Pere Ubu: Apocalypse Now

Pere Ubu has long possessed a volatility that makes its decades-long career something of an odds-bucking wonder. Listening to the band's art-punk classic Dub Housing—recently reissued by Thirsty Ear along with the equally skewed and visceral but less vital New Picnic Time—it's fascinating to consider that Pere Ubu's most recent full-length (Pennsylvania) doesn't sound all that different from its '70s output, even in light of all the music it's made in the interim. Apocalypse Now is a live album that in some ways celebrates that interim. Recorded in Chicago in 1991 during a break from touring with the Pixies (one of several prominent Ubu-indebted bands), Apocalypse Now casts Pere Ubu in a light as unexpected as the group's impressive life span: unplugged rock stars. Well, mostly unplugged, for at the very least, singer David Thomas has always been something of a sparkplug, singing as if electricity is being sent down his spine. Ubu classics such as a gentle "Heaven," a blistering "Nonalignment Pact," and a few other songs from the band's seminal early days are included, but the material is mostly drawn from the group's late-'80s/early-'90s comeback period, when it briefly reinvented itself as a subversively catchy pop outfit that never quite was. Though the sound quality is strictly no-frills—Apocalypse Now was recorded with two audience mics, giving it the feel of a cleaned-up bootleg—the disc does represent Pere Ubu at its loosest and most approachable, preaching to a crowd of the converted that's gathered at the club and loving every minute of it.