Pere Ubu's 1989 album Cloudland seemed like a strange
pop anomaly to many longtime fans, but unbeknown to them the group had something even slicker up its sleeve.
Gil Norton, best known for his work with
the Pixies, was brought in to produce 1991's Worlds in Collision, and it marked an even more dramatic attempt to fuse
Pere Ubu's sensibilities with the
pop mainstream (which, in the year
Nirvana would break through with Nevermind, probably didn't seem quite as forbidding a place as it once did). With
Allen Ravenstine largely out of the picture (he amicably quit the band to pursue a career as a pilot) and the less willfully eccentric
Eric Drew Feldman taking his place,
Pere Ubu were a less noisy ensemble this time out, and under
Norton's tutelage
David Thomas' vocals gained a new degree of precision and control (though no amount of coaching and mix-fixing would ever turn the guy into, say,
Morrissey). However, while
Norton buffed off even more of the rough edges of
Pere Ubu's approach than
Stephen Hague on Cloudland, the group created a bizarro-world triumph; "I Hear They Smoke the Barbecue" is a brilliant
pop single that still finds room for
Ubu's lyrical obsessions and clattering sonic underpinnings, the opening "Oh Catherine" is pretty in a way
Thomas' vocals have never been before, "Mirror Man" is a sideways shout-out to a primal influence, "Cry Cry Cry" finds room for a dash of
country twang in the
Ubu formula, and "Turpentine!" is as crazy as they wanna be. If there were ever a band destined never to make the charts, it's
Pere Ubu, but not unlike
the Velvet Underground's Loaded, Worlds in Collision shows that they could make an album capable of appealing to a broader audience without losing touch with what made them a singular creative force in the first place, something not every band that signed to a major label was able to manage. ~ Mark Deming, All Music Guide
