Nostalgia is a product of fear and uncertainty. We don’t know where we’re going, so we want to revisit where we’ve been. A lot of today’s rock music is wrapped in the warm, worn blanket of the past the hip and nervous ’70s, the gloomy and danceable ’80s. Musicians plunder and draw inspiration from their favorite touchpoints and often the music they create is quite good but often not more than the sum of its parts.

Pere Ubu has avoided this co-opting, probably because no one can come close to their bleakness, isolation and weary humor. Their 1978 debut LP, The Modern Dance, still enthralls and disturbs today because Ubu defined themselves through fear and uncertainty instead of avoiding these emotions.

The album starts with a high-pitched whine out of the Emergency Broadcast System while the bass stumbles around in the background. After 20 seconds of this, though, the band tears into the Stooges-esque ‘Nonalignment Pact.’ After that, the record runs all over the place in its remaining half-hour from the flat-out nihilist punk of ‘Life Stinks’ to the creepy soundscape of ‘Sentimental Journey.’ Tom Herman’s guitar slashes and twiddles, sometimes in the same song, while Scott Krauss’ backbeat melds perfectly with Tony Maimone’s bouncing, fluid basslines. Allen Ravelstine plays, not programs, his synthesizer, caroming ungodly screeches off the other instruments and washing the whole mess in eerie static.

But it’s David Thomas’ voice and lyrics that truly make the album a masterpiece of alienation. Thomas sounds like he’s singing around a whole bleating, crying, gibbering barnyard caught in his throat he makes David Byrne sound like Michael Bolton. His words detail a world of dead ends and bleeding boundaries.

The personal is political on ‘Nonalignment Pact,’ one of the best breakup songs ever penned (‘I wanna make a deal with you, girl / and get it signed by the heads of state / I wanna make a deal with you, girl / and get it recognized around the world’), and the political becomes personal on ‘Chinese Radiation,’ a bizarre love story (I think) caught up in the People’s Revolution. The song’s characters float adrift from relationships, jobs and the world at large ‘he’ll never get the modern dance,’ Thomas sings in the title track. Fear and uncertainty, the abysses of Pere Ubu’s decaying Cleveland then and our country now, are plunged into.

There is a way out, though. We may never learn the modern dance, but we can at least laugh about it as we trudge through the darkness. On ‘Humor Me,’ the album’s final track, Thomas cries out ‘It’s a joke!’ as Herman’s guitar careens through the blasted landscape of the apocalypse.

‘Well, humor me,’ Thomas answers himself. It’s not salvation, but it isn’t the pastiche offered up by many bands today it’s bitter laughter, but laughter just the same. The Modern Dance offers comfort in absurdity, meets dread with a pained grin. It’s an escape inward, synths shrieking and guitars blazing an album of raucous desparation. Fear and uncertainty never sounded so good.