Pere Ubu The Modern Dance (1978)

“The Modern Dance,” at least as it’s depicted on the cover, means a modernist dance; a million Jungled Jurgises replace their boots with ballet slippers and take off to spread the gospel of the worker. But while the cover might seem anachronistic for 1978, the band is actually updating Eugene Debbs and Theatre of the Absurd at the same time. Father Ubu was a character in Alfred Jarry’s 1896 play Ubu Roi, a fat stupid patriarch who murders the king MacBeth-style; Pere Ubu employ the name to contextualize their music in reference to Jarry’s proto-dadaism. The other direct reference to the play is the refrain of “The Modern Dance”; in between deliberations on the plight of “our poor boy” the band shouts “merdre merdre,” the first word of Jarry’s play, which provoked a riot and got the thing shut down during its premiere. For a Cleveland band coping with the post-industrial Midwest rust belt economy, the strange juxtapositions work because the could-be-eye-roll-provoking sentiments of the lyrics (“My baby says / We can live in the empty spaces of this life”) are echoed by the arrangements and compositional style of the group. They’ve been called “expressionist rock”; that’s as good a description as any, I guess, insofar as the band was always more interested in texture than form. Except, of course, the form is still there, which is what makes these songs more fantastic.

Tom Herman’s often-overdubbed guitar switches back and forth between slow, developed deliberation on “Chinese Radiation,” screeching scribbles of feedback on “Sentimental Journey,” and rock-forward bliss on “Street Waves.” Tony Maimone’s bass work isn’t quite as stark on Modern Dance as was generally the case for post-punk; however, his almost-funk drives songs like “Street Waves” and the title track. Scott Krause’s percussion is often based on ambience; “Over My Head” is a gorgeous example of creeping accents, and “Humor Me” is a neat off-time mock march-step. Allen Ravenstine’s synths are critical to the band’s sound; like Brian Eno in Roxy Music, Ravenstine’s position in the band was less “keyboardist” as it was “noise-maker.” Lead singer David Thomas must be a million singers’ idol; insanely contained, his lyrics equate relationships with industry and global politics while his hectic delivery is endlessly entertaining. And, like, find a better melody for “Non-Alightment Pact,” ever.

Essential Logic Beat Rhythm News - Waddle Ya Play? (1979)

This is the only album on this list that has never been released on CD. You can get 7 1/2 of the 9 tracks here on Fanfare in the Garden, an Essential Logic/Laura Logic compilation that for some reason doesn’t include “Alkaline Loaf in the area” or the album mix of “World Friction.” Or you can order the original Rough Trade vinyl, which still isn’t too outrageous. Maybe if I just say, “Love is All would not exist without Essential Logic,” the record companies will act?

Anyway: Logic, kicked out of X-Ray Spex because the record company thought the band would market better if Poly Styrene was the only woman in the group, went on to form this brilliant post-punk but also sort of R.I.O. group in 1978. This band just dissolved everything into everything: “The Order Form (I want to order a pelican)” has a melody that sounds like something from the Sparks’ Kimono My House (1974) played out over Logic and Davie Wright’s saxophone duet-driven New York Dolls-play-post-rock crescendos. In fact, Logic pulls the Russell Mael trick all over, infusing his weird sense of melody with a Sarah Vaughan jazz sensibility. “Shabby Abbott” throws Motown horns under Mark Turner’s total punk bass. “World Friction” is rocksteady fun; “Wake Up” is weird vocal treatments and lots of stop/start action between the pulsating choruses where Rich Tea shows off his sense of groove when drumming. “Albert” -- where Logic sings about jelly and disarmament -- gives lots of room for Ashley Buff to play with interesting guitar textures either in or out of unison with Wright and Turner. “Collecting Dust” has Turner rushing up and down the scales as Logic sings about “molesting trust.” When the album finally crashes into the wicked a capella outro of “Popcorn Boy,” it’s clear just how much ground this band has covered. This album is testament that Logic may just have been the most compelling songwriter in post-punk.

Gang of Four Entertainment! (1979)

It was named after a re-contextualized (or maybe deconstructed) image of the real Maoist Gang; the British group embraced Levi-Strauss, Foucault, Barthes, and Lacan as their Gang, and their lyrics, some of the most overtly political ever recorded, highlight the politics of each through via lyricist Jon King’s Situationist-inspired avant-Marxism.

