St. Arkansas

Performer: Pere Ubu
Engineer: Paul Hamann
Producer: David Thomas
Distributor: E1 Distribution (USA)

Notes: Pere Ubu includes: David Thomas (vocals); Tom Herman (guitar, organ, background vocals); Robert Wheeler, Michele Temple, Steve Mehlman. Additional personnel: Jim Jones. Recorded at SUMA, Painesville, Ohio. No band has sustained as much alt-credibility as long as Pere Ubu. While St. Arkansas doesn't divert from the paths the bandmembers have already traveled, it's worth remembering that these guys started this trip 27 years prior to this album, and noting as well that their lyrical and musical creativity is undiminished by time. Recorded dry, with a boxlike ambience, David Thomas's vocals gnarl like a weed, repulsive yet irresistible, in a garden of broken glass. While the band scatters shards of pointed sound around him, Thomas tells cryptic, twisted tales; on "Slow Walking Daddy" his strangled bleat transplants a Willy Loman character into shadows of vague but looming doom. For the song "Hell" he switches to a smoky mumble and reflects, with odd detachment, on finding himself in perdition -- a place depicted musically by a muffled, lurching drum motif, some keyboard wheezes, and a distant out of tune piano. The closing track, "Dark," wraps up the theme of the album -- tragic self-delusion in a world filled with indifference; Thomas' delivery of the key line, a hopeless mantra to "AM radio," is a masterful bit of expression. On each track he presents himself as more of an actor or a performance artist than a singer, an assumption of identity that would challenge almost any band's approach to accompaniment. In this sense, as well as in his poetic integrity and superb connection to his musicians, and in the dark majesty of his declamation, Thomas casts a dangerous spell with St. Arkansas and reaffirms his stature as a peer of Tom Waits. ~ Robert L. Doerschuk

Entertainment Weekly (7/26/02, p.68) - "...A journey across a blasted landscape of arid loneliness, interupted by moments of surreal humor...an utterly typical piece of witty Ubu absurdity." - Rating: B+ Q (6/02, p.120) - 3 stars out of 5 - "...Thomas's reedy, mass murderer vocals remain as unlikely as they are compelling while the spiky, sometimes challenging music is seldom without a groove....In a cultural climate where anger wears big shorts, all hail the suited Kings Of Being Archly Annoyed." Alternative Press (8/02, p.80) - 7 out of 10 - "...For a different band, this would be a throwback album, one meant to convince fans that time hadn't eroded their mission or authenticity, but Pere Ubu are less interested in revisiting their version of the '70s than they are in adding one more piece of strange territory to the map Thomas has spent his entire career drawing." The Wire (7/02, p.60) - "...ST ARKANSAS is the most focused, succinct and downright enjoyable Pere Ubu album to emerge since their reformation in the late 1980s..." CMJ (6/17/02, p.11) - "...A dark, smoky and decidedly lonesome road through the singer's head..." Mojo (Publisher) (6/02, p.122) - "...Immediate, energised and claustrophobic; redolent of late-night TV and transistor radio rather than the widescreen....It's difficult to think of a more important band currently working..."

Pere Ubu was aptly named for Alfred Jarry's Dadaist play. One of the prime movers in post-punk, the influential Cleveland, Ohio, group took the power and volume of punk and the fractured song forms of avant-gardists like Captain Beefheart, then sent David Thomas's free-ranging vocalizing careening across the top. Founded in the 1970s, the group has undergone a multitude of manifestations to become one of the longest-lasting avant-garde ("avant-garage," they have called themselves) music groups, continuing to make uncommercial audio into the 21st century.

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