Surf's Up!

Though he's made his home in London for years, Pere Ubu frontman David Thomas has built the better part of his songwriting career exploring American themes that seem to hold a special fascination for him — open spaces, the industrial Midwest, cars, and surf culture (he's written a song called "Beach Boys," covers "Surf's Up" here, and has covered or quoted "Sloop John B." on several occasions). In between Pere Ubu projects he has worked under his own name with various collaborators, including the interesting guitar and trumpet duo called Two Pale Boys. Guitarist Keith Moline and trumpeter Andy Diagram both make use of technologies that significantly expand the normal tonal and temporal ranges of their instruments, often making it sound as if there are five or six bandmembers playing simultaneously (in addition to Thomas' own occasional contributions on melodeon). As anyone familiar with Thomas' work both in and outside of Pere Ubu will expect, the songs on Surf's Up! are moody and strange, suffused with a twisted humor and sometimes sweetly melodic in ways that don't reveal themselves immediately. For example, "Man in the Dark" sounds shapeless at first, a muttered lyric over unnaturally low-pitched trumpet and distant shreds of guitar, but stick with it and you'll realize that it's really a three-chord pop song. The nine-minute epic "River" combines layers of digitally delayed guitar and Jon Hassell-ish trumpet with multi-tracked vocals and lyrics that may or may not speak of environmental apocalypse (Thomas has longstanding aversions to both careful enunciation and printed lyrics). The most rockish entry is the harmonically static and, frankly, not terribly interesting "Spider in My Stew." But the big curiosity, of course, is his cover of "Surf's Up," which is given an eerily beautiful and ponderously slow arrangement. As usual, Thomas essentially defies criticism by being utterly sui generis.