Post Scaruffi reviews that are actually good The guiding theme

The work opens with the piercing hiss of Non Alignment Pact, which plunges into a furious, deafening bacchanal of cryptic slogans, ungainly vocals, discordant strumming, electronic distortions and primordial pulsations, in a grotesque dance of bodies possessed by the restless, exhausting rhythm of a tribal ceremony. The sound of the Modern Dance is a devolved funk, primitive and technological, which reproduces the ambience of the office, the cyclic movement of the throng, the smoke of the factory chimneys and the inorganic bawling of the mob, and cadences the working day like a real mechanism, while the singing vibrates in despair to the hammering rhythm of the dance. It is a dramatic, perturbing fresco of the condition of working life, although unfolding to an almost jovial rhythm. The use of "concrete" sequences and electronic sounds, as a means of emphasising the climate of tragedy, makes it the archetype of the "sound collage" for the entire new wave. The third great rock and roll song of the disc is Street Waves, swept by an ominous wind (which evokes the miasmic gust after an atomic explosion) and driven at supersonic speed by a stop-start rhythm. The braying of Thomas and Herman's machine-gun fire ride the infernal pandemonium, giving it the stamp of a prophetic vision of the apocalypse.
The forebodings of the larger trilogy also inform the android litany of Real World (syncopated rhythm, buzzing interference, metallic, discordant guitar), the slow spirit-dance of Over My Head, pregnant with agonised suspense, and the clownish, desperate disco music of Humour Me and Life Stinks, which throw Thomas's incoherent cry and bubbling synth into the general uproar. The ferocity and the icy obscurity of these emotionless ballads place them at the antipodes of the original spirit of rock and roll.

Laughing Stock (Verve, 1991) continues in the same pattern: six pieces, six long trance. The training is a real chamber ensemble: Lee Harris (drums), Mark Feltham (harmonica), Martin Ditchman (percussion), Mark Hollis (guitar, keyboards), Tim Greene (keyboards), more viola, cello, trumpet, horn, clarinet, double bass. Myrrhman proceeds in slow motion, slipping on dilated blues guitar chords and stumbling in jazz trumpet phrases, sinking into funereal drone of a string section. Taphead is equally spectral, crossed by drones stabbing keyboards and trumpets of a confused buzz of arcs. The vibrant rhythmic jazz and crooning desolate push Ascension Day and New Grass (a tour de force of nine minutes) in favorites territories of Van Morrison. Still a deep religious sense, almost apocalyptic, choking After The Flood: a cyclical beat, a chant almost Indian, a confused noise of substrate, a gospel organ that flutters in the background. The baritone Mark Hollis is become a pure sound that creeps into cool jazz and rhythm and blues webs woven by the instruments. The disc is slightly below the previous year, but confirms the exceptional status of the leading forms.

he should've given it a 9/10 though

>>72024878
The eclecticism of their sound is demonstrated by Laughing, which opens with a mini-jam of free jazz for winds, guitar and drums, and suddenly explodes into another mad and brutal boogie fanfare. Even more disarticulated and chaotic is the harmonic tissue of Chinese Radiation, with wandering guitar chords, Thomas's unrestrained raving and his epileptic fit in front of an exulting audience and then piano notes amid general silence. Sentimental Journey, chamber music for breaking crockery, disconnected phrases of synth and a somnambulant lament, is nothing other than a random mass of dissonance in the proudest traditions of psychedelia (once the experiments with gestural musique concrŠte are taken into account), but it is also a manifesto of Dadaist music, of music akin to screeching and hubbub. A singular hybrid of emphatic agit-prop (but without militant intent), of deformation by overdose (but without indulging in the emotions of the trip) and of aleatory music … la Cage (but without his academism), Ubu's Dadaist piece is a product of the industrial civilisation, its perversions and its anxieties. And Thomas, who dissertates imperturbably in the most absolute chaos and in the end remains alone raving amid the fragments of crockery, coins a new type of absurdist lied which might be the analogue of folk in the industrial era.

>>72024891
An extreme synthesis of the anarchic and the rational, a troubled projection of obsessive libidos and negative emotions, the body music of Pere Ubu pivots on the expressive crudeness of the singing, on the ungrammatical syntax of the electronics and on the ludic impetus of the rhythmics. It gives voice to the expressionist howl, to the informal chaos of abstractionism, to the commercialism of pop art. Cultured and primitive, refined and naif, Ubu march under the banner of contradiction, perhaps thus pursuing the ultimate end of pataphysics, the science of laws that regulate exceptions. Altogether their sound is very innovative: the singing of Thomas is uncouth in the worst "Beefheartesque" tradition, the rhythm section grinds out a paradoxical rhythm, a rough and elemental danceability, to the twisted accompaniment of Herman's primitive, strange and hypnotic guitar playing, and Ravenstine injects crude and anti-aesthetic effects, using electronics in a way antithetical to that of flash-rock or of disco music (anti-melodic and anti-rhythmic, earthy and disarticulated), as an ironic counterpoint to the maniacal anxiety of the band.
Thus unbalanced, the music is ambitious enough to function as the soundtrack of the industrial landscape of Cleveland, and, by extrapolation, as that of the holocaust, of the "final solution". Theirs is a philosophy of auto-destruction. The references to Jarry's pataphysics are not accidental; they allude to the sense of deformity, of the absurd, of the grotesque (which is never burlesque), of the brutal cynicism which informs the relations beween the inhabitants of the ruins of technology.

