Devo
Something For Everybody

Damn DEVO!

I have been listening to you for so long that I cannot help but consider you a small but still significant part of me, of this wrecked, desolate soul on which your ramshackle anthems and your oblique proto-POP pieces have contributed to the state of perpetual idiocy of the fragile mind.

Twenty years have passed since the last studio album, not exactly unmissable, from the five De(vo)cerebrated guys from Akron, and the hopes for a return at least decent were not precisely at a level of certainty. After an almost infinite silence in the last five years, they have started filling dance halls overlooking the stages across half of the globe, mostly bringing to light the primordial material that made them essential - from the cornerstone “Q: Are We..” to the Abstract Pop of “Oh, No..” - to many.

Such a new enticing radioactive delicacy, the ninth album in almost forty years of a declining career, undoubtedly adds little (but subtracts nothing) to what was already known about Them: however, it turns out to be a playful, bubbly, fun album: a healthy carrier of carefree and cheerful synth-POP ditties that fill the surrounding air with joyful and beneficial moods: the theorized Devolution taken to its most extreme consequences.

The effect it produces presents the same reactions that an unexpected encounter with an old (evidently not entirely extinguished) flame might engender; it matters little about the wrinkles that furrow the face, the eye bags carry no weight, the double chin: the fact that both carry those extra two decades on your back and that not everything went exactly as expected; infatuation in its purest form beyond any spatial-temporal considerations: it's in cases like this that the rules of (gravitational) attraction become a dead letter.

Nevertheless, little is known whether this album can effectively dispense something (positive) to everyone: as far as the solitary neuron that (stoically) watches over me is concerned, definitely yes.

And so much, whether a little or a lot, is enough.