Cloudland

Cloudland is the seventh Pere Ubu album, released in May 1989.

It’s their most overtly mainstream-sounding album, thanks in no small part to their producer: Stephen Hague, a man who’d previously manned the boards for Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and Pet Shop Boys.

Despite its commercialist trappings, however, this is still unmistakably Pere Ubu – as soon as Dave Thomas’s yelping, nonsensical verse falls in, there’s no mistaking that.

This album is likely the closest Pere Ubu has ever got to actual commercial success: the video for its main single, “Waiting for Mary” was frequently played on MTV and it even made it to #6 on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart. However, the album managed to lapse out of print for over a decade until its 2007 reissue.