (“Blow Daddy-O”), but that they approached the straight lines of punk with a lateral sense of humor more indebted to French surrealism than American rock ’n’ roll. The result was a mix of high and low—featuring both experimental subtlety (“Thriller!”) and lunchpail brutishness (“Navvy”)—that the band’s drummer Scott Krauss once called “avant-garage.” As for Thomas: Depending on how you looked at it, the singer was either a philosopher teasing out the repetitive absurdity of language, or just a moron barking his inner monologue to whoever happened to be passing by (as evidenced by the haunting “I did this/And I went there/And I think about you all the time” on “Codex”). It was hard to tell if he was a Homer Simpson-type written by Samuel Beckett, or a Raymond Chandler detective investigating his own shadow. .

via Apple Music

The Clerk says

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