Pere Ubu was one of those bands I couldn’t quite wrap my head around when I was at the college radio station. This was partially because the station’s music library, my giant encyclopedia of sonic wonders pressed into individual vinyl volumes, wasn’t especially well stocked in efforts by the Cleveland band, especially lacking in those releases that would be considered seminal like The Modern Dance or Dub Housing. But, truth is, I may have been so lacking in background knowledge about the group that they could have been there and I wouldn’t have known to give them a listen. Also, what little music I had heard from the group was so odd that I couldn’t wrap my brain around it.

During the spring of my freshman year, Pere Ubu released the album Cloudland, which was arguably one of their greater successes on the college charts. Being a little less adventurous station that some of our brethren across the nation, we didn’t really know what to do with it, especially as our rotation was well-stocked with fare that was far friendlier to our ears at the time. As I recall, it got slotted into Medium Rotation instead of Heavy Rotation, which was our equivalent of basically giving up on a record. It barely got played, though I’ll admit that I eventually grew to love that record’s lead single, “Waiting For Mary.”

It was actually the band’s next album, a relative failure on the college charts, that generated some interest and airplay at our station. Worlds in Collision came out to little fanfare in the spring of 1991, whatever momentum they had from Cloudland having long since dissipated. It wasn’t a sensation at our station, but I remember it getting played a healthy amount, with different DJs discovering completely different songs on the disc. Regardless of which track someone settled on, it was wholly at odds with just about everything else we were playing, perhaps the last gasp of that sort of diversity for some time as a band from Seattle was a few months away from inadvertently launching college radio and alternative rock into a monotonous sonic sludge for a few years.

Even now when Pere Ubu songs shuffle up on my iPod, I’m briefly taken aback, and my mind kicks into gear like a particularly vexing puzzle has been laid before it. But I’ve also gotten far better at accepting that my mild confusion doesn’t man there isn’t also pure bliss to be found without those willfully bizarre songs. And sometimes I’m smart enough to just enjoy it.

Pere Ubu, “Oh Catherine”

(Disclaimer: There are little stabs at reviving the Pere Ubu catalog from time to time, but it appears that Worlds in Collision is currently out of print, and I can’t find it available for digital purchase through Amazon either. I suppose it’s possible that this track has a landed on a collection somewhere, but I honestly find their discography almost as impenetrable as I once found their individual records. So this is posted here with the understanding and belief that it’s not currently available for purchase through any means other than happening upon it in a used section somewhere, and I imagine the P section is stuffed with Paramore CDs so you’ll probably want to avoid that altogether. Regardless, if anyone with the due authority to request the song’s removal from this corner of the Interweb contacts me with such a demand, I will gladly and promptly acquiesce.)