Fire Records FIRECD371, cd, released Sep 2021.
Fire Records FIRELP371, light blue vinyl, released Sep 2021.
Remix by David Thomas, master by Brian Pyle.
In the lower right hand corner of the front cover of the 2021 remix is a notation reading 'V.2C.' David Thomas remixed the album in 2021. Because this was the first vinyl release, some songs were shortened or edited to allow for the album to fit on vinyl without sacrifice of fidelity. Brian Pyle mastered it.
Release Notes
Greil Marcus, esteemed American critic and lecturer, wrote about the Pennsylvania album in his book Double Trouble (Faber and Faber, 2000, pages 167-168):
"Thomas' gnostic argument - that art exists to at once reveal secrets and to preserve them - makes sense of a particularly American - or modern - form of storytelling. In a big, multifaceted democracy, you're supposed to be able to communicate directly with everyone, yet many despair of being understood by anyone at all.
"Out of this comes an American language that means to tell a story no one can turn away from. But this language - identified by D. H. Lawrence in 1923, in Studies in Classic American Literature, as the true modernist voice, the voice of Hawthorne, Poe, Melville - is cryptic before it is anything else. It is all hints and warnings, and the warnings are disguised as non sequiturs. The secret is told, but nonetheless hidden, in the musings, babblings, or tall tales of people who seem too odd to be like you or me, like us - like the author who puts his or her name to the story, insisting that he made it all up, that she just did it for the money.
"The whole existence of such people is premised on their attempt to tell a secret, perhaps to discover the secret in the telling, in the stunned, shocked response the telling provokes - and their idea of democracy is premised on the conviction that no one can be at home in a place where it is presumed there are no secrets, that all reality is transparent, that all people are the same. Thus those who tell this story, who want desperately to be heard, will likely mistrust even an imaginary audience. If they are like Thomas on Pere Ubu's Pennsylvania, they'll create an aura of portent and unease, but mostly, as it were, sinistramente, with the left hand; by means of unfinished sentences, dead-end monologues, floating images, outmoded phrases, archaic pronunciations, a tone of voice that is blank and addled by turn.
"The tenor of all the wistful, vaguely paranoid tales of displacement on Pennsylvania - tales of abandoning the Interstate highways, getting lost, and finding the perfect town when it's too late to change your life and live in it - is caught in the weirdly menacing way Thomas pronounces 'Los Angeles' in the tune Highwaterville. It's the old flophouse way, the way Anjelica Huston's character speaks the name in The Grifters, with a hard 'g' and a long 'e' at the end, so that the place sounds like a disease. The same sense of the strange, the unacceptable, in the familiar is there in Mr. Wheeler, which sounds like an old tape of a very old telephone call, a tape that showed up in a box in a room in a house where no one has lived for 20 years. 'Uh, Mr. Wheeler?' somebody says; as with every bit of talk in the number, it's followed by a long instrumental passage, as if some great drama is taking shape around a story that will never be put back together...
"What comes into view is a secret country - barely recognizable, and undeniable. And it's a thrill to hear, now, all of David Thomas's voices swirling around the listener, on the street. Pennsylvania seems to draw out of its own spectral geography and that street can be wherever you find yourself..."
Production Notes
Produced by David Thomas.
Engineered by Paul Hamann at Suma Recording Studio, Painesville OH.
Remixed by David Thomas in 2021.
Re-mastered by Brian Pyle in 2021.
Director's Cut (2005):
Cooking Vinyl USA celebrated Pere Ubu's 30th year anniversary with the release of The Director's Cut version of Pennsylvania.
I reviewed all alternate mixes from the session, sometimes discovering that an earlier mix turned out to be superior to the chosen mix.
The disc was re-mastered at Suma by David Thomas and Paul Hamann in early 2005. Alternate mixes and / or edits of Monday Morning, Woolie Bullie, Urban Lifestyle, Muddy Waters, and Drive were substituted. Previously hidden tracks, Fly's Eye (alt mix) and My Name Is... were unhidden. (My Name Is... now appears in a shortened version.) The out-take Dr Sax was added as a bonus track as well as a live version of Sad.txt. The packaging was redesigned in the jewel case format with a 4 page color booklet. A Director's Cut logo appears on the front cover.
