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Ok: third try to post. I hate the new google version of blogger, so far.
I came to Pere Ubu late, but earlier than anyone currently in their twenties, I suppose, since I stole my vinyl copy of The Tenement Year from my college radio station in '89 or '90. Hey, I figure we're even - I paid that school 50K already (yeah, no debt, nyah nyah) of my own money and I also returned anything I stole that happened to suck - like Pearl Joke's debut album 11.11 or whatever it was called, which I think might be the one thing, in my entire kleptomanical life, that I stole and returned within 24 hours. See, I don't have a problem.
I'd discovered Pere Ubu a year earlier, in high school, when late one evening my cornerstone program of all great, seminal video experiences, Nite Flite, delivered the video for "We Have the Technology," and I was sufficiently smitten with a fat, mustachioed guy with a voice like a muppet's singing a bittersweet anthem over a barely-knit arrangement of ramshackle synths and guitars.
I'd later dicover singer David Thomas once uttered one of my now favorite quotes. When asked to define rock and roll, he answered (and I probably paraphrase) with the following: "Hauling large black boxes from one end of town to the other."
Meaning: if you have roadies, you ain't rock and roll no more.
The Tenement Year was Pere Ubu's first album in six years, and I think because Thomas left, but I also think this album reunited the core essentials, like bassist Tony Maimone and synth maniac Allen Ravenstine and drummer Scott Krauss; the rest of the lineup is filled out by super-recruit Jim Jones's distortionless guitar, which does wonderful things, Chris Cutler's kitchen sink percussion and noises, and John Kirkpatrick's melodeon. It's the keyboard and synth noises that did it, and continue to do it, for me; I can't think of anyone other than the early seventies Silver Apples who allowed such unthethered electronic noise to disrupt pop constructions, and so wonderfully - it's like blips and bleeps from a spazzing computer, a dying machine, another vocalist.
Pere Ubu's next album, Cloudland, would be even more pop oriented, and was actually not half bad, but I could never leave The Tenement Year for it. Of course, there's more to Pere Ubu than these two albums, way more, but I wouldn't categorize them together - The Modern Dance et al, being the genesis of artpunk, somewhat, or garage rock's pinnacle, deserve investigation always.
I think Cloudland and The Tenement Year are being resissued after years out of print. Well deserved, and too long in coming.
Not gonna post "We Have the Technology" because it was the single and isn't the only justification for the album's reissue. If you've read this far, you've probably already heard it, or you have too much free time.