Devo
Live In The Land Of The Rising Sun

THE REVIEW

Published in 2004, "Live In The Land Of The Rising Sun" is a compilation of praiseworthy images and ragged sounds, on digital video support, of the tour held the previous year among the dance halls of the Japanese archipelago: on stage, we admire the original core of the band at work, still spry & lively, at least in concert settings, composed of the (little) Mothersbaugh brothers together with the Casale twins, supported by the part-time drummer (in the band during the concluding phase of the band's recording career), Mr. Dave Kendrick.

Note for the little ones: Devo, since the early seventies (search in this sense for the two volumes "Hardcore Devo '74-'77" published by Rhyno Rec.), was an entity that produced literal video/musical upheavals by virtue of its own original, futuristic, and whimsically multi-faceted robotic rock, a genre of which they are effectively the undoubted guardians and immovable pioneers, also thanks to the farsightedly current devolutionary philosophy.

It says a lot that within the seventy-five, well-blended between interviews and on-stage performances, enjoyable and entertaining minutes that make up the concert-documentary, the majority of the tracks in the program (a whopping 6 out of 13 total) are extracted from the spectacular debut ("Q:Are We Not Men? A:We are Devo!"), now reaching the three-decade mark, and the rest focuses exclusively on fragments belonging to the very early phase of the recording career: the most "recent" an excerpt from "Oh No! It's Devo!" - 1982.

Generally, the risk in operations (vetero-nostalgic?) of this nature could be that of not offering qualitative and sufficient points of interest neither for old aficionados (the perpetual recycling of widely known materials) nor much less for the possible co-optation of new followers to the reiterated Devolutionary word: as an unrepentant New Traditionalist, I admit I thoroughly enjoyed the entire evening staged by the Akron quintet, at the same time I honestly wouldn't know "how" it might sound to the ears of a current eighteen-year-old the wonderfully disjointed "Yoko Homo"; the mostly enthusiastic teenagers present, immortalized within the mammoth, fully occupied hall seem to be having a blast (and us with Them) at the passage of immortal and deviant hits such as "Girl U Want", "Freedom Of Choice" or the misleading "Uncontrollable Urge"; to be frank, those who seem to be enjoying themselves the most, roaming far and wide (in time and space) seem to be Them, these five recurring and far from instrumentally obsolete rascals, equipped with canonical yellow slickers, capable of coining one of the most acutely abstruse musical misdeeds of the era.

It is decidedly remarkable that many of the moments placed before Our satisfied view still possess such a whiplash freshness ("Gut Feeling"), such a synthrock-pleasance ("Gates Of Steel") and a jovial structural intensity ("Mongoloid") that they do not remotely reveal the abundant quarter-century that separates them from their original creation.

And call them Devolved!