The Tenement Year

It was Cloudland (with its Billboard-charting “Waiting for Mary,” the closest thing to a radio hit the band ever had) that bandleader David Thomas bemusedly described as Pere Ubu’s first pop album. But that’s not entirely correct: in 1988, the year before Cloudland, Ubu had released The Tenement Year, which was light-years ahead of any of the group’s previous work in terms of general accessibility and hookiness. Sure, “George Had a Hat” (entire lyric: “George had a hat, but it wasn’t where it wasn’t at”) was willfully strange, but it was also quite catchy; “Talk to Me” and “Something’s Gotta Give” both worked quite well as sing-alongs too, and the album-closing “We Have the Technology” was practically a ballad. It was on The Tenement Year that Ubu found perhaps the perfect balance between its “avant-garage” origins and its later, more pop-oriented work.