Generally regarded as the best album of their (very long and still ongoing) career, Dub Housing took the willful abrasiveness and apocalyptic vibes of The Modern Dance and tightened them up, funneling them through something more like traditional song structure and brightening the production noticeably. Of course, none of this is to say that Dub Housing is anything like a pop record. Opening with the effervescent – even manic – “Navvy” (“I’ve got these arms and legs that flip flop flip flop… I have desire!”), the program proceeds through contemplations of monstrous horror (“Caligari’s Mirror”), somewhat more domestic horror (“Dub Housing”), subtle dystopianism (“I Will Wait”), and, well, a sort of frantic romanticism (“Drinking Wine Spodyody,” an original song that has nothing to do with the famous Stick McGhee jump blues tune). Part of what makes Dub Housing such a great album is the fact that it manifests the distilled essence of Pere Ubu’s music: the tension between weirdness and virtuosity. On the weirdness side, we have David Thomas’s bizarre, strangled-penguin voice and singing style, his often equally bizarre lyrics, and the synthesizer playing of Allen Ravenstine, whose approach owed more to Edgard Varèse and mid-century avant-garde classical music than to pop synthesists of the period (or even to keyboard technique more generally). On the virtuosity side, we have the rhythm section of bassist Tony Maimone and drummer Scott Krauss – a pair that rivals Sly and Robbie for tightness and propulsion. Maimone and Krauss keep the structure together during Ubu’s most insane forays into chaos, but when everyone comes together in service to a conventional groove (as on the aptly titled “Ubu Dance Party”) the result is as sharp and tensile as what you’d hear from any funk or soul band of the period. Dub Housing is one of those albums that keeps revealing new depths no matter how many times you listen to it.