Heh. Everybody who complained about the Pantha Du Prince review is getting ready to email me right now. Please don’t. Because this is great irony, right? We have all these contemporary dance-punk groups who say Gang of Four influenced them but then they talk about their own music (and get talked about) as if all we really want to do these days is party. Because in our post-9/11 world, we all just want to relax, right? Except, that was kind of Gang of Four’s whole point: they weren’t embracing dance music so much as re-appropriating it from its commoditization because they believed that commercial pleasure (“a market of the senses”) was just as alienating as industrial labor. In other words, for the band it’s impossible to separate pleasure from politics because sanctioned pleasure (including love) was just another way our bodies get controlled by the dominant order. Look: you can’t really ignore those politics without sounding completely irresponsible. I mean, argue against them, sure, and there are lots of ways: “hey, Gang of Four! ‘Authenticity’ means shit all.” “Hey Gang of Four? Aren’t musicians laborers? How is this album I just paid for supposed to represent un-commoditzed pleasure?” And the most problematic: “hey Gang of Four? Why do you keep using the female body to represent this evil site of commoditized pleasure?” There.

The album itself is a flurry of tension that musically captures these ideas perfectly. King is just the right amount of angry and agile; Andy Gill’s guitar tone on the album has been talked about so much that I’ll just murmur “influential” and move on; Dave Allen is like the punk Bootsy Collins; Hugo Burnham is incredibly adept at playing those dry, sparse beats while still lobbing fills into the mix. And ultimately the tightly wound punk funk of the album is the reason this is the go-to post-punk album; just don’t forget that Entertainment! doesn’t translate simply as entertainment.

Wire 154 (1979)

Not the popular choice for top Wire album, I’m sure. Then again, when all three of your classic albums are themselves considered classics, you’re bound to have fans of each, right? And then again, is it any wonder that I like the most experimental Wire album which also happens to most coherently fore ground their Situationist perspective best? Plus, I think you could make a fairly convincing argument that 154 is the album that most directly anticipates the work of the lengthy list of indie bands Wire has influenced.

Wire benefited from having three songwriters in the group; 154 highlights that diversity. We get bassist Graham Lewis’s nocturnal “A Touching Display” that hinges on feedback whose character is changed by the backing chords; we get his “I Should Have Known Better” which ominously pulsates over drummer Robert Gotobed’s stray snares and metronomic high hats. We get Colin Newman’s hilarious “The 15th” with its lyrics that make no sense while simultaneously expressing some unidentifiable core of human truth while simultaneously mapping out the groundwork for pretty much every band that existed in the nineties; we get his “On Returning” which spins on the contrast between heavily reverbed piano and incredibly dry guitar; and we get his “Once is Enough” which returns to the barn-burning of Pink Flag (1977) but only while letting Gotobed play with hilarious percussion. We get B.C. Gilbert’s “40 Versions” which encapsulates all the good parts of grunge at the same time that it eases the pain of the Stooges; we get his “Blessed State” that rocks Eno/Bowie fantasies with a sensibility that’s a little more…uh, twee? Y’know, right before launching off into some King Crimson shit. And we get “Map Ref. 41°N 93°W,” Wire’s most poppy single which even the band recognizes and makes fun of mid-song by shouting “chorus!” right before the chorus. And, like, find a better melody/harmony for “Interrupting my train of thought / Lines of longitude and latitude / Define and refine my altitude,” ever. Ever.

The Pop Group Y (1979)

The CD version starts with “She Is Beyond Good and Evil,” which might be the band’s greatest song, but it was originally released as a single before the album. The CD itself is nominally hard to find, made more problematic by the fact the most readily available version (at least in Canada) is a Japanese import which ain’t cheap.

I paid for it. I fucking love this album. Reggae ex-pat Dennis Bovell’s production style makes him my hero (which is why Cut, next on this list, I also love). In fact, you can pretty much shoehorn Y and Cut into my top five albums ever (with only the Boredom’s Super Æ and Deceit jockeying for space). The Pop Group are like the future. This is the type of shit the Liars are still trying to do (they can’t). And sure, a few of the songs -- notably “We Are Time” -- might go into Bovell’s bag of dub tricks a little too often, but the ultimate result of a union between dance-punk sensibility and dub production couldn’t possibly sound better than this.

Mark Stewart’s vocals are critical since he sells the chaos; his strangled delivery allows the band to go essentially as crazy as they wanted. The duel guitars of Gareth Sager and John Waddington flop between angular playing and screeching atmospheric feedback (check the break down on “The Boys from Brazil”). Simon Underwood and Bruce Smith hold the mess together, Underwood’s bass especially centering on stripped down funk while Smith’s drums wonk sparse rhythms and the occasional freak out. This is a band with no real avant pretensions that still manages to out-out most out music; they do it through Bovell but they also do it through conscious and carefully considered self-sabotage.

Every good beat on Y comes at a price; just when you start to nod your head, everything falls apart. Lyrically, the band is quite political, too, though nothing beats Stewart’s tragic caterwhauling at the end: “Please! Don’t sell you dreams!” On an album full of lines like “Teeth beckon you,” “Set yourself on fire on a train,” and “bullets cannot penetrate the sea,” his request is so simple and beautiful at the exact same time that the song is the most dissonant and formless. And that’s kind of what this album is like: watching it disintegrate slowly from “Thief of Fire” to the aleatoric noise that ends “Don’t Sell Your Dreams” amazingly makes all the dissonance at the end more comfortable; we’ve lived through the apocalypse, so we can return home and shut the door.

