"The 17th Pere Ubu studio album, Lady from Shanghai, is accompanied by a lengthy primer on the album's conception and making, which employed a kind of musical "Chinese whispers": members recorded their parts in isolation, unrehearsed but according to Thomas's quite particular and faintly perverse rules, aiming for some magical, paradoxical midpoint between the written song and pure improvisation. So ... does all this make for an enjoyable record? In large part, yes: Another One (Oh Maybelline) is a terrifically moody, swooping electro-rocker; Lampshade Man's jerky, churning riff is a real earworm; and on the whole, given its strange, fragmentary creation, it sounds remarkably cogent and coherent. That's relatively speaking, of course - this is no pop album, and the more freeform passages can be difficult to get a grip on".