>>72024905
The modern dance of Pere Ubu is a funeral rite for humanity after the catastrophe: there is the anguish of an inescapable fate, there is the agony and the delirium, the slow decay into the shapelessness, the immaterial chaos of the soul. They are visions of the Apocalypse sung by survivors, gangs of hooligans roaming the debris, faces ravaged by the explosion which and surges and vanishes in miasmic gusts, barbarians advancing in a jungle of tangled piping and electric wire. They are dark and indecent ballads, with a neurotic rhythm of hisses and clangorous crockery. The voice of desperation and madness, of disgust and violence, rises, impetuous and scornful, above the hubbub of the Universal Judgement.
The musical references are innumerable: the most down-at-heel garage psychedelia, an urbanised version of Beefheart's vandalic blues, the most spectral and chaotic free jazz, the tribalism of primitive peoples, musique concrŠte modernised and fused with an abundance of electronic contortions and vocal acrobatics in a harmonic babble laced with blasphemies and laments.
Modern Dance is a pagan representation of the end.

You could have just linked it, you know

Gira's agonizing roars echoed against a wall of sound as brutal as hardcore, as depressed as Joy Division, as strident as industrial music, as distorted as psychedelic-rock, as loud as heavy-metal. The music on Cop (1984) was born at the intersection of a Kafka tale, a Freud treatise, a black hole, a medieval exorcism, the first wails of a robot and the last spasms of a serial killer on the electric chair. Existential boredom exuded not only from Gira's (criminal, obscene and blaspheme) lyrics but also from Roli Mosimann's drumming and Norman Westberg's guitar noise. Their gothic phase peaked with Young God (1985), a slow, austere, terrifying journey into Gira's sinister psyche.

>>72024999
shut the fuck off kid

I always thought the modern dance cover was a pic of a paratrooper squirreling in

i was dumb

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Third Ear Band (Harvest, 1970 - Gottdiscs, 2005) was the band’s second album and one of the greatest masterpieces of psychedelic and progressive rock. It goes even further than the first record, scaling down the “ethnic” feel and creating more “abstract” compositions, which in fact seem to belong more to chamber music than to popular music, and more to jazz than rock. The disc’s four suites (each one dedicated to one of the four elements of ancient Greek philosophy), through the ensemble (which replaces Davis for Ursula Smith on cell), arrive at a formulation of pure music. Their spiritual labors contextualize all of the involved ethnic sources, eliminating any ingenuity still present in Alchemy. This record is a masterpiece, a torturous trace of a journey through sound and avant-garde primitivism.

>>72025304
The album starts with Air, whose ethereal and uncoordinated quality is due to the fragile framework lain by the harmonic oboe, while a viola and cello weave a convoluted counterpoint akin to the praxis of the dodecaphonic avant-garde of the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Equally abstract and inconclusive is Water, although this time the improvisations avoid angularity. Ecstatic oboe melodies are embroidered on a counterpoint of vibrant reflections from the cello and viola. Building on those practices, Fire becomes a sabbatical of chaotic and continuous noise, with stringed instruments and oboe prostheses working together to issue dissonances more or less at random. Earth is the most martial and aggressive piece on the album, and it borrows from popular gypsy dance progressions, swirling with stringed instruments flying in crescendos, while, as always, the oboe and viola alternate, running in vaults gradually increasing in ebriosity. The disk’s only constant is the stubborn rhythm of Sweeny, which is the true ancestral call that holds together the incessant improvisations of the other three. These four pieces are the prime leaders in the concept of the music of the “third ear,” a concept whose limits are insuperable, marked by exotic fusion and free experimentation. The mission of the group is divided into two steps, one propaedeutic to the other: the first is the courage to wander outside the barriers of gender, and the second is a determination to enhance the moral function of music. Their orgiastic style lends itself to a cathartic cancelling of the hypocrisy codified by Western music. In this way, the music harks back to an age where music was primarily a vehicle for meditation and prayer. Finally, their music exposes the bright, inherent duality of all things; closer inspection into the band’s music reveals light and dark, interior and exterior, introversion and extroversion.