Pere Ubu

With Pere Ubu, there are those who get them and those who don’t. Both views are completely justified, however, with Ubu making music that’s intriguing yet hardly what you’d call "listener-friendly.” For nearly 30 years, the band have been attracting adjectives such as absurd, perverse and grotesque. Their albums are never easy — the lyrics are nearly indecipherable, the music without formula — yet they’re always rich in the creativity department. Pere Ubu’s latest, Why I Hate Women, is no exception. Album number 15 is a dark, claustrophobic journey through 11 tracks of what singer David Thomas (the only remaining member from the original ’78 line-up) describes as "artful mayhem.” And Thomas’s description is pretty spot on. With his voice contorting over tense, treble-loaded guitars, drums and squealing electronic devices, there’s a lot of chaos here; however, it’s controlled chaos, where melodies and harmonies do in fact exist. And if you have enough patience to search for them, you’ll likely find diamonds hidden amongst Ubu’s self-imposed rough.