Rocket From the Tombs reduces "Sonic Reducer" — again

“You’re not my friend/ and that is fine,” croak-warbles David Thomas for starters. Circa 35 years ago, longtime Thomas-watcher Greil Marcus summed up the then-new music of Thomas’s Pere Ubu band, as someone who’d been up in his apartment a long, long time — long enough to recall no other life — and who’d decided, finally, to open his door. To come down to the street. To forsake safety for communication.

Circa 35 years later, Pere Ubu awakes from another nap of protean dreams and Thomas’s older band Rocket From the Tombs elbows its way out of its own grave, and Thomas, who at last reckoning lived above a pub in England, ventures, personawise, at least, out to the street. A little like Peter Sellers in Being There, except Thomas, personawise, is no innocent and hates it when a joke is on him.

Rest of Rocket responds in kind. Redoing one of your own classics, usually a horrid idea, but the solo guitar on the front end of the new “Sonic Reducer” summons loneliness, hatred of loneliness, and unkempt desire for companionship, before the rest of the band relieves it. Thomas gives the other singers some, but hangs ten at the edges of the vocal mix, snorking monster movie noises through the Sonics cover and elsewhere. By the end he wants to change someone’s tires. He’s figured out that auto-garage help could equal love. He might have a friend. And is that fine?

• Album: Black Record
• Artist: Rocket From the Tombs
• Label: Fire Records
• Songs: (1) Waiting for the Snow (2) Welcome to the New Dark Ages (3) Strychnine (4) Sonic Reducer (5) I Keep a File On You (6) Nugefinger (7) Spooky (8) Coopy (Schrödinger's Refrigerator) (9) Hawk Full of Soul (10) Read It and Weep (11) Parking Lot at the Rainbow’s End