Following up on last year’s Lady From Shanghai, Pere Ubu are gearing up to release a new album, their 18th no less, on September 8. Carnival Of Souls is based on Herk Harvey’s classic 1962 B-movie of the same name, and comes out of a run of improvisatory live performances the band played last year, including soundtracking a screening of the film at London’s East End Live. it also seems to have caught the band at the end of their wits, with the press release telling us:
"On the road, the frayed nerves of the group meant they would switch from a whisper to a scream at any given moment, provoking each other, egging each other on and occasionally erupting as if in violent rebuke, before moments of gentle, bittersweet reprieve – an extraordinary work resulted."
The CD and vinyl versions of the album promise slight different sets of tracks: in addition to the main song cycle, the former gets ‘Brother Ray’, a twelve-minute "prequel" to The Day Of The Locust by 20th-century American novelist Nathanael West, while the wax gets five ‘Strychnine Interludes’, one-minute tracks combining "shortwave interference, a deconstructed garage riff and secret morse code transmissions". We’ve got a taster of the album in the shape of the video for ‘Road To Utah’, which puts the band’s fittingly gothic and organ-heavy track underneath footage of Candace Hilligoss as Mary Henry arriving at the Great Salt Lake pavilion – watch below:
