Pere Ubu – The Long Goodbye (2019)

David Thomas and his nourish gang of musical misanthropes have been haunting the edges of the alternative music scene since I first began reading Creem Magazine as a boy.

An aspiring delinquent at the time, Thomas’s first band, the proto-punk legends Rocket From The Tombs, seemed like an unholy experiment that crawled out of the fog and ether of the Cleveland Cuyahoga in my worst nightmare. Of course, I loved it- if you haven’t heard the sublime rock noise they devour, you’ve got some important listening to catch up on.

Rocket eventually split into two bands; Dead Boys and Pere Ubu, thus beginning one of the most important post-punk journeys any American band has embarked upon. Ever wondered where the Talking Heads got their sound from? Once In A Lifetime indeed.

Pere Ubu’s back-alley journey was nearly over for David Thomas in 2018. Whatever music fans want to believe about their musical heroes- they are not immortal or immune to serious health issues. That’s a bitter pill that infects the new record in subversive ways.

The band embraces their mortality on The Long Goodbye, and they ask their audience to embrace it too, even when it’s uncomfortable. All things disintegrate, evolve and change. Music, politics or relationships- it’s a thin line between a healthy tradition and a reactionary impulse.

The Long Goodbye is named after Raymond Chandler’s darkest and most tormented Marlowe-novel. For many it is his best work, with a Chandler that put all of himself in this novel and his Philip Marlowe, who as a result is more cynical and depressed about the state of civilization. It is an existential read offering you more than just a crime plot, a read in which Chandler perfectly encapsulates the apathy of modernity, and the ‘rewards’ offered to the lone man who resists shallowness. But it is also the novel in which Marlowe for the first time faces melancholy, confronting his age and mortality. A melancholic and suicidal Chandler wrote it as his wife was dying.

The music on The Long Goodbye is unlike anything Pere Ubu has recorded on their 19 albums before. It pulsates with modern sounds – electronic noise, synthetic rhythms and modern drum machines that together create a complex and often sinister sound. It’s also unmistakeably the sound of Pere Ubu, a band that resisted to flirt with hipness and conformity for over 40 years now. Frantically pushing and jerking one moment, ambient and otherworldly the next. The result is a shockingly dark and important record. Few artists are capable of creating such a vital record in the fifth decade of their career.

Thomas speaks like a lonesome DJ broadcasting from a ghost town in rural America. There is no audience. Nobody but you is listening. You’ve tuned in by accident and find that you can’t stop these tales of spiritual and economic decline from feeling both political and personal.

Apocalyptic storytelling has always been an important part in David Thomas’ lyrical path. During ‘Flicking Cigarettes At The Sun‘, Thomas’s lyrics take focus directly on the current state of culture within the US. He addresses the collective apathy and unhealthy nostalgia that the nation is embracing. The past is all that we see, an illusion with no vision.

“Fare thee well, Los Angeles
Your shuddering breath
Your ever-lingering death
Awkward and cruel
I wish you Götterdämmerung,
Los Angeles
Here it is!
Your flaming Dead Pool.”

On ‘What I Heard on the Pop Radio‘, Thomas points directly at the culprit. Although we may not like the implication, it’s obvious to anyone paying close attention. We have nobody to blame but ourselves;

“You want real?
No, you don’t!
Real is in my eye.
Look!
Gut up, shut up
Take it like a man”

It’s a brutal and unforgiving statement. Maybe even an accusation. One we should all consider carefully before we find the past is the only shelter left for the citizens of a dying empire.

by Shawn Ciavattone