Pere Ubu played The Sinclair – 6/27
The current iteration of Cleveland avant-punk stalwarts Pere Ubu brought their “Coed Jail” tour to The Sinclair on Monday night with support from Ohio neighbors Obnox.
Over the course of their roughly 40-year history, Pere Ubu have been anything but static. A project that came together in the wake of Cleveland proto-punk band Rocket From The Tombs’ dissolution in 1975 has since undergone innumerable lineup changes, with mastermind David Thomas remaining its permanent driving force. The band’s sound is self-described as “avant-garage,” which pretty well gets to the heart of their precarious balance at the intersection of garage-punk ferocity and uncompromising experimental tendencies. It’s style that bears the rare distinction of actually not sounding like anything else out there, and on Monday night Thomas offered a chance to revisit the songs that first defined it.
Pere Ubu have remained a restless creative entity in their four decades, with 16 studio albums to their name as of 2014’s Carnival of Souls. For this tour though, the focus is squarely on their early years – 1975-1982 to be precise. Fire Records have recently released a pair of box sets comprising the band’s first five LPs, period non-album singles and other ephemera, and this run of shows finds the band’s current iteration – guitarist Gary Siperko, bassist Michele Temple, keyboardist/theremin-wielder Robert Wheeler and drummer Steven Mehlman – making their own go at those early songs. Monday’s result was a transfixing 90-minute set exploring the many strange and beautiful facets of the material.
From opener “Heart of Darkness” onward, the band sounded focused and urgent, owning the tensely quiet and eerie songs just as well as the more propulsive rock-leaning tunes. And they exhibited a masterful sense of timing in the compositions that blended the two in abruptly unpredictable ways. There were passages of sublime, restrained beauty that lurched thrillingly into full-band grooves and back again without warning, and there was nary a lull to be found amid a tightly-paced set. No one was complacently going through the motions here – the arrangements and execution succeeded in making the material feel fresh, rather than beholden to the past.
Thomas, on lead vocals, sat at center stage in suspenders and a bowler hat acting as the evening’s ringleader. He sipped cup after cup of red wine and told cryptic, occasionally hilarious stories during breaks regarding everything from personal romantic anecdotes to The Velvet Underground, seamlessly segueing many of them into the next song. It felt cleverly orchestrated – a series of spoken word interludes to lend the performance fluidity – but could just as easily have been the product of off-the-cuff improvisation. Thomas is a difficult presence to read.
It’s often tempting to assess a band that’s been around as long as Pere Ubu by the perceived authenticity of its lineup, and as such, a single founding member leading a performance of the band’s early work threatens to come across as disingenuous. Here though, that framing doesn’t feel appropriate. Pere Ubu have always been Thomas’ band, and he’s adept at finding collaborators who are serious about making his vision come to life. Mondays’ show was a mesmerizing testament to that.
Openers Obnox, who impressed at last year’s Hassle Fest, followed up here with another blast of fuzz-soaked noise-rock (and a bit of rapping, for good measure). The duo, headed by singer/songwriter Lamont “Bim” Thomas, delivered a set of riffs and charisma galore that garnered a rave response from the early arrivers.
Photos from both sets below.
