Monster Walks the Winter Lake

by Rick Anderson Toward the end of one of Pere Ubu's many periods of inactivity, singer David Thomas made this album with a pickup group he named the Wooden Birds, members of which included bassist Tony Maimone, synth player Allen Ravenstine, and percussionist David Hild -- in short, a band suspiciously similar to Pere Ubu in makeup. Monster Walks the Winter Lake is something of a song cycle: after the frankly hilarious program opener "My Theory of Simultaneous Simultude/Red Tin Bus," the remainder of the program is a series of reminiscences and contemplations of urban and pastoral life delivered from the perspective of an otherwise unidentified monster. The songs range in mood from the extremely spare and angular "My Town," with its combination of accordion, random-sounding percussion and even randomer-sounding synthesizer, to the vaguely Slavic waltz of "What Happened to Me." Thomas' singing is, as always, a barely mammalian yelp. Humanity can essentially be divided into those who find this stuff completely compelling and those who find it utterly incomprehensible. (Thomas and the Wooden Birds would record one more album together, Blame the Messenger, before abandoning pretense and releasing the outstanding Tenement Year under the name Pere Ubu.)