Pere Ubu - Lady From Shanghai

Double LP album cut at 45 RPM

2013 album from David Thomas and company on the 35th anniversary of the group's debut (The Modern Dance).The vinyl release is pressed at 45 RPM and spread across two records for the highest fidelity. A 100-page paperback of liner notes, "Chinese Whispers," written by David Thomas, is published and can be purchased from Ubutique. 

"'Black music is dead,' David Thomas informed a journalist in 2009. 'It's a rotten, stinking corpse.' The remarks by the frontman and sole original member of Pere Ubu, which were part of a more sweeping condemnation of contemporary pop's lack of spine, may well have laid the foundation for Lady of Shanghai, the group's 15th studio album since The Modern Dance industrialized punk rock in 1978. This time around, though, modern dance is the problem, rather than the solution: 'It's past time somebody puts an end to this abomination,' announces the band's website with a barely stifled giggle. 'Lady of Shanghai is an album of dance music fixed.' If so, Thomas and Co. have repaired it with all the electroconvulsive finesse and violent pleasure of a Tarantino revenge fantasy... Pere Ubu's mostly nonironic fidelity to the revolutionary intent of rock'n'roll at its most fundamentally caustic (and erotic) paints the band into a corner from which it has no intention of escaping, even while critiquing that corner's existence. Not only does Thomas channel a loathsome aging rock lothario in 'Musicians Are Scum,' he adds a self-referential exclamation point by quoting the Chamber Brothers' 'Time Has Come Today,' the tick-tocking cuckoo clock at the root of all subsequent electronic rock. Like the film from which it borrows its title, Lady From Shanghai is an artfully awkward study in malaise. If pop music in general and dance music in particular is a nightmare from which David Thomas is trying to awaken, he's reproduced that ambivalent dream state with remarkable accuracy." — Spin

 

Side 1

Thanks

Free White

Feuksley Ma'am, The Hearing

Side 2

Mandy

And Then Nothing Happened

Musicians Are Scum

Side 3

Another One (Oh Maybellene)

The Road Trip Of Bipasha Ahmed

Lampshade Man

Side 4

414 Seconds

The Carpenter Sun

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