Lady from Shanghai

"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".

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"As with Why I Hate Women, Lady from Shanghai also has its share of rambling tracks; aside from the noir-ish "The Road Trip of Bipasha Ahmed," the collages of murky electronics and fractured rhythms on "The Carpenter Sun" and "Feuksley Ma'am, the Hearing" remain more interesting in theory than in practice. Nevertheless, Lady from Shanghai intrigues more often than not, and shows that Pere Ubu can tap into paranoia, loathing, and the downright weird with nearly as much ease and eloquence as they did almost four decades before".

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