Art of Walking

Pere Ubu: Mayo Thompson (vocals, guitar, piano); David Thomas (vocals, organ, drums); Scott Krauss (horn, piano, drums, drum machine); Tony Maimone (piano, bass, organ); Allen Ravenstine (synthesizer).
Additional personnel: Allen Ravenstine, Scott Krauss, Tony Maimone.
As out-there as Pere Ubu's early singles like "Heart of Darkness" and first couple of albums were, they were still recognizable as rock & roll, however warped. By the time of their fourth album, 1981's THE ART OF WALKING, however, all traces of the group's early proto-punk sound had been sublimated into something else entirely. Less sonically aggressive than before, though still challenging ("Lost in Art" is as noisy as anything the band ever did), the 12 songs on THE ART OF WALKING show the growing influence of Pere Ubu's newest member, Mayo Thompson.
Thompson, the Texas-bred leader of the Red Krayola, favors difficult but occasionally oddly soothing soundscapes, and his more gentle musical sense displaces a lot of leader David Thomas' sonic aggression, making THE ART OF WALKING simultaneously more inviting and more opaque than any of Ubu's earlier work. It's a challenge, but it's worth it.