Pere Ubu live at The Village, Dublin

Few bands in history have attracted an avalanche of slippery rockspeak semantics quite like Pere Ubu, and frontman David Thomas’ seminal musical mobius trip has variously (and aptly I guess) been proclaimed as the statelier emanations of jazz-punk, post-punk (via either Detroit or New York scenes), Dadaist art-rock, demi-no wave, pre-Pixies rumbling, avant-garde and just about any hip, broad church you care to mention.
They’re a complicated beast and no mistake – a bundle of nerve endings and contradictions that’s mostly cerebral - all hymns to Pynchon (‘Navvy’) and existential theremin musing, then suddenly barbaric, as tonight’s throbbing rendition of ‘Raygun Suitcase’ so pointedly demonstrates. Beneath the occasionally daring Fountainhead architecture though, lurk prettier songs, carried by Thomas’ preternatural hermaphrodite vocals.
“I have to apologise for the quality of my voice,” pleads the imposing, plaid-shirted Thomas, head in hands between slugs from a hip flask. “I’ve been taking a substance which is completely illegal. It gives a sublime upper range then takes it’s toll. But kids, it was worth it.”
It sure was. The instrument in question elegantly hovers between agitated, vertiginous octave Jello wobbles (the heartbreaking ageing punk lament ‘SAD.TXT’ is majestically forlorn in a fucked-up, angry way) and a spidery, soaring Agnes Bernal malaise, never more poignant and eerie than on ‘Dark’, Thomas’ shivering ne plus ultra couch session (“Oh my friends don’t understand me/ And my wife begins to fear”).
With an irony arch enough to befit the evening, the synth packs up just before ‘We Have The Technology’, depriving the eclectic congregation of such live staples as ‘Final Solution’. By then, though, we’re so enraptured that we really don’t need a cure after all.