Send "DEVO " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Billboard |
 Devo's ninth studio album, "Something for Everybody," is more than the new wave art rockers' first record in 20 years--it's an ongoing multimedia, performance-art-project-slash-marketing-campaign designed to reintroduce the band as "DEVO Inc." with engaging and hilarious commentary on American corporate culture and conformity. The album's 12 tracks were chosen through a crowd-sourced "Song Study" and are true to the band's longstanding formula of synth-and-guitar jolts, hyper-catchy riffs and winking comment on the human condition. While there's a uniformity across the tracks in tempo and vibe, first single "Fresh" booms out of the gate with an unforgettable refrain, while "Please Baby Please" and "Human Rocket" have a bounce and crunch made for the gym or dancefloor. The track "Step Up" is hard-beating and inspirational compared with the slight cynicism of political disco jam "Sumthin'." There's also a contemporary fullness and distortion in the album's production that updates Devo's sound without sacrificing its unmistakable essence. --Evie Nagy...full text |
| Musicomh |
| Turn on your television this week, and you'll be met with a houseful of lolling, dead-eyed numpties, or aggressive simians in aprons bellowing obscenities at hapless kitchen staff. Board a train, and you'll be faced with legions of apparently sane people reading the Daily Mail. Complete financial collapse is imminent; and a pudgy, whey-faced child is in charge of the nation's finances. Devo first appeared in the late '70s, touting the philosophy that mankind is not evolving, but devolving. It appears that they've been proved right in the interim; and are therefore riper than anyone for a glorious comeback. With a sly nod to the prevailing Western idiocracy, Something For Everything is simultaneously really dumb and really clever. It's the closest thing to a party album that Devo have ever released: every track is fast, insistent, loud, danceable, and wouldn't have been out of place in the Top 40 at any time over the last 30 years. And yet it's full of invention and oddness, crammed full of sonic gimmicks and unexpected delights....full text |
| Bbc |
| When they first appeared in the late-70s wearing boiler suits and spud boy hats, a mix of punk guitars and cutting edge electronics, sporting the patronage of both Brian Eno and David Bowie, Akron, Ohio’s Devo seemed as much a mysterious cult as a band. Their vision of the future – that as the human race evolved society was regressing, or something – was as thought-provoking as Kraftwerk’s man/machine debate, but possibly because of the eccentric headwear and ironic lyrics, nobody quite saw Devo in the same exalted light as the funky Germans. Twenty years after their last album of original material, 1990’s poor Smooth Noodle Maps, and 30 years after they released anything even the most dedicated fan could make a convincing case for, they once again return to chart the downfall of the American Dream. Something for Everyone isn’t a return to the halcyon days, but neither is it a deluded grasp for relevance, their sonic instincts still intact, the wheezy synths and buzzing guitars sharp and modern. Lead track and single Fresh sounds as perky as anything in their canon, with What We Do and Step Up only shades behind it; but too often it’s an inconsistent world of quirk over content. Please Baby Please is an unappealing mixture of Antmusic and cult 60s garage nutjobs The Monks, while Mind Games is something you never really want to hear – a Devo ‘love’ song filled with observations like “trying on dresses half her size”. References to day-glo skies, hybrid cars and the robotic vapidity of modern America litter the other tracks and overshadow even Later Is Now, the one true return to old form....full text |
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