Graham Reid | | <1 min read
Devo: Step Up
Although I don't get the point of Blondie or the Pretenders in the 21st century, there seems to me a place for Devo: after all, they were always looking to that devolved future when things got worse and worse (like having Blondie and Chrissie still out on the traps?)
And of course here they clear the ground for themselves with the two opening tracks: the chipper Fresh jokes about finding something "so fresh it's giving me a second life"; and What We Do makes clear that "what we do is what we do, it's all the same, there's nothing new".
Their robotic beats and proto-electro sound hasn't aged just got sharper, and of course lyrics that tell you "love is . . . mind games" are simple and memorable. Human Rocket seems to be pretty much what they were always about, with a slashing beat.
Devo were always ironic, fun, tongue-in-cheek and danceable: there are worse things than that in life.
Something for Everybody? Well, in the sense that this is as cold and as calculated as anything they have ever done (which was their point), as relentlessly catchy as The Cars, and comes in a brand new uniform.
Oddly enough the iTunes genre lists them as "alternative".
Hardly.
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