Music Arcades: Pere Ubu: Pennsylvania

So this is the point where I lost the Pere Ubu plot. Everything I said about St Arkansas applies here; just a few years earlier. The album feels shapeless, impenetrable — even the layout of the tracklisting on the cover seems designed to make it difficult to work out what you're listening to, so you experience the album a one big lump rather than a collection of songs. I don't object to that in principle, and David Thomas's work with the Two Pale Boys and Foreigners is arguably rambles just as much, or more. In practice, the Ubu albums of the last thirteen years don't satisfy me in the same way the other works do.

I have no feel for whether any other fans agree with me. The critics evidently don't. From the official page, comes this from the much-revered Greil Marcus:

The tenor of all the wistful, vaguely paranoid tales of displacement on Pennsylvania — tales of abandoning the Interstate highways, getting lost, and finding the perfect town when it's too late to change your life and live in it — is caught in the weirdly menacing way Thomas pronounces "Los Angeles" in the tune "Highwaterville." It's the old flophouse way, the way Anjelica Huston's character speaks the name in The Grifters, with a hard 'g' and a long 'e' at the end, so that the place sounds like a disease. The same sense of the strange, the unacceptable, in the familiar is there in "Mr Wheeler," which sounds like an old tape of a very old telephone call, a tape that showed up in a box in a room in a house where no one has lived for 20 years. "Uh, Mr. Wheeler?" somebody says; as with every bit of talk in the number, it's followed by a long instrumental passage, as if some great drama is taking shape around a story that will never be put back together… What comes into view is a secret country: Barely recognizable, and undeniable. And it's a thrill to hear, now, all of David Thomas's voices swirling around the listener, on the street. Pennsylvania seems to draw out of its own spectral geography and that street can be wherever you find yourself… (Greil Marcus, Double Trouble, Faber and Faber, 2000, pages 167-168)

So that's what I was missing.

And from the press release (quoting mischievously out of context, but what the hell):

Are there any underlying themes?
Nothing worth understanding explains itself.
Anomalies clarify, consistencies confuse.
The vision recedes before the visionary.
Order and meaning are the proper pursuits of the grown man, to stand against the flood of cynicism and passion for the darkness that pours out from the media priests.