The Slits Cut (1979)

Cut is a masterpiece of punk/dub hybridity; the band, rollicking over Budgie’s drums and producer Bovell’s odd percussive accents, exploits the far reaches of punk attitude without ever playing a power chord. Viv Albertine’s guitar is a constantly fluctuating sieve of bouncy chords and strange textures. Tessa Pollitt’s bass resounds on the low end; she throws in runs between the head-bobbing pulse that drives the songs forward where the drums don’t. Ari Up sings about various forms of addiction over top, her elastic voice mixing vocal ticks, old-school punkisms, and arching melodies. The album was recorded in the wake of original drummer Palmolive’s departure from the band (to record the next album on this list); any tensions that existed in the band seem to have dissolved if the synergy here is evidence.

Superficially, the album’s songs all work on the same vibes. But check out the variety. Two of Palmolive’s songs are back to back: “FM” presents the radio as “frequent mutilation” through droning harmonies and straightforward drum work; “New Town” employs delicate and strange guitar work, high hats, toms, and percussive accents to create a slowly building crescendo that envelopes itself. “Spend Spend Spend” and “Shoplifting” present different sides of the same consumer-therapy coin. “Instant Hit,” the fantastic opener, sounds like the track has been chopped to shit, self-destructing just like the heroin addict it’s about. “So Tough” mocks a tough boy while Up employs her most interesting melody, giddy and running in and out of harmonies with the rest of the band. The closer, Palmolive’s “Adventures Close to Home,” is a funny little excursion through a labyrinth of riffs and changes that casually -- almost accidentally -- captures some of the most beautiful moments in punk ever -- like, in the spaces between the chords. It’s mind-boggling. “Typical Girl,” a pot shot at marketing directed at young girls, features the most hilarious piano line ever.

And it’s the cocky, snotty, punk attitude that let’s the band get away with this genre centrifuge, which is why when they were dismissed then (and sometimes now) as the girl group of punk, the Slits fucked that shit up. Hell -- nobody else had the balls to release an album like this. They didn’t get naked on the cover for any other reason than because they could, and that’s exactly what Cut plays like. Because all the drugs and other addictions on the album? The “typical girls” who don’t create or rebel? The backhanded dismissal of shopping as a solution to domestic loneliness? The album itself is the answer to every issue it raises; this is the new jonze, and it’s a fucking insane high.

Raincoats Raincoats (1979)

Bla bla bla Kurt Cobain. We can thank him for getting this reissued and we can also write letters to David Geffen asking why it’s out of print again. That’s a travesty, really, because this album, more than anything else here, most directly anticipates the indie rock of the past two decades. Just listen to “The Void,” where the opening pairs Gina Birch’s slow bass riff with Vicky Aspinall’s post-Cale violin riffage. The short section essentially capture everything good about post-rock right before Ana De Silva enters on guitar and vocals and the song hints in an entirely new direction -- and not just because fucking Hole covered it. “No Side to Fall In” is a brilliant vocal piece accompanied by scattered percussion and Birch’s hilarious bass line. Palmolive’s tom-playing in the middle section (a bridge between the Velvet Underground and, say, Broadcast) in brilliant, as is the a capella section that follows. Palmolive’s “Adventures Close to Home” gets another treatment here; the song sounds entirely different from the Slit’s version (in fact, in a weird way this is the version that sounds more Slits-y). “Off Duty Trip” hints at math-rock pretensions; “You’re a Million” creates this collapsing sound scape filled with clomping drums and Aspinall’s countrified violins. Closer “No Looking” is just spastic. The cover of the Kink’s “Lola” takes the nervous sexuality of the original and flips it even further; when De Silva sings “I’m a man and he’s a man” the gender politics of the song dissolve. Essentially, this album is indie rock in the eighties and nineties before the eighties and nineties had happened.

This Heat Deceit (1981)

Finally reissued with the Out of Cold Storage box, Deceit is either a fairly straightforward R.I.O. masterpiece or the weirdest post-punk album that exists. It’s a little bit of both, really, sounding as much like Henry Cow as the Sex Pistols and produced with a spate of studio trickery. It’s hard to imagine today with all of our sequencers and sound generators how complicated this album was to make; this band didn’t have that shit. Charles Bullen, Charles Hayward, and Gareth Williams recorded the basic tracks for some of these songs live, yeah, but for the most part we’re talking tape-editing, splicing, manipulation, tape loops, odd recording spaces (like inside toilets and shit), and expansive overdubs.

