** David Thomas and the Pale Orchestra

MIRROR MAN: ACT ONE: JACK & THE GENERAL

(Cooking Vinyl import)

In a more perfect world, every Cuyahoga County schoolkid would know that Cleveland native David Thomas is the eccentric leader of Pere Ubu, the most inspired and original postpunk band ever to come out of northeast Ohio. Their late-'70s caterwaul was as definitive of that post-industrial wasteland as Jim Jarmusch's deader-than-deadpan movies or Harvey Pekar's down-but-never-out comics. By 1985, however, the world's continued imperfection led Thomas to move to England, the green and pleasant retirement home of all frustrated art-rockers. Although he has since revived Pere Ubu, this behemoth "solo" album is a tribute to and from his foreign hosts, commissioned for a four-day London festival entitled "David Thomas: Disastrodome!" and recorded live at that 1998 celebration.

Mirror Man serves up a modulating but unbroken tone poem in which seven different "singers" step forward in rotation to recite new pieces or highly modified versions of recent Ubu compositions. Behind them, a six-member band supply slow, undulating waves of simple chord changes electronically distorted into strange timbres. Thomas does well by his one featured lead in "Nowheresville," and Linda Thompson throws a loose Western swagger into her comely British accent, but many others just over-emote, underscoring the occasional clumsiness of the poetry and reminding you that better examples of this stuff abound, from Allen Ginsberg's famous "Howl" to Michael Hall's obscure "Frank Slade's 29th Dream."

-- Franklin Soults