Album review: Devo - Something For Everybody

Published on 13/06/2010 12:43

Warners 9362496681, £12.99 ****

Experience has made Devo yet more potent in the pop domain. These songs are ferociously commercial. What We Do and Please Baby Please distil the old verse-chorus-verse pattern down to rock in its most primitive form, Cameo is a funky 1980s parody, while the vocoder barking out the orders on March On is almost an Eastern European Eurovision moment.

Informed by decades of scoring films and TV shows, not to mention toying with religion with their Church of the SubGenius, Devo's perspective is worldly in the most wicked of ways.

A sting in the tail comes in Knock Boots, hissing about "the suits laughing while they rob you blind". This is Devo being a big boy rock band, with electro illustrations. "What we do is what we do, it's all the same, there's nothing new," sings Mark Motherbaugh, safe in the knowledge that if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Or whip it.

Download this: No Place Like Home, Later Is Now

&#149 This article was first published in The Scotland on Sunday, June 13, 2010