Check the mid-section of “Paper Hats” that sounds like King Crimson going at it in strict time; you’ll suddenly find that the odd off-time accents in the background are actually a tape loop of a different and much looser and slower performance of the same bit, and you get to hear the tension created between them as the latter gains volume in the mix. Or “S.P.Q.R.,” where an Edge-like guitar sound spirals under deliberations on Roman life. Or “Cenotaph,” all lush guitar textures pinned down by Hayward’s groovy drumming as the band sings “history repeats itself” in harmony right before a brilliant chord change before dissolving in a rush of noise. “Shrink Wrap” and “Sleep” are widely different edits of one another meant to link both sides of the album together; the former is a cute fear-of-nuclear-holocaust lullabye and the latter a collage (like the cover) of dissent directed at world leaders and the arms race. “Radio Prague” is another collage; this time a cutting radio signal, squirrels of feedback, and some heavily filtered percussion. “Makeshift Swahili” is the most overt homage to prog rock on the album; those chord progressions are total krautrock/Crimson moves balled up into little indescribable bombs. Best of all, the song switches into a live version of the outro, and suddenly free from the studio trickery the band sounds like a phantom. “Independence” is all loping guitars and whistles as the Declaration of Independence is read; “A New Kind of Water” continues that ambient sense until exploding into frustrated guitar work. “Hi Baku Shyo” is more collage that ends the album on a suitably eerie note.

This is a band that, more than twenty years later, is still arguing about whether the lyrics of certain songs should have been “we” or “you”; in other words, whether the band should have included themselves in the problem, or simply decried others. And Bullen and Hayward are still arguing about that amiably (Williams unfortunately passed away). Like many of the other groups here, this kind of noise was as inspired by a firm dedication to Marxist ideas as it was avant-art. Deceit, however, is an astonishing piece of work and (especially remastered) shows no signs of its age. Bands, with all of our sequencers and sound generators, still can’t produce this shit today.

Mission of Burma Vs. (1982)

It’s difficult to judge how much Burma’s present success has affected the reception of their back catalogue. Vs. has always been the high point, for me; it’s pretty much the ideal indie-rock album, and further, thanks to Martin Swope’s tape and sound manipulation, covers a lot of experimental bases as well. Like Wire, the band benefited from three song writers, with guitarist Roger Miller offering the eclectic songs, bassist Clint Conley penning the more straightforward material, and drummer Peter Prescott contributing a track as well. The album’s lyrics are highly political, certainly, but are delivered with a sense of playfulness absent from some of the earlier bands here; the effect takes some of the burden off approaching the music with those same politics (by which I mean, Mission of Burma don’t act so much like they’re preaching to the converted. They’re trying to convince you, and they’re working hard at it).

The music is vibrant throughout. We get Swope-ified treatments like the thunderous “Fun World” (which doesn’t actually suggest the world is fun), the droning-over-riffage intro “Secrets,” the woozy spirals of “Trem Two,” and the delightfully odd “Weatherbox,” the lyrics of which are delivered like a schoolyard chant. “The Ballad of Johnny Burma” and “New Nails” sound the most traditionally punk; elsewhere we get the guitar solo-explosion of “Einstein’s Day” and the effects chain workout of “Learn How.” “That’s How I Escaped My Certain Fate” closes the album out with its most straightforward track (one of Conley’s finest, edged in with some lo-fi punk clipping). I’ve always felt that half the awesomeness of Mission of Burma just lies in how much fun it always seems like they’re having; how effortless it all is. Vs. is a fucking monster that sounds like it was squeezed out as a lark. Which means it’s fantastic.

ESG Come Away with ESG (1983)

Name another album that is both a massive sample staple and an important influence on contemporary dance punk; name another album that sits at the intersection of disco, house, hip hop, and punk. This album has been sampled by both the Liars (when they were good) and J Dilla; it’s a phenomenally stark exploration of poly-rhythms and stripped-down funk. The breaks are endless (and fucking prime because they’re so dry); the vocals of sisters Valerie, Renee, and Marie somehow robotic and sensual at the same time, but that’s the attitude they’re kicking, right? This is an album that’s sexy because of the joy of music; it’s not sexy because that’s the only point. The three women blend complex rhythms together; scattered guitar riffs (usually only a couple of notes, surf-like) fade in over the pounding bass lines as the percussion goes nuts. There are even glitchy moments in parts; stuttering tracks that re-orient themselves. Essentially, this album is the root of so many genres and movements in music it’s impossible to talk about. And that’s despite the fact that, since it was originally released on the short-lived 99 Records, the thing has been out of print forever. It was reissued just this past fall; the new release marks the first time ever Come Away with ESG has existed on CD. ‘Bout fucking time, because I only have on other thing to say about this album: listen to “About You.”

Motherfuckin’ Dre, right?