Pere Ubu
New Picnic Time

"The Modern Dance" alone would have been more than enough. Even if Ubu had stopped at the most important and influential Dance of Rock, history would still have been their conquest. It's not often that you debut on LP with such a bang. An absolutely atypical record both for the context in which it was born, and for its visionary attitude. Industrial skies and gray urban alienation painted with a satirical expressionist touch, which manifested mainly on one side with Thomas's grotesque wails, and on the other with Ravenstine's sociopathic synth. Garage rock was deconstructed and recomposed by the funk-tinged guitar sobs of Tom Herman until its fragments were hidden. Krauss and Maimone applied the concept of anarchy to the rhythm section.

After a "Dub Housing" characterized by sound epileptic convulsions to the limit, in 1979 it's time for "New Picnic Time," and the difference with the debut is immediately felt. Where the Dance stood out on dusty industrial scenarios, here it seems that Thomas & Co. move clumsily and slowly through the ocean depths. Due to Mayo Thompson's influence, the sound shifts markedly towards psychedelic shores. The instruments almost completely lose their old garage charge, dampened by the liquid atmospheres permeating the record. The avant-garde does not suffer, if anything, it is even accentuated, and the echoes of Beefheart and Red Crayola are more evident than ever.

The initial "The Fabulous Sequel," one of the stronger tracks, represents the typical Pere Ubu style. But already with the next "49 Guitars & One Girl," you enter an obsessive Dadaist vortex. "A Small Dark Cloud" is concrete music with a rambling Thomas and apocalyptic but scattered and fragmented percussion amidst the sound chaos. The two apathetic guitar chords of "All The Dogs Are Barking" drag on indifferently for three minutes while David recites his most lethargic script yet. "Make Hay" recalls the unforgettable quirky funk of "Humor Me," with the addition of an unhealthy rock-blues intro. In "Goodbye," the tension rises to the stars, and Ravenstine builds a Synth bridge throughout the piece, like a galactic siren, while the organ intervenes to make the moment more dramatic yet also more human. "Voice In The Sand" is perhaps the most intense moment, a post-apocalyptic scenario after the conclusion of a nuclear war. However, its scant minute and a half could have been developed in a more interesting way, thus resulting in a merely hinted and unfinished idea.

The timid tribalism of "Kingdom Come" closes this more impressionistic picnic compared to the past, where some passages seem to propose a more hedonistic and self-indulgent vision of the Pereubian reality (as much as possible for a band of this kind), perhaps because the sound of the Cleveland group was crystallizing into a very recognizable and personal style, but inevitably, album after album, no longer represented an absolute novelty, despite the undeniable stylistic evolution that occurred with this delightful Picnic.