18 monkeys on a dead man's chest by David Thomas & two pale boys & Rocket redux by Rocket from The Tombs
by Ian Simmons
[ cdreviews ]
Since his days as Crocus Behemoth in the riveting post-punk ensemble Pere Ubu, David Thomas has never been less than interesting. He is probably the closest the US has come to producing an equivalent to Mark E Smith, not in terms of manner or content perhaps, but in terms of having a consistent and off-centre musical vision which has been ruthlessly pursued over the years with a changing cast of musicians. These discs visit two very different ends of that journey.
18 monkeys is the latest way-station on Thomas' journey, and the third album by his current ensemble, two pale boys, with Andy Diagram on trumpet and Keith Moline on guitar. This unconventional and flexible line-up serves Thomas well, producing a scratchy, odd-shaped, minimal sound, reminiscent in some ways of The Fall. But Thomas's gentle, vulnerable voice is about as far from Mark E Smith's sarcastic Manc curmudgeon as you can get. Despite many years in the UK now, Thomas' music still has a wide-screen Americana to it, a sort of anti-Springsteen take on the big country/ wide open road. The songs here are a little sad, distinctly restless and always surprising. Rather austere compared to much of Thomas' work, this is easily his best in some years, going from the Dylan-referencing intimacy of Sad eyed lowlands to the wistfully apocalyptic Prepare for the end without putting a foot wrong. A spiky, beautiful piece of work.
The success of 18 monkeys makes Rocket redux all the more mystifying. You have to ask yourself: why has Thomas done this? Rockets redux is essentially the first studio album by Thomas' first band, the Ur-Akron ensemble Rocket from the Tombs (not to be confused with the much later and completely unrelated Rocket from the Crypt), which unbelievably spawned both Pere Ubu and the risible Dead Boys. They released nothing before the band collapsed in the mid-70s, and most of their songs were recycled by one or other of their successor bands, though an excellent live album of one of their gigs, released a year or two back, gives a flavour of their sound. They have now reformed, almost 30 years later, to record these songs in a studio. With a recording of these songs by the original band available, core member Peter Laughner long-dead (replaced here by Television's Richard Lloyd) and better versions of almost all the tracks here having been done by other bands, the whole exercise seems redundant. '30 seconds over Tokyo', 'Final solution' and 'Life stinks' can't hold a candle to the Pere Ubu versions. 'Sonic reducer' rendered by David Thomas rather than Stiv Bators is interesting (and a considerable improvement, which is not hard with Dead Boys songs), but any interest this sparks is swiftly extinguished by the ghastly rock balladry-by-numbers of 'Ain't it fun' and 'Amphetamine' (not coincidentally the only tracks sung by someone other than Thomas). It is not that this album is actually bad (it is pretty good for the most part), but the moment it represents has been superseded, leaving it less interesting to revisit than it might have been and largely a waste of the participant's efforts.
