Pere Ubu
Why I Hate Women

"This is an irony-free recording", warns Mr. David Thomas. And it's hard to disagree with him. If anything, "Why I Hate Women" (according to Thomas, a title that could have been by writer Jim Thompson) sounds terribly serious, cryptic, obsessive.

Recorded by the same lineup that five years ago released "St. Arkansas" (Robert Wheeler - synthesizers and theremin, Michelle Temple - bass, and Steve Mehlman - drums, plus Two Pale Boys guitarist Keith Moliné), this new chapter of the elusive Ubu saga immerses itself in atmospheres that oscillate between the expressionist and the melancholic, between the murky/dreamlike and the desperate/pounding. Thomas, in fact, entrusts his paranoid narrations of the unconscious to different expressive forms: from the funky and demented rhythmic tension of "Two Girls (One Bar)" to the dark and nuanced slo-core languor (with traces of noise and psychedelia) of "Blue Velvet", from the hardcore (somewhere between Fugazi and Husker Du) of the graceless "Caroleen" to the ironic recitation of "Texas Ouverture".

Incomprehensible starting from the title, the album flows with sufficient fluidity (hindered by an unnecessary track like "My Boyfriend's Back") without creating too many problems for those listening to Ubu for the first time. Clearly: Thomas's voice is not Top Of The Pops material (and this is certainly a good thing), and the rest of the band does nothing to cater to any need for "normalcy", so it goes without saying that tracks like the already mentioned "Blue Velvet" and "Babylonian Warehouses", steeped as they are in tones that echo the blues, new wave, and even trip-hop, are filled with synth disturbances, amorphous theremin screeches, and whimsical and elusive guitar strokes, far from easy and profitable melodicism. However, it is an album perfectly accessible to those who feed on rock music and the like without setting listening limits. A word should also be given to the lyrics, more focused than ever on psyche and feelings, despite the desperate sociological analyses of post-industrial society that formed the backbone of the early works: verses like "I got a job for life", "I fear it's you, so I hope it's you", and "There are ghosts in the barn and I don't like what I hear" do not provide any insight into the meaning of these hallucinatory odes to the absurdity of life, but they do convey the sense of bewilderment and oddity that pervades the eleven tracks of "Why I Hate Women".

The irony may be absent, but the quality, at least for now, isn't over. And although in the end it's not clear whether Thomas really hates women or not, one can grasp another concept, much more important: that Pere Ubu absolutely doesn't care about making money hand over fist, while they do care, immensely, about making quality albums, surreal, almost snobbishly enclosed in their chilling hermeticism.