Trouble On Big Beat Street

Album review

When Pere Ubu released 2019's excellent The Long Goodbye, it felt like a final statement. In a manner of speaking, that remains true: though they returned four years later, Trouble on Big Beat Street finds them in a different frame of mind. Shaped by David Thomas' belief that a song is at its best the first time it is played, the album's pieces were performed by the band only once while recording. This first thought, best thought approach sounds much less premeditated than works like 20 Years in a Montana Missile Silo; though Trouble's lurchingly live feel doesn't quite reach jam session levels of spontaneity, it isn't overworked with niceties like multiple takes, either. Freed from the burden of telling an overarching story as they did on The Lady from Shanghai and Carnival of Souls, Pere Ubu savors the immediacy of each moment, shifting from skronky workouts like "Crazy Horses" to the more surreal territory of "Let's Pretend"'s gooey surf guitars and bursts of electronic noise. This amorphousness heightens the band's trademark air of mystery on "Crocodile Smile," which begins as synth-driven art-punk, then dissolves into a tumult of synths and trumpets as Thomas intones "From the jaws of victory/I will seize eternity." No matter how wild things get on Trouble on Big Beat Street, Thomas holds dominion over it all. Matching the album's tone, his words and delivery evoke beat poetry instead of the carefully constructed narratives of the group's immediately previous work. "Tomorrow is a Turkish prison movie written by a hack," he crows on "Uh Oh"'s meditation on the dread of facing another day. Though Trouble's songs feel connected more by their execution than their themes, the record's underlying threads are also compelling. Pere Ubu's folk, jazz, and blues influences are more prominent than they've been in quite a while, whether in the collision of bluegrassy harmonies and taut drums and guitars on "Moss Covered Boondoggle" or the dangerously romantic fusion of punk and jazz on "Love Is Like Gravity," where Thomas howls "I will always be the moonbeam in your eye" like a wolf. Howlin' Wolf himself is one of the American music legends Thomas meets on "Worried Man Blues," a fiery interpolation of the traditional song framed by a quintessentially Pere Ubu tale of travel and food (Thomas encounters the blues legend while getting a slice of pie at a fried chicken place located at the crossroads where Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil). Given the nature of its creative process, Trouble on Big Beat Street sometimes meanders, and not all of its detours are rewarding. Nevertheless, this is some of Pere Ubu's most rawly experimental music in some time; for fans who want to feel like they're listening in on the band working out these songs instead of being presented a perfected product, there's a lot to love.

© Heather Phares /TiVo