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Road
to Perfection
Pere
Ubu
St.
Arkansas (Cooking Vinyl/spinART)
Pere Ubu’s St. Arkansas is a road record, so rich in
texture and so ripe with imagery that it’s hard to experience
it as strictly an aural event. It’s a colorful record, invoking
hazy blue sky over fading Southern blacktop, yellow “do not
pass” lines winding like oxbow-lakes-to-be, as gray creepers
of Spanish moss and olive-drab live oaks flit by at periphery.
You can smell St. Arkansas, too: It carries the odor
of old freon-based air conditioning, sweat, cigarette butts,
cheap cologne and marsh gas, all fighting to rise above the
dominant strain of pine emanated by the air-freshener suspended
from the rearview mirror. Feel your hands hot on that cracking
artificial-leather steering wheel? Taste the vinegar-salt
aftermusk of a country ham-and-egg biscuit? Then you’re probably
well along the road to St. Arkansas—with a sense of
what a remarkable place it’s gonna be when you get there.
Pere Ubu’s 12th studio record is, in short, a creative masterpiece,
a nigh-unto-perfect collection of 10 well-written, brilliantly
played and crisply recorded songs, each of them solid enough
to invite repeated listens, each of them rich enough to make
such return visits rewarding. Many of Ubu’s trademark sounds
(David Thomas’ always-distinctive warbling, nasal vocal style,
squiggly EML synthesizer and theremin fills, fluid bass lines
mixed to the fore atop metronomic drum cadences) are evident
on St. Arkansas, but the sonic palette is expanded,
too, in a variety of effective and exciting ways. Organ plays
(no pun intended) an important role in this record’s fever-dream
flavor, and haunting piano melodies or nearly subliminal,
finger-picked, minor-key guitar figures are as likely to augment
each song’s mood as are the expected synthetics.
St.
Arkansas is the second studio work from what has become
the longest-standing incarnation of Pere Ubu, Cleveland’s
(if not the world’s) most successfully unsuccessful rock band.
Thomas, prodigal founding guitarist Tom Herman, bassist Michele
Temple, keyboardist Robert Wheeler and drummer Steve Mehlman
(aided and abetted by studio guitarist-organist Jim Jones)
have now been playing together since 1995. There’s a deep
sense of creative fluidity and musical intuition evident on
this record that seems to have grown from such (relative)
stability in a group long dogged by personnel (not to mention
record-label) turnover.
Recorded by Thomas and longtime engineer Paul Hamann at the
group’s beloved Suma studio in Cleveland, with an ice-dry
sonic style that enhances the album’s sweat-inducing musical
miasma, this record is as organic and positively lived-in-sounding
as anything by Ubu since 1978’s Dub Housing. That latter
record has long been recorded by many Ubuphiles and music
critics alike as the group’s defining work, but to this particular
listener’s ears (and eyes, mouth, nose and hands), St.
Arkansas now defines the new standard of excellence for
Pere Ubu—and for anyone else foolish enough to attempt to
give ’em a run for their money down one of their beloved American
byways.
—J.
Eric Smith
Bill
Frisell
:Rarum
(ECM)
Sharing its title with other collections in a new series from
the ECM label, this set offers selections featuring guitarist
and composer Bill Frisell, appearing both as leader and sideman.
It documents a startlingly broad range of music from his own
boisterous and gleeful horn-infused “Resistor” to the quietly
regal “Mandeville” recorded with Paul Motian’s band. There’s
the icy Northern serenity of “Singsong,” recorded with the
Jan Garbarek Group, and the mournful lilt of “Alien Prints”
with his own band.
While Frisell has gone on to create a large and rich catalog
for Nonesuch Records (including the newly released The
Willies), his work with ECM shows him as a young man,
confident and eager to experiment—a trait he’s carried throughout
his career. He’s a sympathetic improviser, able to let loose
both large sheets of sound and beautifully whispered passages
from his guitars. The booklet includes Frisell’s own notes
on the pieces and his collaborators.
—David
Greenberger
 Solomon
Burke
Don’t
Give Up on Me (Anti/Epitaph)
About two-thirds through “Fast Train,” one of two superb Van
Morrison songs on this extraordinary disk, Solomon Burke sings
so powerfully, he lifts you off your feet. Burke’s vivid baritone,
never less than inspiring, infuses Morrison’s urgent, cautionary
tale with that full measure of luminescence available only
to the greatest soul singers. At 62, Burke may be singing
even better than he did in the ’60s, when he delivered such
classics of country-flecked blues as “Cry to Me” and “Down
in the Valley” for Atlantic Records. Although he’s a Rock
& Roll Hall of Famer, he is far from a relic: This spare,
elegantly textured and imaginatively sequenced album burns
with vitality.
Burke’s protean, deeply persuasive voice is magnificently
showcased on this collection of songs by the best contemporary
writers, including Bob Dylan (the crafty shuffle, “Stepchild”),
Nick Lowe (the barroom ballad “The Other Side of the Coin”),
Elvis Costello (the eccentric, courtly “The Judgment”) and
Dan Penn (the heart-rending title track). The key tune is
the Barry Mann-Cynthia Weil-Brenda Russell “None of Us Are
Free,” an anthem Burke sings with the Blind Boys of Alabama,
rocking & rolling our hearts with its beautifully articulated
message of liberation. There are numerous potential hits here,
including the grammatically shaky, emotionally true “None
of Us,” Brian Wilson’s gorgeous cheek-to-cheeker “Soul Searchin’
” and the implacably grungy Dylan. This album breathes; recorded
live, all the musicians working together in real time, in
four days at the legendary Sunset Sound studios, it’s profoundly
moving, authentic and contemporary. Produced with respect,
imagination and restraint by Joe Henry (who contributes the
remarkable “Flesh and Blood”), Don’t Give Up on Me
isn’t a plea, but a command. It’s your loss if you don’t listen.
—Carlo
Wolff
Wetwerks
Wetwerks
(Hydrostatic)
 Out
of Nassau, N.Y., comes one of the more coherent pieces of
heavy-duty electronica the area has seen in a few years. While
news is that these lads are currently working on the West
Coast with producer Rae Dileo of Filter and Rollins fame,
this 2001 self-titled release is a competent stroke into realms
both commercial and experimental.
 It
would be misleading, however, to classify the effort as industrial
or electronic, although it appears that is where they are
headed. Rather, Wetwerks is simply a riff-laden powerhouse,
with Godzilla bass lines and well-meshed live drumming embellished
with Roland V-Drums. The axes are somewhat overprocessed,
but this does little to diminish the aural assault. These
guys are not afraid of effects pedals. “What I’m Not”
and opener “You Know” advance nicely textured melodies, and
all tools are ferociously wielded to produce instantly memorable
portraits of frustration and self-reflection.
Sadly, the rap-style vocals employed in “Cairo,” “Hydrostatic”
and others, while not total white-bread, area by now a well-worn
medium to help deliver such a promising payload. On the whole,
though, the CD is a coherent, cerebral bit of burnage. Expect
the next one to be mighty.
—Bill
Ketzer
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