My Name Is... was recorded live in a rehearsal studio. Jim Jones played organ and triggered the drum machine. David Thomas triggered the voices from a Mac. Dr Sax featured Tom Herman on sax and Steve Mehlman's foot steps.
Metroland (Albany NY), J. Eric Smith, Dec 23 1998
"Top 10 National Albums of 1998
2. Pere Ubu, "Pennsylvania" (Tim/Kerr)
Cleveland's journeymen noisemakers create the year's best road record, filling it with strange moments, odd sounds and bittersweet stories-- all of which will resonate deeply if you've ever spent too many late nights drinking strong coffee in interstate truck stops."
splendid e-zine, George Zahora, May 11 1998
"After the intensity of 1995's Raygun Suitcase, fans might find Pennsylvania a bit jarring -- half of it is the loud, [censored] rock they love, complete with abrupt invasions by harmonica, keyboard, theremin and so forth, but the other half is a sort of alternate universe Delta blues fusion thing that works, brilliantly, because this is Pere Ubu and everything they do works, brilliantly."
Mojo, Joe Cushley, Apr 1998
For nigh on 25 years Pere Ubu have harassed America... They celebrate their near silver anniversary of artistic dysfunctionality with a truth-defining album... Ubu are generally regarded as the missing link between the Velvets and punk. From the beginning they obviously understood the nuts and bolts of popular music, and then loosened them. For example, Pennsylvania seems to deliberately echo Springsteen's Nebraska, while tracks like Muddy Waters fortify the sense that they are the inheritors of the Guthrie-Beefheart line: a metal-collar version of The Boss's blue-collar vision.
SF Weekly, Mark Athitakis, Apr 6-14 1998
"Before and since Dub Housing, for nearly 25 years, songwriter and vocalist Thomas has leapfrogged across genres and side projects, from the rough-hewn experimentalist rock he called "avant-garage" to the crafty pop of Ubu's highly underrated 1989 Cloudland. Both of these musical roads, and a few others, collide on the sharp, sinister Pennsylvania... Brows furrowed the band goes about the business of constructing a road map, a catalog of people and places... the group conveys a scarifying nervousness about the world throughout the record. Except that its nervousness isn't willfully experimental, difficult, or forced. Indeed, what's most striking about Pennsylvania is just how tuneful and honest it is, catchy while retaining its offhanded feel. The musicians-- particularly Robert Wheeler's haunting synthesizer and theremin, and Steve Mehlman's loose, evocative drumming-- approach the music artfully, but passionately. It's thinking man's rock, sure, but it's also the sound of a brilliant rock band creating great music the way it's always been done."
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More reviews
New York Times, Greil Marcus, "Powerless to Forget an Afternoon When Time Froze", Feb 23 1998
"Pere Ubu may be a better band today than it has ever been: funnier, more doom struck and more passionate. Mr. Thomas's voice is that of a man muttering in a crowd. You think he's talking to himself until you realize he's talking to you.
"All across "Pennsylvania," people turn off the main roads and find themselves in towns whose names they can't remember." But I do remember the frozen quality of the hours we stayed there," Mr. Thomas recites in "Perfume." He might be guiding you back by means of a 1940's film noir voice-over, through the wreckage of what seemed like a good idea at the time. That's the feeling: a loser who's come to grips with the fact that he'll never win, but who remembers how perfect the plan was."
The Wire, Edwin Pouncey, March '98, pp.59-60
As slick, slippery and dangerous as a tank of electric eels... It is hard to not be moved by their huge surges of power and passion. The greatest thing about Pennsylvania, though, is how Pere Ubu suck you in and hold you fast, and for 70 minutes you're convinced that they're the greatest out-rock 'n' roll group of this millennium, and probably the next."
Sunday Times, Mark Edwards, Mar 1 1998
"Still straddling the extremes of pure, uncompromising modern art and pure, uncompromising loud rock in the determined effort to meld them into a cohesive whole."
Metroland (Albany NY), J. Eric Smith, May 28 1998
"While Pennsylvania bears many of the edgy sonic tags that so define Pere Ubu music, it's that laconic story-teller's depiction of a time remembered and a place defined that stays with you once the record itself finally winds down. Call it tomorrow's folk music..."
New Musical Express Mar 14 1998, p.49
"This is Pere Ubu's world. It's not similar to the one you know and love."