From the opening seconds of Pere Ubu's freshly-released 1991 live album, you know the performance is going to be a one-in-a-hundred affair. On this night back in December of 1991, frontman Dave Thomas is loquacious and babble-prone from the get-go, like Dean Martin simmering on mescaline. And on the wacky opening piece, "My Theory of Spontaneous Simultude," the band cooks up an off-kilter blues mutation thing while Thomas begins with some of his patented theorizing on algebra and geometric forms. Before long, he engages in a an interactive word game: "Anything is like something else," he assures us. He asks the members of the band, and the audience, to finish the sentence, "I am like...," assuring them that whatever they blurt out will make perfect sense.

Besides Thomas doling out plenty of quotable onstage banter between songs, the band's execution of their catalog of inside-out pop songs is near flawless. Jim Jones' acoustic-electric guitar shimmies around Eric Feldman's melodic but authoritative piano flourishes. The recording as a whole is mixed down with surprising consistency and clarity.

"That's what they want, more mind-dead rock," Thomas quips during "Non-Alignment Pact." "Wanna hear 'I Wanna Be Your Dog' by the Stooges?" Of course, the band launches into a measure of the classic Iggy tune before Thomas halts the action. "Okay, enough fun," he continues, and they immediately switch gears to the jittery Ubu angularity of "Caligari's Mirror," from their treasured 1978 album, Dub Housing.

Pere Ubu conjures up more of their honorably obscure past on "Cry Cry Cry," and the irrepressible rubber-ball bounce of the closer, "Misery Goats." Also represented here is the semi-accessible and structurally conventional side of Ubu's legacy-- "Oh Catherine," and the title track to 1991's somewhat human-friendly Worlds in Collision.

Apocalypse Now does nothing more or less than capture Pere Ubu at their anarchic best. Documented here are all the abnormalities, tangents, odd details and detours of their rarely-predictable live experience. Moreover, this particular recording succeeds where previous primitive attempts at reigning in the band's singular sound have failed. My ballooned expectations of what live rock 'n' roll should sound like will now have to be deflated again-- back down to some sort of socially-acceptable, non-threatening median point. In fact, to fully recover from Apocalypse Now, I'll probably have to listen to the Carpenters' Live in Japan for two weeks straight.

-Michael Sandlin