Pere Ubu

THE GRAND SOCIAL & U:MACK presents

Iconic American art-punk legends performing in Ireland for the last time..

PERE UBU

‘The Last Goodbye’ Farewell Tour

The Grand Social

Saturday September 21st.

Doors: 7.30pm.

Adm: €25 (www.ticketweb.ie + bk fee)

David Thomas and his band of merry experimentalist protopunks return to Dublin for the very last time, showcasing their swansong album ‘The Long Goodbye’.

Cleveland, Ohio’s Pere Ubu said hello in 1975 with the seven-inch apocalypse “30 Seconds Over Tokyo,” initiating a legacy of avant-rock challenge and dissonance that comes to an end in The Long Goodbye, announced by founding singer David Thomas as the band’s last album. As tangled in shadows and slicing observation as Raymond Chandler’s namesake novel, the album — layered in dense, pictorial electronics — evokes Ubu’s early riff-driven reckoning in the electro-garage opener “What I Heard on the Pop Radio” and the high-noon noir “Flicking Cigarettes at the Sun.” The darkness and programming closes in even tighter as Thomas crosses a nation of ravaged landscapes and battered dreams in the long spoken fever of “The Road Ahead.” (“I am the last of the Americans,” he notes at one juncture. “After us come barbarians.”) A bonus CD from a 2018 concert includes a reprise of “Heart of Darkness,” the B side of that ’75 single, bringing this ride full circle.

The new album by Pere Ubu, 'The Long Goodbye’ is the end of a road. David Thomas has been talking about Pere Ubu’s journey on the road to Satisfied City for many years but he has now declared that they have arrived. Named after Raymond Chandler’s novel, Mr Thomas says, ‘This wraps up every song and story that Pere Ubu has been telling in different ways for the past forty plus years. It is one definitive hour that provides the answers to the questions we’ve been asking and delivers it up into what I consider the definitive destination.”

This Pere Ubu album does not sound like any of the others. It has a large expanse of synths due to Thomas writing and arranging the songs alone with his private collection of drum machines, synthesizers and, uh, a melodeon… before sending it out to the other musicians in Pere Ubu’s extensive fold, with an invitation for them to take it on and make it more.