Pere Ubu's tenth album is also its third since the group reunited in 1988, and like Roger McGuinn or Pylon or other artists who took a sabbatical in the Eighties, the band is still struggling to find a place in the video age. In the past, the singer and tormented Cleveland Indians fan David Thomas, one of rock's few genuine visionaries, celebrated birds, hats and "other small things that give pleasure," mixing Van Morrison's wondrous pantheism with Jonathan Richman's boyish whimsy. On Worlds in Collision, Thomas's dramatization of an unbalanced natural world returns to the imagery of Ubu's extraordinary first two LPs, The Modern Dance and Dub Housing: Thomas's rumbling mountains and swaying rivers, hurricanes and floods are abstract predictions of ecological eruption. The ongoing sense of dismay and displacement peaks in "I Hear They Smoke the Barbecue," where Thomas announces we're "on the downside of forever," then cheers up when some lovable Martians stop by to say howdy.

Founding member Allen Ravenstine, who's done more to liberate the synthesizer than anyone since Brian Eno, is demoted to a guest on Worlds, playing on only four of the thirteen songs. (He's replaced by Eric Drew Feldman, an alumnus of Captain Beefheart's Magic Band.) The loss of Ravenstine's aberrant squeaks and heedless intrusions makes this a different band, which may have been deliberate; Ubu's last album, Cloudland, was a giddy foray into electro-pop, a bid for modern-rock airplay that failed. The calculation is intensified on Worlds: Gil Norton (who has worked with the Pixies) produces and shares mixing duties with David Bascombe (who has worked with Tears for Fears) and the renowned Stephen Hague, who is also the executive producer.

What once distinguished Pere Ubu from its peers was the group's sense of joviality; even when the band made music that anticipated (and simulated) the end of the world, it sounded like the group was having fun. So the obvious commercialization of this album isn't misguided – no other art-punk group has such a big pop instinct, which is why Cloudland was such a great surprise. Instead, the album is just unsuccessful – the bevy of experts listed above tries to sand Ubu's fractured hooks and startled rhythms to the sheen of the B-52's or Talking Heads (or, in the case of the anachronistic "Playback," Gary Numan), but the group's flair for brain-magnet riffs seems to have diminished. Within the modern-rock continuum, this is a marginally superior record; with the inventive Tony Maimone on bass and the agile Scott Krauss on drums, there are slippery beats other groups would kill for. But for a band that's blown away the competition steadily for thirteen years, that's faint praise. (RS 612)

ROB TANNENBAUM