The young men of Pere Ubu were living in Cleveland, by all accounts a place of urban decay that could give the outskirts of Pittsburgh a run for their money. But they loved their wasteland. Or at least they spoke its language and wanted to make their art with it. Their music wasn’t aspirational fantasy or particularly “fun” in the sense rock usually takes (although they did write “Ubu Dance Party”). It’s abstract and domestic. The devil and Caligari can pop up but so can buses, windows, tables, chairs. It’s noise and melody, playfulness and terror.

Guitarist Tom Herman slashed and skritched, drummer Scott Krauss drove it forward and held the backbeat. Bassist Tony Maimone bounced and bubbled, a reggae cauldron. Allen Ravenstine garbled and whined and choked noise from his synths, hissing into the grooves, becoming the melodies. And David Thomas made sounds with his mouth, his drunken slurs and demented yawp making David Byrne sound like Michael Bolton. The parts interlocked more than aligned, surfacing and subsuming as needed.

After several singles that are brilliant in their own right (collected on the essential Terminal Tower), the band released their debut at the beginning of the year. It opens with a high-pitched emergency test pattern almost designed to have people slapping their stereos before lurching into a Stooges-bitten riff and Thomas wailing about not dating or banging a girl, but creating a non-alignment pact with her. Besides the Stooges, the Seeds and even ? and the Mysterians are touchstones: the album has more overt rock than subsequent records and even guitar solos. “Street Waves” is their Beach Boys number, riding the asphalt instead of the surf with a girl and getting gone.

But even that has a break midway through, the waves lapping ominously. “Sentimental Journey” is a man of sorrow (or insanity? just boredom?) wandering through his house, glass smashes and synths squiggle as Thomas intones “home” with the unnameable longing of someone who isn’t there. But he is there. There is contradiction at the heart of these songs — the Cultural Revolution becomes a love story, that non-alignment pact is a break-up, the title track invents a modern dance that its main character will never get. The final track, “Humor Me,” says it: “What a great big world to be drowned in.” It’s just a joke, Thomas insists over and over as the band lays down a stark, blasted apocalypse behind him (the first time I read Watchmen, this song slammed into my head as soon as I saw the first pages of the final chapter), ghouls coming to claim their due. It’s a joke! But humor me.

By the end of the year, they had pulled the contradiction further. Second album Dub Housing is poppier: Maimone’s bass leads the way and opener “Navvy” is outright perky — “Boy THAT sounds swell!” Thomas squeals. (Its opening line about arms and legs going flip flop, flip flop, that 30 years on would be jacked by Trent Reznor surely portends no danger ahead, right?). The music of “Ubu Dance Party” is indeed danceable with a chorus of “dah-dee dah dahs!” inviting a singalong as well. “I did not see the darkened sky, I did not feel the pressure drop” Thomas jovially tells us. This is more than the light music/dark lyrics play-off that pop will pull off all the time though — this is both light and dark at the same time. They do not deny each other but exist together, contradiction as concoction.

But as parts of the album grow poppier, others disperse. There are more soundscapes here, from large parts of the title track to the nearly wordless “Blow Daddy-O” to the entirely wordless “Thriller!” which does Michael Jackson one better (and several years before he got there to boot) — a house haunted by Ravenstine’s creaks and spooks is infested and devoured by zombies, their damp mastication seeps in and entirely consumes the track by its end, wetly chewing to the point of listener madness. Or is that just the tape itself cunningly looped? Sounds, particularly the guitar/synth/keys axis — to say nothing of Thomas’ vocals — are not clear in origin. They waft in and combine in hooks and riffs and fillips and that’s enough to get in your head before flying away.

“What do you do with a drunken sailor? Who do you see in Caligari’s mirror?” Thomas asks, a child’s song mashed into a weirdo film reference. This isn’t Pere Ubu making sense of their world but it’s not a retreat into nonsense, anymore than the music is a retreat from what we see as standard rock/pop structures (From the band itself: “Pere Ubu is mainstream rock. Justin Timberlake is weird experimental music. Robbie Williams is avant-garde. Britney Spears is constantly coming up with something new and innovative. Pere Ubu does the same old thing. ‘New’ is a trap and a scam to dupe student-types and other naive people.”). It is their way of being in the world, and while that can be hermetic (I don’t know what they’re talking about half the time. And I mean that literally: Thomas’ enunciation is not always a consideration) it is true, and truth penetrates beyond the dome of the self, in the way it is expressed. A riff, a squawk, a word — that “home” in “Sentimental Journey” — these reach out from the dub houses and terminal towers of Cleveland forty years ago and in their abstraction and life will be there forty years from now.

*Parts of this were inspired and drew reference from this long but extremely well-considered analysis: https://thisisentrippy.wordpress.com/2014/08/17/elitism-for-the-people-in-praise-of-pere-ubu/