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, Norton buffed off some rough edges of the group , still they 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.

"Solid as the band can be, it's also likely to dissolve songs from the bottom up. For all Pere Ubu's uncertainty, the band isn't arbitrary; its music has the off-the-wall unity of a Marx Brothers routine," said Jon Pareles of The New York Times.

In 1991, 'Worlds In Collision' became "the most atmospheric, carefully sculpted recording in the band's 13-album catalog." (Tom Moon, Spin).