Pere Ubu Dub Housing CD

When David Thomas idiosyncratically wails his asymmetrical way around "Ubu Dance Party," you sense a forced smile atop the group's thumping noise. Pere Ubu put down the ideas of which others could only dream. Thomas articulates his personal pain in jagged verbal shapes, while art wrestles pop into submission. DUB HOUSING, wrapped in a dark and uninviting sleeve, is named after the ambience of terraced homes in Baltimore. It's that sort of record.

THE MODERN DANCE was Pere Ubu's debut and 1978's great leap forward in the wake of punk and its lesser descendents. As such, DUB HOUSING, 10 months its junior, was always going to have a hard act to follow. At heart an avant-garde troupe with an overbearing sense of alienation about them, Ubu resisted the hooks that earned THE MODERN DANCE so many of its plaudits. DUB HOUSING rode along on Tony Maimone's fluid bass work on "I Will Wait" and "Navvy," periodically breaking down into ordered chaos. You can almost hear the fragile building bricks tumble on "Thriller!"

Pere Ubu: David Thomas , Allen Ravenstine, Scott Krauss, Tom Herman, Tony Maimone.

Alternative Press (10/99, pp.105-6) - 5 out of 5 - "...Ubu were some of the most danceable freaks in all of post-punk America...if David Thomas' caterwaul and Allen Ravenstine's mind-altering keyboard riffs don't get you leaping around...you're not really alive and you never were..."
Mojo (Publisher) (p.116) - 4 stars out of 5 -- "DUB HOUSING remains an exemplar par excellence of US post punk's facility for marrying the austere with the madcap."
Mojo (Publisher) (p.116) - 4 stars out of 5 -- "[T]he album's default setting remains dark, twitchy and compellingly uncompromising."
Clash (magazine) (p.103) - "Typically experimental, it's tied together with a disregard for convention and a lust for exuberance."
Record Collector (magazine) (p.100) - 4 stars out of 5 -- "There's jarring guitars, spiralling synths, very off-kilter rhythms and then, most strikingly, David Thomas' crazy-as-a-loon yelping."