Dub Housing is the second album by American rock band Pere Ubu. Released in 1978 by Chrysalis Records, the album is now regarded as one of their best, described by Trouser Press as "simply one of the most important post-punk recordings."[1]
The title is an allusion to the visual echoes of blocks of identical row houses in Baltimore,[2] presumably reminiscent of the echo and reverberation that characterize dub. "Dub" is also a reference to Jehovah's Witnesses, who refer to themselves as "Dubs". Lead singer David Thomas was a Jehovah's Witness. On a 1979 concert bootleg recording, during the song "Sentimental Journey," David Thomas ad-libs the line "I live in a dub house!" The photograph on the cover shows the apartment building at 3206 Prospect Avenue near downtown Cleveland in which members of the band lived when this album was recorded.
At the end of 1978, NME named Dub Housing the year's eighth best album,[13] while Sounds ranked it at number 13 on its year-end list.[14]Robert Christgau of The Village Voice wrote in 1979, "not only is it abrasive and visionary and eccentric and hard-rocking itself, but it sent me back to The Modern Dance, which I liked fine originally and like more now".[15] In The Village Voice's Pazz & Jop critics' poll for 1979, Dub Housing placed at number nine.[16]The New York Times called Dub Housing "one of the finer recent new-wave records ... well worth hearing."[17]
^"Pere Ubu: Dub Housing". Mojo. p. 116. Dub Housing remains an exemplar par excellence of US post-punk's facility for marrying the austere with the madcap.
