I find that I'm a little nervous at the prospect of writing about any of David Thomas' less "conventional" works.
When you think about it, that's a pretty ridiculous statement. Pere Ubu frontman Thomas doesn't really have any conventional works. Pere Ubu's periodic, nominal adherence to the unspoken rules that govern pop songs gives them a tentative accessibility, but they're never going to draw the Britney Spears and N'Sync fans. Thomas, of course, would argue with me that Surf's Up is as conventional as anything in the Top 40, because he's like that. And he may be on to something.
Surf's Up follows the standard DT&TPB operational ethic, which can be summarized as spontaneity without improvisation. Because the unspoken rules of pop songwriting are so rigid, and the components so well-defined, Thomas believes that any group of reasonably skilled musicians should be able to pull these things out of their collective ass with minimal advance notice. It might amount to circular logic -- "The song will go this way because this is the way songs go" -- but the more you think about it, the more appeal the idea has. It might be a process beyond the abilities of the average musician-on-the-street, but for a skilled artist it's not much harder than simple jamming. The real challenge is the lyrics -- and that's where Thomas, who always seems to be carrying a dozen narratives in his head for just such a purpose, comes in.
Much of Surf's Up sustains the mood of Pere Ubu's Pennsylvania, or at least of those portions of the album wherein Thomas cast himself as a rambling, late-night storyteller. Swirling around Thomas' narrative is a variety of deconstructed instrumentation; the Pale Boys, Andy Diagram and Keith Moliné, seem to favor broad, mimimalistic strokes over a crowded sonic canvas. You'll witness jagged guitar and banjo loops and blaring trumpet on the striking opener, "Runaway", and soulful melodeon and guitar, oom-pah horns and subtle electronic twiddling on "Man in the Dark", but you'll never hear an excess of sound. "Night Driving"'s percolating rhythm recalls the proto-drum-n-bass rhythms of Diagram's work with the Spaceheads, creating a curious sort of mechanized Americana -- it's rather like catching a cyborg in your headlights as you drive down a deserted country road. "River", the disc's longest song, drags itself through labored swells of horn-induced dischord, finally flooding its banks in a torrent of noise.
"Spider in my Stew" restores a measure of rock with its abrasive guitar and trumpet interplay, underpinned by a subtle loop of "bone-clattering" percussion. Though it's entirely unintentional, Thomas' repetition of the title phrase winds up sounding like one of Moby's Delta Blues-sampling experiments. However, the most striking song on Surf's Up is the title track -- by all accounts one of the least "coverable" songs Brian Wilson ever wrote, here rendered in a layered haze of horns, shimmering strings, tinkling piano and David Thomas' best falsetto. It's beautiful -- almost like My Bloody Valentine done with trumpets -- and its post-climactic collapse into a maelstrom of uncoordinated noise is marvelous to behold.
The wonderful thing about Surf's Up is its "component" nature. It's a record made up of dozens of connected pockets of "listenability" -- perfect little proto-song moments that ably embody the spontaneity for which Thomas and the Two Pale Boys so aggressively strive. For all its compositional reliance on rules, Surf's Up rarely takes a predictable step...proving, perhaps, that art is in the execution rather than the process.
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